The UC Irvine Law Center for Law, Equality and Race welcomes Susan Bibler Coutin, Jennifer M.
Frederik Rom Taxhjelm is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, and currently a Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley. His work examines self-isolation in Danish prisons and the limits and paradoxes of rights-based discourses of punishment. He has published in Punishment & Society and Incarceration, most recently as guest editor of a themed issue on “pockets of punitiveness” in the welfare state.
Drawing on interviews with self-isolated prisoners, Taxhjelm's talk explores how they make sense of their painful form of confinement. It identifies five types of narrative work on the self through which they attempt to adapt to isolation: the respectable self, the reparable self, the controlled self, the caring self, and the future self. To the isolated men, such narratives are pivotal to understanding the choice to self-isolate but also to making space in isolation for hope and reinvention, to the extent that that is possible. Rather than offering a defense of isolation, the talk provides an empirical account of how prisoners derive meaning from the harms of its emptiness. It concludes by discussing the precarious nature of self-understandings produced in solitude.
Draft paper available upon request. E-mail reiterk@uci.edu
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Africana Studies Graduate Chair and the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Perry came to Penn from Brown University, where she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement.
Perry's first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.
What follows is Perry's abstract for the UC Irvine event:
Registration is now open for a program that will focus on a recent upgrade to the NRE website (https://exonerationregistry.org), which hosts the nation’s largest database of wrongful conviction cases. Learn how to use new features and capabilities now built into the site.
This training, which is open to the public, was made possible by Grant No. 15PBJA-24-GK-02883-WRNG awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.
Abstract:
Extensive research finds that place-based investment reduces crime,
leading practitioners to propose it as an alternative to police-centered
policies. We explore another channel linking local investment to
crime—that police patrol is endogenous to the built environment-using
smartphone location data. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation in
HUD rules designating Qualified Census Tracts (QCTs), we find police
increase patrol in QCTs enough to explain all the observed violent
crime reduction. Police increase patrol more in neighborhoods with
more Black residents and fewer recently-built units. Our findings
highlight the importance of understanding police response to local
development before framing it as a substitute for policing.
Bio: Emily Owens is the Chair of the Department of Criminology,
Law, and Society at UC Irvine. She also holds a secondary appointment
in the Department of Economics. Professor Owens studies a wide range
of topics in the economics of crime, including policing, sentencing, and
the impact of local public policies on criminal behavior. Her research
examines how government policies affect the prevalence of criminal
activity as well as how agents within the criminal justice system,
particularly police, prosecutors, and judges, respond to policy changes.
Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus is a featured speaker at the Nobel Prize Summit on a panel titled “Making Sense of Misinformation.”
Her talk is titled, “The Misinformation Effect.”
More information is available online.
This talk will examine the intersection of mass incarceration and mass child support enforcement in the contemporary U.S. Based on material from my new book, Prisons of Debt, I analyze how these state systems work together to create complex entanglements for formerly- incarcerated fathers--entanglements that lead to cycles of debt and punishment. Drawing on observations in child support courts across the country and interviews with 145 indebted fathers, I show how these cycles too often undermine familial wellbeing and relations of care and reciprocity. The talk also connects the criminalization of child support to conceptualizations of state hybridity, unraveling the cross-system linkages and legal interlacing that create prisons of debt.
Join the Urban Institute for a conversation on restrictive housing and how social science research and lessons from on-the-ground implementation can move reform forward. A controversial practice in corrections policy, restrictive housing typically isolates an incarcerated person to their cell for all but an hour per day, sometimes for months or years. Although correctional administrators often argue that restrictive housing makes facilities safer, research has shown it can result in a plethora of negative health outcomes in those who experience it.
This discussion pairs Keramet Reiter, a UCI professor of criminology, law & society with more than 20 years of experience researching solitary confinement, with Sara Sullivan, a US Department of Justice policy advisor who has worked with numerous corrections systems to reduce or eliminate the use of restrictive housing. The conversation will focus on how research and practice can come together to reform restrictive housing in prisons and jails.
SPEAKERS:
Keramet Reiter, Professor and Vice Chair of Criminology, Law, and Society, University of California, Irvine
Sara Sullivan, Senior Policy Advisor, US Department of Justice
David Pitts, Interim Associate Vice President and Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute (moderator)
PRISON RESEARCH MEETS PRACTICE LECTURE SERIES
Brian D. Johnson, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, will be the featured speaker for the Department of Criminology, Law and Society's Colloquium series.
Johnson is the recipient of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar and the ASC Division on Corrections and Sentencing Distinguished New Scholar Awards. He is a recent co-Editor of Criminology and currently serves as the gubernatorial-appointed Criminal Justice Policy Expert on the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing. His research addresses issues related to social inequality in the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on racial disparities in prosecution and punishment. His published research appears in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology and Justice Quarterly.
Jackson Smith, Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow at tUCLA, will be the featured speaker. His talk is titled “Drug Nuisance Properties and Municipal Carceral Power in Philadelphia.”
Abstract: In 1991 Philadelphia prosecutors formed the Public Nuisance Task Force (PNTF) to shutter bars they accused of harboring narcotics activity. Between the early 1990s and the late 2010s the PNTF would go on to seize nearly 1,700 homes, most located in Black and Latinx neighborhoods devastated by decades of disinvestment. I explore how the PNTF’s targeting of drug nuisance properties transformed these neighborhoods into arenas for the projection of municipal carceral power. Prosecutors defended the unit’s work by claiming it remedied the harms associated with the criminalized distribution of narcotics. However, my research reveals how the PNTF’s home seizures ultimately exacerbated racialized disinvestment and reproduced racial segregation.