Events

Drawing on several hours of life history interviews and hundreds of archival documents, Friedman traces the institutional conditions that spurred the rise of the Black Guerilla Family within the California Department of Corrections. She advances a critical race theory of prison order, emphasizing how institutions operationalize the logics of white supremacy and divide and conquer using official and extralegal controls. Friedman documents how in an effort to annihilate Black prisoners aligned with political movements, the California Department of Corrections used official controls such as surveillance and indeterminate solitary confinement, bolstered by extralegal controls, such as correctional officer alliances with white supremacist prisoners and forced gladiator fights. These control techniques were eventually wielded against each subsequent problem population that the Department of Corrections came to find threatening. Implications for racial inequality and punishment are discussed. 

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Mollie Fee and Mobarak Hossain.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.