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Image: Cell Block 7, Eastern State Penitentiary, courtesy of Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.
First Mondays: Join us for the Prison and Incarceration Research (PAIR) Interdisciplinary Work-In-Progress (WIP) Speaker Series. The AY 2024-2025 speaker series is designed to strengthen campus research on one of the most pressing legal and social challenges of our time, mass incarceration. Each speaker offers unique perspectives on prisons, mass incarceration, and broader implications for legal institutions, society, and social policy. While highlighting the complexities of incarceration and its consequences, the series also actively fosters interdisciplinary connections among UB scholars.
SPRING 2025 FIRST MONDAYS (monthly, as listed)
509 O’Brian Hall, Noon Reception, 12:30 to 1:30pm Presentation
FIRST MONDAY (monthly, as listed) 509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus; Noon Reception; 12:30 to 1:30pm Presentation
Veronica Horowitz (Sociology & Criminology) presents “Shared Sorrow: Navigating Mass Grief in Incarceration"
Christopher St. Vil (Social Work) will be the discussant.
Log-in to access WIP paper in advance of event.
Abstract: Within the context of the small communities that develop in prison, the deaths of individuals integral to these communities echo heavily within the institution, resulting in mass grief. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with 58 men imprisoned for the duration of the pandemic in an institution where over a dozen men died in a very short time. The term mass grief to describe the collective sorrow, loss, and sadness characterizing the experiences of the survivors. While grieving in prison is often complicated and repressed at the individual level, bereavement may take a different form when experienced collectively within a prison society.
D. Michael Applegarth (School of Social Work)
Brian Whitener (Romance Languages & Literatures)
Jarrett M. Drake (Africana and American Studies)
Andrea Pitts (Comparative Literature) presents “Health Empires Behind Bars: Carceral Humanism and the Rise of Correctional Medicine"
Victoria Piehowski (Sociology & Criminology) will be the discussant.
Log-in to access the paper here.
Abstract: Drawing from the prescient calls to action of radical organizations like the Young Lords of the 1970s, this presentation seeks to examine how health care and carceral industries have become intertwined. Starting with medical oversight of prisons and jails beginning in the mid-1970s, this presentation outlines the institutionalization of medical industries within carceral facilities. It argues that a post-civil rights era of medical racism has become further obfuscated under the terms of what James Kilgore and others describe as “carceral humanism.” According to Kilgore, “Carceral humanism recasts the jailers as caring social service providers.” This presentation thereby seeks to address the deep rift between humanist reforms and abolitionist projects, as the former seeks to address forms of suffering within existing institutional apparati, while the latter calls for the formation of new social and institutional configurations to end punishment industries altogether.