Historicizing the Carceral State in the Community College Anthropology Course

This paper offers a perspective on using state prison archives and prison activist histories to teach the history of the carceral state, focusing on the period of mass incarceration from 1970-present. I show the potential for using archival documents to demonstrate how the prison is both organized and created by everyday decisions, focusing on Department of Corrections plans for building a new prison in Elmira, New York in 1988.