热点大瓜

Speaker: Veronica Horowitz (Sociology & Criminology) 

Title: “Shared Sorrow: Navigating Mass Grief in Incarceration"

Discussant: Christopher St. Vil (Social Work)

Abstract: Within the context of the small communities that develop in prison, the deaths of individuals integral to these communities echo heavily within the institution, resulting in mass grief. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with 58 men imprisoned for the duration of the pandemic in an institution where over a dozen men died in a very short time. The term mass grief to describe the collective sorrow, loss, and sadness characterizing the experiences of the survivors. While grieving in prison is often complicated and repressed at the individual level, bereavement may take a different form when experienced collectively within a prison society.

Speaker: D. Michael Applegarth (School of Social Work)

Title: Reexamining the Sequential Intercept Model: Incorporating Theory, Practice Insights, and Social Work Perspectives

Discussant: Mala McCormick Department of Community Health & Health Behavior

Abstract: Persons with mental illness (MI) are disproportionately represented across the criminal legal system (CLS) and regularly experience worse outcomes when compared to persons without MI. The Sequential Intercept Model (SIM) is a framework used to display points of intervention in the CLS where individuals with behavioral health issues can be diverted to social support services or treatment in lieu of criminalization. As currently conceptualized, the SIM consists of several linear intercepts ranging from prevention of involvement with the CLS (i.e., pre-arrest) to community reentry and community supervision following incarceration. Each intercept presents an opportunity for interventions and policies to increase use of community alternatives to incarceration and critically examine current practices. However, gaps often exist in communication and collaboration between administrators, mental health professionals, community stakeholders, and other advocates across these intercepts - contributing to missed opportunities to divert or reduce individuals’ involvement in the CLS. The SIM is a valuable resource to numerous communities; yet, the linear nature of the model can fail to fully represent individuals’ journey through the CLS and the necessity of collaboration of stakeholders across the entire system. Additionally, the SIM is not theoretically based or empirically driven, but rather a roadmap of how the CLS operates. This paper seeks to reexamine the SIM and its intended objectives, propose a reimagined visualization of the framework, and incorporate relevant theory and practice insights. Further advancing the SIM requires identifying where social workers fit into this model, decentralizing the focus on criminal legal actors where appropriate, and infusing theory into how the model is conceptualized and implemented.

Speaker: Brian Whitener (Romance Languages & Literatures)

Title: "Abolitionisms at the Border"

Discussant: Isabel Anadon (Sociology & Criminology)

Abstract: This piece is a rough draft of the first chapter of a new book project, which will examine abolitionist movements and theory in a Hemispheric frame. In this chapter, I am putting prison and police abolition ideas into conversation with emerging work on border abolition. First, I make an argument for the importance of control of mobility as a historical, and necessary, feature of capitalism, which I do by examining how much contemporary discourse on migration has a “hydraulic” imaginary. Second, I demonstrate how the control of mobility has served as a material support for multiple processes of racialization. While much anti-capitalist work on migration locates racializing processes at the boundary between formally free and coerced labor, I argue that the fixing or forced circulation of populations has historically served as a critical site where the racializing work of linking beliefs and practices takes place. Following from this, I argue for thinking of bordering devices as complex techno-juridical infrastructures which underpin capitalist control of mobility and as devices for fixing bodies in space and inciting them into movement. Finally, the chapter closes with a set of reflections on the political horizons this chain of concepts opens for us.

Jarrett M. Drake (Africana and American Studies)

Title: Angels of Angola: Fascism and Slavery in the Deep South (Chapter 3: Touch)

Discussant: Veronica Horowitz, Sociology & Criminology

Abstract: This chapter from my in-progress book manuscript explores how prisons steal time, money, and flesh from non-imprisoned people and demonstrates how traditions of Black captive love work to restore relationships disrupted by regimes of anti-Black alienation.

Andrea Pitts (Comparative Literature) presents “Health Empires Behind Bars: Carceral Humanism and the Rise of Correctional Medicine" 

Victoria Piehowski (Sociology & Criminology) will be the discussant.

Abstract: Drawing from the prescient calls to action of radical organizations like the Young Lords of the 1970s, this presentation seeks to examine how health care and carceral industries have become intertwined. Starting with medical oversight of prisons and jails beginning in the mid-1970s, this presentation outlines the institutionalization of medical industries within carceral facilities. It argues that a post-civil rights era of medical racism has become further obfuscated under the terms of what James Kilgore and others describe as “carceral humanism.” According to Kilgore, “Carceral humanism recasts the jailers as caring social service providers.” This presentation thereby seeks to address the deep rift between humanist reforms and abolitionist projects, as the former seeks to address forms of suffering within existing institutional apparati, while the latter calls for the formation of new social and institutional configurations to end punishment industries altogether.