In the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic crisis, policymakers were forced to answer hard-hitting ethical questions: how would resources […]
Maternal-Child Separation in the Carceral State
In 1966, the American “war on crime” began with Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message to the Congress on Crime and […]
What Will Today’s Immigration Detention Centers Look like to Future Americans?
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 […]