ANTHR 7488 - [Prison Worlds]

Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Next offered 2014-2015. Co-meets with ANTHR 4488.

C. Garces.

This course will illuminate the rise of mass incarceration and punitive containment strategies around the globe. Probing recent ethnography, history, prison memoirs and documentary journalism (including film), we will explore cultures of confinement and systematically critique the prison as a normalized space of exception. Emphasis will be given to works that shed light on ‘prison climates’ of governance, survival, and transition. Among other topics to be elaborated will include: prisoner’s rights; political imprisonment; everyday life in custody; gendered, ethnoracial, and/or religious difference and inmate hierarchies; the abolitionist movement; the steady growth and impunity of organized crime networks; prison management by wards of the state; the prison as a site of precariousness and claims to radical potentiality; the worldwide proliferation of ‘supermax facilities’ and ‘black sites’; and the political economy of the prison-industrial complex and today’s security state.