In DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, Felker-Kantor traces the establishment and growth of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. The program, established in 1983 in Los Angeles, quickly expanded to a majority of schools across the United States before spreading elsewhere across the globe. Placing police officers in schools as de-facto teachers, the program was pitched as an anti-drug initiative but, Felker-Kantor argues, was more a project of police legitimation. That project led in some cases to painfully intimate moments such as children calling the police on their own parents, but more broadly, instantiated the police more fully into the lives of children, families, and communities as police sought to restore lost credibility.

In This Is My Jail, Newport turns our attention to an astonishingly understudied site of American carcerality: the jail. Focusing on the infamous Cook County (Illinois) Jail but with lessons that reverberate to the entire system, she explores the various ways in which jailing became a central, racist, and repressive entry point for people entering and having to live inside the carceral system. With attention to the lives of the people who are jailed and those who do the work of jailing, she examines the expansion of jailing power; its increasing racialization; and the place of the jail in urban life. In so doing, she tells an entirely new story about urban life and mass incarceration in the United States. Importantly, she also traces a thru-line of resistance to this carceral project, showing how places of confinement rarely go unchallenged by the people they confine.

As an authors-meets-critics roundtable, participants (including the authors) will put these new, cutting-edge books into conversation with one another. In so doing, this panel explores a variety of themes in post-World War II American carceral history that remain understudied: the social sprawl of carceral systems; the links between education and the carceral state; how millions of people have ended up in the purgatorial state of being jailed without being convicted; the punitive evolution of drug policy; and how people resisted all of that against enormous odds.