AHA Session 210
Saturday, January 8, 2022: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom B2 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Simon Ezra Balto, University of Iowa
Papers:
Session Abstract
In the mid- to late-20th century, Chicago witnessed not only a rise in racial tensions between White, Black, and Latinx residents experiencing deindustrialization, urban decay, and a shrinking economy, but also a growth in the city’s carceral state. Policing increasingly focused on capturing, containing, and restricting Black and Brown Chicagoans, having numerous impacts on their daily lives. Not all state actors, however, advanced this punitive agenda. This panel will reveal how the Chicago context shaped the rise of the repressive policies locally. The historical field of carceral studies continues to blossom in recent years, inspired by the Movement for Black Lives and their urgent reminders of the daily threat the prison industrial complex poses to Black and Brown citizens. Chicago's carceral history illuminates an important intervention in the field: it shows us that a city’s politics and racial tensions and the decisions of individual actors can both conform with and resist the carceral apparatus - and its effects can radiate out beyond the municipal borders. These four papers reveal a city primed for and influencing the rise of mass incarceration well before the drastic rise in the US prison population in the 1980s.
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