Race and Punishment in America: Toward a History of Mass Incarceration This syllabus is subject to change

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1 1 Race and Punishment in America: Toward a History of Mass Incarceration This syllabus is subject to change Instructor: Max Mishler Office: KJCC 527 Office Hours: TBA mam895@nyu.edu Course Meeting Times: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30am-12:30pm There are currently over two million people incarcerated in the United States, constituting by far the largest prison population in the world. African Americans and Latinos comprise a disproportionate number of these prisoners. In fact, there are currently more black men under carceral control (prison, parole, probation) than were enslaved in This expansion of what scholar/activist Angela Davis has called the prison industrial complex has produced enormous profits for private prison corporations, growing deficits for state and local governments, and social crises in those communities targeted by systematic policing and imprisonment. It has also generated public and scholarly debates about the history, ethics, and function of mass incarceration. In her recent book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that the contemporary prison boom is really only the most recent manifestation of a long-standing American racial caste system that evolved from slavery to Jim Crow to urban segregation and mass incarceration. In this course we will examine the origins of the prison industrial complex through an analysis of its antecedents in slavery and in the prison systems of the nineteenth-century United States, asking whether contemporary mass incarceration is indeed a new expression of an old racial caste system or something altogether different. We will begin by considering the place of systematic punishment during slavery, exploring the racial dynamics of both the private and public punishment of the enslaved, and look at how new modes of punishment such as incarceration in a penitentiary accompanied the abolition of slavery in the United States. We will examine the role of post-emancipation prison regimes in the development of race as a sociological category, black criminality as a popular discourse, and the incarceration of black men and women as a social fact. Last, we will discuss the rise of the carceral state in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, paying special attention to the role of political change and economic transformation in driving prison construction. Throughout the course we will consider the distinct experiences of punishment for men, women, children, African Americans, whites, Latinos, and non-citizens in order to tease out the specific relationship between race and punishment at various moments in American history. Within our broader exploration of state-based punishment policies, we will also consider community resistance to policing and incarceration. Course readings will draw on the work of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers, and geographers. We will focus our attention, however, on historical scholarship that relies on archival research or that makes creative use of original sources to tell the story of race and punishment in American history. We will also spend time in class

2 2 examining primary documents related to race and punishment from different historical periods. This course will also make use of contemporary film, television, and music as prisms through which we might evaluate the culture of prison and policing in American society. We will consider whether these public narratives of prison and policing offer new insights into contemporary incarceration not found in scholarly writing or whether they only serve to further obscure the reality of mass imprisonment. As a class, we will also make use of New York City. Through field trips to historical and contemporary sites of racial punishment, students will have an opportunity to connect historical discussions in class to contemporary social policy debates in New York. Course Readings: Tuesday / Thursday Week 1 Introduction to the History of Prison and Mass Incarceration Tuesday May 28, 2012: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995 (1975). (Selections) David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. (Selections) Punishment in NYC Walking Tour (New York Tombs; Criminal Court in lower Manhattan; Parole Board; Hangman s Tree in Washington Square Park; old Five Points) Thursday May 30: Punishment on Television: Drugs Inc. (National Geographic Network) Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force (A&E) Week 2 Slavery and Punishment Tuesday June 4: Phillip Schwartz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, (Selections) Diana Paton, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation. Durham: Duke University Press, (Selections) Thursday June 6: Prison in Antebellum America Field Trip to the African Burial Ground Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century American South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (Select book reviews)

3 3 Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, (Selections) G.S. Rowe, Black Offenders, Criminal Courts, and Philadelphia Society in the Late Eighteenth Century, Journal of Social History, Vol. 22 (1989): Week 3 Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Incarceration Tuesday June 11: David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman s Farm and The Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press, (Selections) Diana Paton, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation. Durham: Duke University Press, (Selections) Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America s Prison Empire. New York: Picador, (Selections) Douglass Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, Wall Street Journal, March 29, Thursday June 13: Khalil Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard, (Selections) Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, Durham: Duke University Press, (Selections) Week 4 The Rise of the Carceral State (Part I) Tuesday June 18: Heather Ann Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History, Journal of American History, 97:3, 2010: Punishment on Television: Uprising: Hip-Hop and the L.A. Riots, VH1 Rock Docs, Episode 137, 2012 OZ episode (HBO). Thursday June 20: Loic Wacquant, The new peculiar institution : On the prison as surrogate ghetto, Theoretical Criminology 4:3:

4 4 Week 5 (Rise of the Carceral State Part II) Tuesday June 25: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, (Selections) Documentary screening: Incarcerated Scarfaces documentary on formerly incarcerated men in one Bronx community (by Pistol Pete of the Terror Squad) Thursday June 27: Suzanne Oboler ed., Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, (Selections) Margo Demello, Tattooing Among Male American Prisoners, Anthropology Today, Vol. 9, No. 6, Documentary screening: Mothers of Bedford Documentary on mothers incarcerated in Bedford Correctional Facility (by Jennifer McShane) Week 6 Tuesday July 2: Contesting Mass Incarceration Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, Suzanne Oboler ed., Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, (Selections) Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance. St. Martins Griffen, (Selections) Thursday July 4: Final Class and Evaluations Mumia Abu Jamal, Live From Death Row. Harper Perennial, (Selections) Coursework: Discussion Questions (10%) Students are expected to submit two discussion questions per class that reflect substantive engagement with course readings. Two 3-5 page response papers (30%) These papers are opportunities for students to more fully explore specific themes that emerge from readings or class discussion. Students are expected to make an original argument and to draw on textual evidence from course readings. Students may also submit a document analysis that makes an original argument about an original source, drawing on course readings to contextualize the document within the broader history of race and punishment.

5 5 Class Presentation (15%) Each student will be responsible for a in-class presentation (ten minutes) consisting of a critical introduction to the required readings and three questions about the readings capable of generating class discussion. Presentations should engage with an author s argument, evidence, and methodology. Students can also address the political or ethical implications of particular readings. 10 page final paper (30%) One option for the final paper is an essay that compares and contrasts various approaches to the study of race and punishment covered during the class, elaborating on such topics as methodology, chronology, evidence, social theory, or the relationship between scholarship, activism, and public policy. A second option is to write a review of one of the academic monographs, novels, memoirs, or autobiographies on the suggested reading list that compares and contrasts your chosen book to key course readings or to important themes in class discussions. Class participation (15%) Students must contribute actively to class discussions and respect the guidelines for classroom behavior as laid out on the first day.