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Incarceration



  • Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?

    by Sean Wilentz

    Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.



  • Life Sentences for Arbery's Killers Nothing to Celebrate

    by Joseph Margulies

    A defense attorney and legal expert warns that the harsh sentences imposed on perpetrators of a racist killing help to validate a punitive system of incarceration that overwhelmingly harms people of color. 



  • Prison Tech Comes Home: Tenants and Residents in the Surveillance State

    by Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker and Nicole E. Weber

    Landlords have combined technologies developed for screening tenants in the 1970s with more recent digital surveillance and facial recognition systems developed in prisons to dramatically increase control over their tenants during an affordable housing crisis. 



  • Disenfranchisement in Jails Weakens our Democracy

    by Charlotte Rosen

    Because the pretrial population is disproportionately non-White, this kind of “de facto disenfranchisement” constitutes an abhorrent form of racist voter suppression, despite rarely gaining the headlines and outrage that long voting lines do. 



  • Online Forum: The Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition (August 24-28)

    Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), will host an online forum in honor of Black August on the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition organized by incarcerated writer, activist and intellectual Stephen Wilson and historian and professor Garrett Felber.