150 - Dr. Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons

Today, we have Dr. Brittany Friedman on the show. Dr. Brittany Friedman is a sociologist and expert on cover-ups, politics, and the dark side of institutions. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Friedman's research has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR, The Nation, Jacobin Magazine, and the Associated Press, among others. She is co-founder of the Captive Money Lab and an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation. 

She has come on to discuss her new book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons. Here’s the description: It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid. Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society.

Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that, beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

Buy her book here

Dr. Friedman's Website