Carceral Studies Conversations: Recent Episodes
Carceral Studies Consortium
The official podcast of the Carceral Studies Consortium at the University of Oklahoma. The Consortium brings together faculty, staff and students from across OU and beyond to cultivate and support rigorous research, pedagogy, and community engagement toward social transformation.
Jared Deveraux is recently paroled from Idaho Dept. of Corrections after serving 5 years of a 20 year sentence for Grand Theft-Embezzlement. Prior to incarceration Jared was grinding away at a Fine Arts Doctorate at Texas Tech. He previously had received a Master’s in Theatre from Idaho State, and his Bachelor’s from BYU. Jared is the father to 6 amazing children. In addition to enjoying his new release from prison, Jared is looking forward to publishing his prison memoir “Devils, Fires, Thieves and Liars-Groomed for the American Gulag."
In this conversation, Deveraux discusses the connection between race, incarceration, and capitalism. He explains how his experience in prison taught him to understand how racism cannot be eradicated without ending mass imprisonment. In the discussion of private prisons and spending time in a facility located in Texas (under contract with Idaho), he discusses the impact of being separated from his community and family.
- Sophia Sarantakos is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and researcher whose work aims to facilitate the reduction of the size, scope, and power of the prison-industrial complex. They worked as a social work practitioner for ten years. Dr. Sarantakos’ current research focuses on contributing to the advancement of community-based approaches to harm and need, as well as exploring the future of social change work. They are questioning how the "profession" of social work can directly and effectively connect to the work of large-scale social movements and advance their aims. In this episode, Dr. Sarantakos discusses social care work, how social work can support communities, the ethics of academia, and movement lawyering as an actionable framework for social work. Sarantakos explores how communities are mobilized and organizing, offering social workers an opportunity to listen to, respect, and support this ongoing work in preparation for moments of crisis.
In this episode, Dr. Dylan Rodríguez discusses the logics and practices of slavery as a mode of sociality, liberation movements, the production of knowledge, and the role of academics and the university in liberation works. Rodríguez is a Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. His research focuses on how historical regimes and logics of racial and racial-colonial violence become normalized features of everyday state, cultural, and social formations. He is currently President of the American Studies Association and serving as a Freedom Scholar working towards social and economic justice. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, and most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.
On this episode, Dr. Jessica Ordaz discusses the detention and deportation regime, the violence in the detention process, and the transnational migrant politics that formed in opposition to this violent regime. Jessica (Yesika) Ordaz is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ordaz studies Chicanx/Latinx history, US/Mexico border studies, radical social movements, migration and migrant politics, labor history, the carceral state, the detention and deportation regime, and food justice
On this episode, Dr. Keramet Reiter discusses a new architecture of incarceration that isolated, separated, hid, and repressed imprisoned populations as well as the organizing efforts against this form of violence and repression. Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.
On this episode, Dr. Subini Annamma discusses the school-prison nexus, the way youth in schools are targeted, labeled, and criminalized, how this systemic process perpetuates ableism, sexism and racism, and the effects of this targeting. Annamma was a special education teacher in both public schools and youth prisons. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons.
On this episode, Dr. Matthew Guariglia discusses carceral logics, the international and imperial connections of surveillance and policing, and the consequences of surveillance. Guariglia is a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of racial and ethnic formation, state building and state power, and urban policing in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
On this episode, Dr. Constance Chapple discusses how trauma from contacts with the criminal justice system manifest in families, the gender deviance gap, and what a research project conducted at a correctional facility at the onset of COVID-19 reveals about systemic inequalities. Constance Chapple is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She graduated from the University of Arizona in 1999 with a degree in sociology and has served on the faculties of the University of Nebraska and the University of Cincinnati. She does research on families and crime, gender and crime, child abuse and neglect, and the consequences of incarceration for children, youth and adults.
On this episode, Dr. Reuben Miller discusses how people are made invisible and what effect that has on them and society. Miller also delves into the issues of legal and cultural citizenship, the afterlife of incarceration as a system of control, and the racism that inhibits progress on the carceral state. Miller is an Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. His research examines life at the intersections of race, poverty, crime control, and social welfare policy. His new book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, is based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends.
In this episode, Dr. Scott Gronlund discusses the malleability of memory in relation to eyewitness evidence in criminal legal proceedings, as well as the key lessons from an analysis of cases where DNA exonerated people in which eyewitness testimony was key in the conviction. Gronlund discusses the factors that influence both memory and confidence.
Dr. Guy Emerson Mount explores the meaning of emancipation as it changed over time, the demands of reparations relative to repair and justice, and how the legacies of slavery and the lack of reparations has contributed to the Carceral State. Mount is an Assistant Professor of African American History at Auburn focusing on the intersection of Black transnationalism, Western modernity, and global empires. As part of his research into the lasting legacies of slavery, Prof. Mount recently co-founded the scholarly team that uncovered the University of Chicago’s historical ties to slavery. Mount currently serves as Associate Editor of Black Perspectives, the world’s largest online destination for African American history.
Dr. Dan Berger is an interdisciplinary historian focusing on critical race theory, twentieth century U.S. social movements, and critical prison studies. His research pursues a human accounting of how freedom and violence have shaped the United States in the twentieth century and continue to influence the world. Much of his work concerns the carceral state, including the diverse ways in which imprisonment has shaped social movements, racism, and American politics since World War II. In this episode, Berger helps define the Carceral State--its roots, features, and implications. Berger also explores the activism against the Carceral State and what radicals have fought for.
Professor James is a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU Silver. Jae was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, during a period of political and social unrest. He would ultimately migrate to the United States at ten years old with his mother in search of a better life. Yet the “American Dream,” like it is to many immigrants of color, would be more mirage than reality — the nightmare that awaited Jae — that 1 in 3 black men between 16 and 24 would be victims of what many scholars (decades later) would rather euphemistically title: “Mass Incarceration.”As a professor at NYU, he utilizes his firsthand knowledge and research to educate, train, and work with governments, community-based organizations, social workers, and advocates with social justice agendas throughout America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Jae’s teaching philosophy is most influenced by Paulo Friere, bell hooks, and theories on critical pedagogy. Jae believes education is our greatest tool for liberation and social justice. But to use it effectively, he believes it is essential that we recognize the inherent bias within our current education paradigm. And thus create space(s) that allow for critical dialogue, co-created knowledge, and action aligned with our organizing value of social justice.
Professor Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and teaches and writes on American Indian history. Her first book, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960," looks at film as places of work and documents employment practices of both Natives and non-Natives playing Indians on screen. Her second book is a history of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The tentative title of the book is "How to Get Away With Murder," highlighting the lack of justice for the women and their families.