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PROJECTS |
Few institutional contexts evidence
a greater need for innovative research, education,
and collective action than the U.S. criminal
justice system. Our national response to poverty, unemployment,
drug abuse, crime and other social problems has grown increasingly
hostile and exclusionary, amounting to an oppressive and exclusionary
campaign of mass criminalizaton and incarceration.
The adverse consequences of this response are exacerbated by
corresponding patterns including divestment in public education
to fund the prison industrial complex, disregard for the rehabilitation
and re-entry of young and adult prisoners, and the disfranchisement
of citizens who are incarcerated, or who have completed criminal
sentences. While criminal sanctions and policies are directed
at individuals, they have an aggregate social consequence,
an impact highly concentrated in the segregated, poor, and
otherwise marginalized black and Hispanic communities from
which prisoners disproportionately come, and to which they
eventually return.
The Africana Criminal Justice Project seeks to address these
and other issues through a series of inter-related research,
education, and organizing initiatives, each of which are described
in more detail below. This work is ongoing, so please refer
back to this page periodically for updates on the status of
the Africana Criminal Justice Project.
| Research |
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The Africana Criminal Justice Project supports
two major research projects on crime and
justice in the black experience, one focusing
on intellectual history (using printed works),
and the other on original oral history research.
The projects are expected to expand our understanding
of crime and justice in the black experience,
including how historical and contemporary
patterns of racialized criminal social control
have impacted African American individuals,
families, and communities. Rather than an
inventory of inequality, we are especially
looking to produce insight on how crime and
justice are addressed and understood through
the changing lens of the black experience,
and how a new generation of outstanding leadership
can be generated and sustained within communities
impacted by mass criminalization and incarceration.
The section below provides further project information and
updates:
1) INTELLECTUAL HISTORY PROJECT:
This research analyzes the patterns and core contributions
of crime and justice inquiry and writing
in the black intellectual tradition. A primary goal is to mark
the foundations of an “Africana theory of justice,” based
upon criticism and knowledge produced by Black scholars, artists,
and public intellectuals, including many who have personally
experienced incarceration—such as Nat Turner, Marcus
Garvey, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Assata Shakur,
George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, James Farmer, and Angela Davis.
These contributions reflect a wide array of interpretive styles
and disciplinary perspectives (i.e., social sciences, humanities,
law, criminology, etc.), as well as dynamic impulses and aspirations
inspired over centuries of the black experience.
Updates: Coming Soon!
Download our working bibliography of Africana Criminal Justice.
2) ORAL HISTORY PROJECT: This research
develops a theoretical and political analysis of the collateral
consequences of racialized criminal social control, using as
a primary source the oral histories of formerly incarcerated
young and adult black women and men, as well as interviews
with scholars, activists, and practitioners. We feel that the
leadership to address these consequences must be drawn in large
part from those young and adult women and men who have experienced
incarceration. Therefore, the oral histories will focus on
former prisoners who have persevered to become effective advocates
of change and empowerment for their communities—as leaders
in community organizations, faith-based institutions, artists,
labor organizers, entrepreneurs, social workers, youth organizers,
lawyers, elected officials, or in other capacities. The research
will focus on key deficits and disparities in the socioeconomic
conditions of black prisoners and their families, as well as
the broader cultural and political consequences of mass incarceration
for black civic capacity and leadership, including how felon
disfranchisement alters access to, and orientations toward,
democratic forms of civic engagement.
Updates: Coming soon!
| Education |
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The Africana Criminal Justice Project supports the development of new strategies
and resources for teaching about race, crime, and justice in academic and popular
settings. Several ACJP-related courses will be offered at the Institute for Research
in African-American Studies at Columbia University. The project will also develop
new curricular resources for teaching in this area (See ACJP Research), and support
public education on crime, punishment, and resistance to criminal injustice,
through public speaking, conferences and organizing initiatives (See
ACJP Organizing).
ACJP-Related courses offered at Columbia University:
Juvenile Justice in the African American Experience (Spring 2002)
Description: This upper-level undergraduate course examines the experiences of
African Americans in U.S. juvenile justice systems, both as subjects and agents
of juvenile social control, from the mid-19th century to the present. The focus
of the seminar is juvenile justice administration, with an emphasis on delinquency
case processing, not delinquent behavior. Major emphasis is given to the conceptual
and institutional evolution of "juvenile justice," and their application
in the handling of black children and within black community contexts. Key developments
explored in the course are: the early “child-saving” movement and
exclusion of black children from its rehabilitative initiatives, the role of
African Americans in the development and transformation of U.S. juvenile justice
systems, and the radical reorganization of juvenile justice in the last half
of the 20th century.
[Syllabus – Forthcoming]
Africana Criminal Justice: A Research Seminar (Spring 2003)
Description: This seminar explores core themes of the Africana Criminal Justice
Project through assigned readings, in-class discussion, and a research module.
The seminar will focus on the racialization of criminal social control, as evidenced
by the black experience, and the broader consequences of criminal justice policies
for individuals, families, communities, and societies overall. The seminar will
introduce students to important texts in these areas, including several overlooked
contributions from black writers, while also challenging students to develop
new insights on crime and punishment in the black experience, through oral history
and/or archival research projects. Student research will help to develop assets
for a Multimedia Study Environment for the Africana Criminal Justice Project.
[Syllabus – Forthcoming]
Crime, Punishment, and Resistance in the Black Intellectual Tradition (Spring
2004)
Description: Forthcoming.
| Organizing |
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The Africana Criminal Justice Project not only seeks
to reframe and expand academic debates on issues of race and criminal justice,
but to help mobilize initiatives to address the problem of racial inequality
in criminal justice, and the particular crisis of mass incarceration. Critical
research and education initiatives within Africana Studies can contribute to
this effort, but especially important will be organizing civic leadership, especially
among former prisoners themselves, and within communities burdened by the staggering
collateral consequences of mass criminalization and imprisonment.
The ACJP will contribute to this effort through several organizing initiatives,
including two national conferences, workshops, and an internet-based learning
and organizing environment. These initiatives are described in more detail below.
Africana Studies Against Criminal Injustice: Research—Education—Action
An Academic and Community Conference
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Columbia University
April 11-12, 2003
See detailed conference information in News & Events.
National Africana Criminal
Justice Conference (Theme Forthcoming)
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Columbia University
November 2003 (tentatively the 7th and 8th)
This conference will be a significantly larger meeting, bringing together activists,
practitioners and especially former prisoners to build upon the Civic Action
theme developed in the April conference, and through ACJP research, education,
and organizing initiatives in the interim. The conference will be organized to
facilitate the exchange of information, development of strategy, and mobilization
of resources to address the collateral consequences of mass criminalization and
incarceration for black civic capacity and participation. Individuals and organizations
interested in participating in this event are strongly encouraged to contact
us immediately.
ACJP Multimedia Learning and Organizing Environment
Finally, we have recently begun designing a “Multimedia Learning and Organizing
Environment”(MLOE) for Africana Criminal Justice. Anchored by assets generated
by ACJP research initiatives, the MLOE will provide users with options for engaging
multimedia informational resources (in text, video, photography, and other mediums)
on crime and justice in the black experience, through pedagogic strategies suitable
for a range of user abilities and interests—for example, by identifying
source material and other resources related to public policy, political economy,
literature and the arts, women and gender, youth issues, community organizing,
and more. The MLOE will be a valuable tool for progressive educators, researchers,
criminal justice professionals, practitioners, activists, and members of the
general public seeking a more in-depth understanding of crime, punishment, and
resistance to criminal injustice in the black experience.
We are especially interested in establishing connections through the MLOE with
the growing network of “Community Technology Centers” (there are
approximately 150 such centers in New York City alone), and developing the MLOE
as a resource for former prisoners and families of the incarcerated. The site
could be used to relate and communicate personal experiences within and outside
of the prison and criminal justice system, sharing information with a vast network
of scholars, activists, and practitioners, and accessing information relating
to strategies of individual and collective action.
While realizing its limitations, we feel the MLOE can be a powerful and long-lasting
resource for developing civic capacity and leadership to address major challenges
at the intersection of race, crime, and justice. As a “digital knowledge
community,” the MLOE can connect a wide variety of users, and serve multiple
research, educational, and organizing purposes. The MLOE will also have the potential
to link local, regional, national, and even international networks of individuals
and organizations seeking to address the crisis of racialized criminal injustice.
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