The Carceral Studies Working Group is an interdisciplinary collective of scholars, educators, activists, and students who address the mass criminalization and incarceration of marginalized groups through research, teaching and activism. We recognize the racialized, gendered, and classed nature of the criminal justice system as well as the prison industrial complex, the network of interests and institutions that profit from imprisonment, especially the imprisonment of people of color and the poor. The Carceral Studies Working Group (CSWG) advances a combination of research and practice that connects the production and dissemination of knowledge on incarceration to concrete work for social justice.
Background
Within the last 12 years, over two million people were imprisoned in the United States – most for non-violent drug-related offenses. Prior to this period, it took 160 years to incarcerate two million. Currently, there are about two and a half million prisoners n the U.S. and approximately six million people under U.S. criminal justice supervision. These numbers and the important human lives they count call for critical, interdisciplinary scholarship on the history, forms, causes, and impacts of the current prison crisis, as well as methods of effective social change.
Strategies and Tools
The Carceral Studies Working Group is committed to research, teaching and activism in relation to incarceration, confinement and criminalization in the United States and abroad.
Research
CSWG provides a space for scholars producing innovative, interdisciplinary research on criminalization and incarceration to critically discuss and inform one another’s work.
Teaching
CSWG facilitates exchanges in which participants share strategies for teaching about imprisonment that engage students and communities in social change work. CSWG also hosts workshops and dialogues that help working group members and others understand how incarceration connects to other academic areas of study, avenues for activism and their daily lives.
Activism and Service
CSWG develops and participates in projects and campaigns that connect groups and individuals at the University of Maryland with other communities organizing against incarceration and criminalization. We also facilitate avenues for members of the UMCP community to provide assistance to incarcerated people.
Benefits
Through individual and collaborative work employing each of our targeted strategies, CSWG participants are supported through lively interdisciplinary exchange and dynamic platforms to share, learn and act. Carceral Studies Working Group members also benefit from interactions with scholars and organizers working from grassroots organizations, leading policy think tanks, and other academic, activist, and educational settings.
History
The Carceral Studies working group was co-founded in fall 2004 by graduate students Johonna McCants and Bailey Kier and faculty member, Dr. Angel David Nieves. Dr. Mary Corbin Sies (American Studies) also played a key foundational role by initiating conversations about developing a working group dedicated to the study of the prison industrial complex. After the first meeting was called in September 2004, participants began considering a name for the group. Prison industrial complex working group? Prison studies working group? Johonna McCants suggested the term, 'carceral studies' because of its potential application to scholarship focused on multiple forms of confinement and criminalization as well as the complex processes at the root of contemporary and historical incarceration. During its first year, CSWG hosted a brownbag on the impact of felon disenfranchisement on the 2004 election featuring Malik Russell of the Justice Policy Institute and a panel highlighting the research of working group members, Rob Chase, a Ph.D. candidate in history, and Dr. John Caughey, a faculty member in American Studies, among other events. In the 2005-06 academic year, the group selected its first annual theme, “Prisons, Activism and the Academy: From the Ground Up.” The year’s events included an interactive workshop on the prison industrial complex co-sponsored by the UMCP NAACP and a conversation with Rhodessa Jones, director and founder of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, an event principally presented by the Department of Women’s Studies. The working group also joined with the Gender, Violence, and Resistance reading group to initiate a writing group for graduate students planning or working on research projects on violence, confinement, and resistance. Called Writing Violence and Resistance, the group features graduate students from multiple universities and has come to be an exciting home for select young scholars in the Washington, DC metropolitan area writing about historical and contemporary confinement.
Carceral Studies Working Group 2006-07 Program:
The Violence of Confinement: Conversations on Criminalization and Resistance
Tues. October 14, 2006. 4-6 pm. Sex Workers and the State: Policing, Punishment and Protest
1108 Holzapfel Hall, American studies seminar room; Refreshments will be served.
Co-sponsors: American studies department and GLBTQ and Sexuality studies working group.
More information about the topics and presenters is available here (PDF).
Tues. November 7, 2006. 4-6 pm. Panel featuring Writing Violence and Resistance members: Aisha Finch, History Ph.D. Candidate, New York University; Jessica Johnson, History Ph.D. Student, University of Maryland; Johonna McCants, American Studies Ph.D. Student, University of Maryland; and Tamara Walker, History Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan
More information about the topics and presenters is available here (PDF).
2006-2007 Service Project: Book Drive for Incarcerated Youth
Initiated in spring 2006 by Beck Krefting and her AMST 603 classmates, this book drive is helping to build libraries on the units of Oak Hill Youth Center, a detention facility located in Laurel, Md. Drop-off box located outside 1108 Holzapfel Hall. Check back for more locations.
2006-07 Leadership
Johonna McCants – Director
Beck Krefting - Activism and Service Coordinator
We are in need of more coordinators. Interested? Please contact Johonna at the address above.
