Carceral State Project

In Part II, What They’re Telling Us, CSP researcher Ariana Kertsman asks: what if, instead of the narratives youth have been told, they are offered opportunities in which they recognize their own voice? Power? Agency? This report centers the voices and experiences of Black and Brown youth who’ve been part of Telling It, an organization offering marginalized youth opportunities to tell their own stories, take ownership over their own learning, and claim narratives about themselves that they haven’t yet been offered by limited systems of power and influence.
Check out the link in our bio to read the full story!

New publication alert! “The Politics of Fear: How the 1990s Victims’ Rights Movement Justified Punitive Legislation in Michigan,” a multimedia report authored by Madison Hammond, investigates how racialized narratives of crime and victimhood shaped Michigan’s punitive turn in the 1990s. White suburban victims became the public face of innocence and suffering, images that politicians such as Governor John Engler and Senator William Van Regenmorter mobilized to justify tougher punishments and expanded incarceration through “truth-in-sentencing” laws and harsh parole restrictions. Drawing on the Leslie Williams case and the activism of victim’s rights organizer Linda Clark, the report traces how political and media actors weaponized the moral authority of white victimhood to deepen racial inequality and help construct Michigan’s carceral state.

As the United States is a prison nation, Michigan can aptly be described as a prison state. Throughout its history, Michigan has housed more than 90 state-run carceral facilities incarcerating adults, and the State’s incarceration rates have mirrored national trends of mass incarceration. In this story by our researcher Lawson Schultz, “Postcards, Prison Camps, and Politics”, Lawson Schultz combs through the planning archives to demonstrate that the prison landscape of Michigan was not an inevitable product of history but a consequence of active and intentional planning.

Join us now in the Michigan League for the Michigan Against Solitary Confinement Summit, we’ll be here all day!