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Race & Carcerality

The United States’ dependence on policing, punishment, and incarceration is unparalleled. While the racial justice uprisings of 2020 helped call attention to the ways in which these systems create and sustain racial injustices, they have been met with widespread legislative and municipal backlash. ARPC scholars and community partners bring together perspectives from a wide range of fields to address questions of equity in policing and incarceration and offer innovative models and abolitionist-based approaches for broad social transformation.

Jacket cover of Tip of the Spear

Book Discussion: Tip of the Spear

ARPC and community partner BOL held a book talk and signing with scholar-activist Dr. Orisanmi Burton (American University) and Dr. Joshua M. Myers (Howard University) for Burton's book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, a radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons.

AU Antiracist Research and Policy Center

Abolition Everywhere working group

This interdisciplinary research cluster brings AU scholars of policing and the carceral state together with AU scholars deploying abolitionist frameworks to stage critical interventions on a range of racial justice issues, including education, climate justice, urban gentrification, and reproductive justice.
More about Abolition Everywhere

"Til All of Us Are Free"

"Til All of Us Are Free": The Convergence of Prison Abolition and Reproductive Justice

This April 11, 2024 panel explored the intersections of reproductive justice and abolition, connecting our Center's 2022-23 focus on "Race & Reproductive Politics After Roe," with our 2023-24 theme of "Abolition Everywhere."

The group of leading thinkers, cultural workers, and activists working at the intersections of reproductive justice, gender justice, and prison abolition addressed the lessons and opportunities that emerge from a conjoined critique of the carceral logics of policing and imprisonment and the containment, criminalization, and surveillance of sexuality and reproduction. Their discussion illuminated the power and potential of an abolitionist reproductive freedom movement that centers BIPOC feminist approaches to anti-violence, decriminalization, and decarceration.

Speakers:

  • Dr. Priya Kandaswamy, San Diego State University
  • Dr. Cinthya Martinez, University of California Santa Cruz
  • Dr. Connie Wun, AAPI Women Lead
  • Moderated by Dr. Sara Clarke Kaplan of ARPC.