THE POLITICS OF MASS INCARCERATION

To many observers, mass incarceration is among the most pressing civil rights and human rights issues in

the contemporary United States. America’s carceral state is sweeping. In addition to the nearly 2 million

people currently incarcerated, there are over 7 million people living who have been imprisoned in the past

three decades and 19 million people currently living with felony records. These carceral sentences impact

the lived conditions and life chances of those most directly affected as well as their families and

communities. These dynamics are also deeply racialized and have reshaped American culture and

democracy at the local and national levels. But that is not the full story. Liberatory movements have

resisted and surged against racialized subjugation for centuries in the United States, making confinement

a continually contested racial and political condition in the United States.

In this course, students will study the origins and developments of mass incarceration, as well as the

political struggles that have been waged against it. Students will read across a range of genres, including

scholarly work in the fields of sociology, political science, history, and law, as well as performance,

memoir, and testimony. By examining the rise of the carceral state in this way, students will gain a critical

lens on longstanding concerns in the American imaginary: race and racism, justice and injustice,

community and reparation, liberation and abolition. While the course is not exhaustive, it is meant to

equip students with a working framework on the critical debates in the field.