Policing, Prisons, and Political Power in America

Untangle the history of policing in prisons in the United States and the extensive influence these systems have on elections, policy, and governance. Kevin Reese (Until We Are All Free), Robert Chase (Carceral Studies, Stony Brook University), and others, with Dan LoPreto (Stanford University Press) will explore how the U.S. prison system came to be—one that utilizes paramilitary practices, promotes privatized prisons, and embraces solitary confinement. How does modern day incarceration replicate the same power structures of slavery? How does reliance on these systems influence the current political state? The panelists will further contextualize with stories from inside the carceral system—including their own—as well as their experience leading work supporting human rights within these systems.

Image: Protesters block streets as inmates strike on the 45th anniversary of the Attica Uprising. Sep 9, 2016. Credit Alex Milan Tracy.

The 2024-25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing presented by the Institute for Advanced Study at the UMN critically examines how policing intersects with broader societal issues across the globe and explores efforts to reform, transform, or abolish policing. Presented in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing.

About the Presenters

Robert Chase is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. His research centers on the ways social justice movements, civil rights, and the prisoners’ rights movement have confronted mass incarceration and the carceral state. His award-winning We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) examines the southern prisoners’ rights movement and the rise of a militarized carceral state. Chase is also the editor of the anthology Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Migration Detention, and Resistance (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). He is currently at work on a project about the history of sheriffs in the American South and South West that marks their policing role as significantly different from other nations. With collaborators Susan Scheckel and Zebluon Miletsky, Chase launched the digital humanities project “Writing Beyond the Prison: Reimagining the Carceral Ecosystem with Incarcerated Authors” with support from the American Council of Learned Societies. The project aims to publish the writings of incarcerated authors and make them publicly available in a “Living Archive” and build a curriculum around their writing.

Kevin Reese grew up in Minneapolis. He spent 14 years incarcerated inside the criminal justice system. During that time he founded the BRIDGE, which is a grassroots group of directly impacted criminal justice experts whose mission is to abolish mass incarceration and find the answers to a true transformative criminal justice overhaul. Reese is the co-founder and co-executive director at Until We Are All Free Movement and the founder and CEO of Until We Are All Free Consulting Group. He is a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project award winner for poetry published in the Hayden Ferry Review. He can be found featured in Emily Baxter’s internationally acclaimed book We Are All Criminals. He has a running column “Bridging the Gap” in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.

Moderator

Dan LoPreto is an editor at Stanford University Press, where he acquires books in global studies, international affairs, and environmental politics. Prior to joining Stanford, he worked at Columbia University Press, Oxford University Press, and several bookstores in and around New York City. LoPreto also serves as the editor-at-large of Columbia International Affairs Online, a contributing editor to Bold Type Books, and an editor-at-large at the Toynbee Prize Foundation. He has worked with several notable writers including Sarah Jaffe, Mychal Denzel Smith, Yanis Varoufakis, Samar Al-Bulushi, and Ibram X. Kendi.

UMN Conversations at Northrop is a collection of lectures, panel discussions, and other conversations focused on important and timely issues presented in collaboration among numerous University of Minnesota departments and held at Northrop.

Related Links

• We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America by Robert Chase
• The Vibrations of Trauma: A Conversation with Kevin Reese
• We Are All Criminals by Emily Baxter
• Until We Are All Free 
• Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop
• Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing: Transnational Perspectives on the Definition and Possibility of Justice in Law Enforcement
• IAS Institute for Advanced Study