Welcome to the University of Oklahoma Carceral Studies Consortium Newsletter. The Carceral Studies Consortium strives to build a community for intellectual exploration that includes faculty, staff, graduate students, community members, practitioners, and organizers.
Carceral Studies is concerned with the independent function and nexus of the political and social systems that organize, shape, sustain, and entrench practices of punishment, surveillance, incarceration, and harm.
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Carceral Studies Conversations Podcast |
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"Isolation and Visibility" with Dr. Keramet Reiter |
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On this episode, Dr. Keramet Reiter discusses a new architecture of incarceration that isolated, separated, hid, and repressed imprisoned populations as well as the organizing efforts against this form of violence and repression. She also discusses the PrisonPandemic initiative to offer incarcerated people and their communities a platform to discuss the conditions and experience of incarceration during a pandemic (https://prisonpandemic.uci.edu/). Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.
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Encampments of unhoused people have become increasingly common as, in 2020, for the first time ever, the number of single adults sleeping outside surpassed the number of single adults sleeping in shelters. Residents of these encampments, as Nichole Fiore notes, have formed a community by virtue of living together for a long period. Kriston Capps writes: “The strategy that cities have adopted — clearing and closing encampments, with varying levels of support for people living in them — comes with high costs and mixed results.” A study done by Abt Associates found that sweeping away encampments is expensive: cities in the study paid between $1,672 and $6,208 managing camps per unsheltered person per year in 2019. There are also unquantifiable costs such as the trauma endured when cities clear unhoused peoples’ communities. Some of the root causes driving the growth of encampments are a lack of affordable housing, a lack of decent shelter options, and a lack of political will to solve the problem.
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The murder of Adam Toledo by a Chicago Police officer is shaded by two important impulses, according to Kelly Hayes: “In the minds of many people, Adam is a dangerous generalization, a brown child with scary affiliations who embodies the ‘super predator’ stereotype” and the officer who killed Toledo “is ensconced in another manufactured fever dream: the police procedural” which uses cop shows as propaganda to “tell[] stories about sympathetic cops who are the only thing that stands between us and the worst that society has to offer.” Kelly Hayes further explores policing by interviewing Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing. Vitale argues: “mostly police are managing a set of low level social problems in an effort, not so much to produce safety in some broad sense, but to produce a kind of system of order and a notion of order that benefits some players more than others.”
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Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed a law that cracks down on protests by increasing penalties for demonstrators who block public roads and grants immunity to motorists who “unintentionally” kill or injure protestors while “fleeing from a riot.” State Senator Rob Standridge, a sponsor of the bill, justified the law by arguing: “The bill will protect innocent people trapped by a rioting mob.” Critics of the bill contend that it restricts First Amendment rights and disproportionately harms people of color who are generally at the forefront of demonstrations. This bill is part of a slate of anti-protest bills, such as another law that makes it a crime to post anything online that could include personally identifying information about police officers. The ACLU of Oklahoma argued that these lawmakers are “trampling the rights and liberties of Oklahomans in favor of those with the most power and access, themselves included.”
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Mariam Kaba and Andrea Ritchie argue that “Chauvin’s conviction of murder in the second degree represents neither justice nor change.” Laws across the country that have criminalized dissent and authorized violence against protestors, they argue, “demonstrate the stark reality that the verdict won’t do anything to protect Black communities facing brutal repression whenever we rise up in mourning and rage in the wake of each new police murder.” The conviction of a single cop does not offer systemic change; instead, “it will embolden [the system] to continue business as usual under the pretext that it can deliver justice.” In the six weeks during the Chauvin trial, 64 people were killed by police, and Ma’Khia Bryant, the 65th, was killed as the verdict was being delivered. Policymakers are using Chauvin’s conviction to argue that the system is working as it should and thus does not need substantive change. Kaba and Ritchie conclude: “George Floyd’s murder is being used to recuperate the institution that killed him in the midst of one of the greatest crises of legitimacy it has faced.”
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The Fines and Fees Justice Center conducted a study of outstanding court debt throughout the United States: The report found that at least $27.6 billion of fines and fees is owed across the court, but this comes from only 25 states that provided data (and data from 11 of those states were incomplete). This court debt, however, does not represent the total amount of debt the criminal legal system has imposed and is only “the tip of the iceberg,” but the courts keep records of every case which specify the amount of fines and fees imposed at conviction. Ten states said they didn’t track court debt; ten states said they “did not possess the technological capacity or bandwidth to gather the information; four states denied the data request. “Uncollectible debt,” the report concludes, “places an extreme financial burden on those who cannot afford to pay it.” States have often failed to keep track of the amount of court debt, which means that “stakeholders cannot appropriately weigh other socio-economic factors (apart from poverty) that may correlate with an inability to settle one’s court debt.” Without a complete view of the problem, lawmakers, advocated, and stakeholders can’t understand the extent of the challenges of people unable to pay fines and fees.
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“Business improvement districts (BIDs),” writes Tyler Walicek, “sit at the intersection of these twinned forces of privatization and criminalization of the unhoused.” BIDs are urban areas in which private entities are empowered to conduct the typical functions of local government. BIDs, of which there are over a thousand in the U.S., “have come to resemble unaccountable private governments.” BIDs are inherently undemocratic: they are formed by property owners in the urban area, are funded via the city’s revenue division levying fees on in-district property owners and are run by unelected administrators. In Portland, for example, one such entity Clean & Safe, went without any oversight from the City of Portland yet paid the full salary of four dedicated police officers who work in concert with other security guards employed or contracted by the BID. Auditors noted that Portland’s “hands-off approach may lead to disparate law enforcement outcomes in districts and limits community members’ ability to influence district activities and monitor results.” Within the districts “quality of life” violations (e.g., vagrancy, loitering, or public consumption of alcohol) are often more strictly enforced and, according to Walicek, “are a primary means by which unhoused people are criminalized.”
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Chula Vista, California became the state’s first “Welcoming City” for immigrants, yet it is also one of the most surveilled cities – the police department uses license plate readers, drones, and body cameras to track residents. Residents and activists argue that city leaders have betrayed immigrant residents by permitting federal immigration authorities to access such data collected by local police. These technological tools are part of the “smart city approach to policing.” Since 2017, the data from police car-mounted license plate readers has been shared with ICE without approval from the mayor or city council. When this data-sharing arrangement became public in December, Chula Vista revoked ICE’s access, but in April the city council voted unanimously to continue using the cameras and install two more. Fussell writes: “The outcry against the ALPR [license plate reader] system, amid the nationwide discussion on policing and immigration, has prompted some residents to consider the city’s suite of surveillance tools, a notable shift after years of quiet acceptance.”
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Police officers killed Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly and disabled Black woman, in 1984 while administering an eviction notice. Bumpurs’ case, Keisha Blain argues, has a striking similarity with that of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police after they entered her apartment. “The eerie similarity of the two cases,” Blain argues, “reveals how little has changed when it comes to state-sanctioned violence in the United States. No doubt the police shootings of Bumpurs and Taylor underscore the general pervasiveness of police violence in non-white communities.” These two cases also reveal the specific targeting of Black women: “the systemic problem of police violence also places Black women’s lives at great risk.” In the aftermath of these two killings, activists protested, and Black women emerged as key political actors. The ideological and philosophical underpinnings of Black Lives Matter simmered long before the movement formally gained national prominence in 2014: Black people, since slave patrols and lynchings in the aftermath of the Civil War, since Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, and through the present, have insisted that their lives were valued equally as white lives. Blain concludes: “The nationwide and decades-long efforts of Black women—as writers, organizers, and activists—have shaped a movement to end state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism.”
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Announcements & Opportunities |
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Carceral Studies Graduate Student Fellowship
Applications Due May 7, 2021
The Carceral Studies Consortium offers an outstanding graduate student with interest in advancing Carceral Studies a 12-month, .20 FTE position (8 hours per week). This CSC Graduate Student Fellow serves as the student representative on the Carceral Studies Board of Directors, as well as provides critical support for CSC initiatives throughout each academic year (July 1 to June 30).
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Opioid Research Group: One-Page Seed Grant Opportunity
Applications Due May 19, 2021
The Data Institute for Societal Challenges has generously offered $10K in seed grant awards to be distributed across 1 – 3 of the best one-pagers and associated project ideas. Please contact Erin Maher (erin.maher@ou.edu) for more information.
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Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Position in Food Studies and Higher Education in Prison
Applications Due June 1, 2021
Stetson University is hiring a post-doctoral fellow as part of the larger project "Seeding Justice: Collaborative Learning Landscapes in Carceral Spaces."
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Carceral Studies Federal Funding Workshop
NSF/NIH/NEA/NEH focus with Bill Ruch, Beeta Rasouli and Kari McCarron of Lewis-Burke: View Recording
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Welcome New Board Members...
Emily Johnson, Professor of Russian, works on the Stalinist labor camp system foucsing on the private correspondence of Soviet inmates.
Katrina Ward, Graduate Student in Geography at OSU, organizes around abolition and investment in Oklahoma City and founded Design for Divestment.
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ABOUT
The Consortium Newsletter will offer a roundup of a few selected articles that reflect today’s news, organizing, and thinking related to the carceral state. We understand that freedom work is built on education and engagement. Education requires an understanding of contemporary issues informed by their historical context. We hope that these curated articles will help you analyze the issues that we face and understand the community that we strive to construct.
Join the conversation!
We encourage feedback, suggestions, and article suggestions. Please reach out to carceralstudies@ou.edu with any ideas, thoughts, or recommendations.
If anyone you know is interested in receiving this newsletter and other information from the Carceral Studies Consortium, please forward them this email and they may click this link to subscribe.
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Land Acknowledgment
The University of Oklahoma is on the traditional lands of the Caddo Nation and the Wichita & Affiliated Tribes. This land was also once part of the Muscogee Creek and Seminole nations. It also served as a hunting ground, trade exchange point, and migration route for the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Osage nations. Today, 39 federally-recognized Tribal nations dwell in what is now the State of Oklahoma as a result of settler colonial policies designed to confine and forcefully assimilate Indigenous peoples.
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The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. ou.edu/eoo |
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