This piece originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016 and is reprinted here with permission of the author. Janet Golden’s latest book is Babies […]
An Interview with Historian Heather Ann Thompson (Part 2)
The second in a two-part interview with historian Heather Ann Thompson, whose seminal article on mass incarceration, “Why Mass Incarceration […]
An Interview with Historian Heather Ann Thompson (Part 1)
2010 was an important year for scholarship documenting the history of the carceral state. In January, legal scholar Michelle Alexander […]
Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum
This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, […]
Surviving While Black in America: A Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
One of the products of Americans’ growing consciousness around racism and the police killings of African Americans is the conversation […]
Police Brutality, Mental Illness, and Race in the Age of Mass Incarceration
On November 9, 2014, two Ann Arbor police officers shot and killed Aura Rosser, a 40-year-old black woman, after responding […]