Co-taught with Professor Walter Johnson

Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: No Exam

The modern American prison abolition movement consciously evokes the nineteenth century movement to abolish slavery. The institutions each movement sought to end—chattel slavery and the contemporary carceral state—are also directly linked, by intersecting lineages and genealogies, and by the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime” and thus preserved the legality of American slavery to this day, within prisons. This course examines these linkages between institutions of coercive state power and between the movements that oppose them and seek to build different social systems, norms, and structures in their wake.

Note: This offering is cross-listed with FAS as AFRAMER 179X.