Recommended Citation
Jeremiah Chin, Lockdown for Liberty: Black Masculinities, Mass Incarceration and Labor in the Georgia Prisoners Strike, 4 L.J. SOC. JUSTICE 54 (2013), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/1095
Publication Title
Law Journal of Social Justice
Keywords
prisoners strike, critical race theory, prison labor
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines the Georgia prisoners’ protest and uses the prisoners’ list of demands to examine the relationship between historical and present notions of race, labor, rights and incarceration. Particular focus will be placed on how mass incarceration is racialized in the disproportionate imprisonment of men of color, specifically black men, and how this contributes to the invisibility of this population in the public eye. The next section offers a theoretical framework to understand how prisons and prisoner issues are removed from public discourse, the general assumptions undergirding public perceptions of prisons and how common sense assumptions of prisons can be countered. Section three examines how criminality has been conflated with black masculinity to establish mass incarceration as a racial caste system in the United States, intensifying the stigma and invisibility of prisons/prisoners. The fourth section outlines a brief history of United States prisons from slavery to the present in relation to black men, convict labor and white supremacy. The final section examines the Georgia prisoners strike as a specific site of resistance to the history of racialized mass incarceration, assertions of constitutional rights by a disenfranchised prison population and the role of media in generating public discourse during the strike. Though the lack of ongoing media coverage makes the Georgia prisoners strike appear as a non-event, the “Lockdown for Liberty” presents a crucial act of resistance to mass incarceration.