Prison and the Carceral State Syllabus

Date Published: 11/7/2019

Our syllabi series highlights articles, books, and journal issues that encourage discussion of today’s most pressing issues. The scholarship in this syllabus discusses life in a society governed by policing, surveillance, and imprisonment. Topics range from women of color abolitionist activism and the militarization of everyday life to intimacy, queerness, and parental rights in prison.

All book introductions are freely available.

Challenging Convictions: Indigenous and Black Race-Radical Feminists Theorizing the Carceral State and Abolitionist Praxis in the United States and Canada

Lena Palacios
Meridians 15:1, 2016

Labor in the Correctional State

Leon Fink, editor
Labor 8:3, 2011

Fighting for Parental Rights in Prison

Jaqueline Smith
Genre 35:3–4, 2002

Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State

Stephen Dillon
2018

Lessons in Being Gay: Queer Encounters in Gay and Lesbian Prison Activism

Regina Kunzel
Radical History Review 100, 2008

Dehumanizing Slave Personhood

Jeannine Marie DeLombard
American Literature 91:3, 2019

Posing in Prison: Family Photographs, Emotional Labor, and Carceral Intimacy

Nicole R. Fleetwood
Public Culture 77, 2015

Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy

Joy James, editor
2007

From Slavery to Jane Crow to Say Her Name: An Intersectional Examination of Black Women and Punishment

Nishaun T. Battle
Meridians 15:1, 2016

The Militarization and Madness of Everyday Life

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
South Atlantic Quarterly 113:3, 2014

Quasi: Adjudicating Guilt, Innocence, and Citizenship in the Neoliberal Prison

Deena Varner
Cultural Politics 15:2, 2019

Between the Market and the State: The Problem of Prison Labor in the New Deal

Matthew Pehl
Labor 16:2, 2019

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