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

February 22, 2025 00:53:35
150 - Dr. Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons
History of California Podcast
150 - Dr. Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons

Feb 22 2025 | 00:53:35

/

Show Notes

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

Other Episodes

Episode

October 24, 2022 00:34:23
Episode Cover

71 - Dr. Andrea McDowell, We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush

Today, we have Dr. Andrea McDowell on the show. Professor McDowell is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and holds a...

Listen

Episode

May 31, 2023 00:49:35
Episode Cover

93 - Dean King, Guardians of the Valley John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite

Today, we have an interview with Dean King. King is an award-winning author of ten nonfiction books. Dean relishes the adventures involved in making...

Listen

Episode

October 29, 2024 00:55:52
Episode Cover

142 - The Melba Liston Research Collective

Today, we have an episode with four amazing scholars, Dr. Lisa Barg, Dr. Tammy Kernodle, Dr. Dee Spencer and Dr. Sherrie Tucker, to discuss...

Listen