Course Details

How did America’s carceral institutions come to house over two million unwilling residents? What precipitated prisons’ central role in our society?

Prison have been a fixture among state institutions throughout recorded human history.  However, the form of the prison and the justifications for its existence have evolved markedly over the centuries and millennia. So too has the scale of carceral institutions and their relative importance to states’ penal systems.

In this course, we will examine the rise of modern prisons as a historical problem through the writings of Michel Foucault.  We will read firsthand accounts of lived experiences of incarceration from ancient Christians in the Roman Empire to Algerian Muslims under French colonial rule. We will interrogate how states have used prisons to marginalize minorities, control restive populations and delegitimize political activists. We will analyze prisoners’ memoirs, personal letters, political treatise and poems as sites of resistance to state power. Central to this course is developing students’ public writing skills. We will use these skills to document prisoners’ lives, translate academic articles about prisons into intelligible prose and advocate for prison reform (or abolition).