Carceral Studies Conversations Carceral Studies Consortium

Jared Deveraux is recently paroled from Idaho Dept. of Corrections after serving 5 years of a 20 year sentence for Grand Theft-Embezzlement. Prior to incarceration Jared was grinding away at a Fine Arts Doctorate at Texas Tech. He previously had received a Master’s in Theatre from Idaho State, and his Bachelor’s from BYU. Jared is the father to 6 amazing children. In addition to enjoying his new release from prison, Jared is looking forward to publishing his prison memoir “Devils, Fires, Thieves and Liars-Groomed for the American Gulag."

In this conversation, Deveraux discusses the connection between race, incarceration, and capitalism. He explains how his experience in prison taught him to understand how racism cannot be eradicated without ending mass imprisonment. In the discussion of private prisons and spending time in a facility located in Texas (under contract with Idaho), he discusses the impact of being separated from his community and family.

3. Sophia Sarantakos is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and researcher whose work aims to facilitate the reduction of the size, scope, and power of the prison-industrial complex. They worked as a social work practitioner for ten years. Dr. Sarantakos’ current research focuses on contributing to the advancement of community-based approaches to harm and need, as well as exploring the future of social change work. They are questioning how the "profession" of social work can directly and effectively connect to the work of large-scale social movements and advance their aims.
In this episode, Dr. Sarantakos discusses social care work, how social work can support communities, the ethics of academia, and movement lawyering as an actionable framework for social work. Sarantakos explores how communities are mobilized and organizing, offering social workers an opportunity to listen to, respect, and support this ongoing work in preparation for moments of crisis.

In this episode, Dr. Dylan Rodríguez discusses the logics and practices of slavery as a mode of sociality, liberation movements, the production of knowledge, and the role of academics and the university in liberation works. Rodríguez is a Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. His research focuses on how historical regimes and logics of racial and racial-colonial violence become normalized features of everyday state, cultural, and social formations. He is currently President of the American Studies Association and serving as a Freedom Scholar working towards social and economic justice. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, and most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.

On this episode, Dr. Jessica Ordaz discusses the detention and deportation regime, the violence in the detention process, and the transnational migrant politics that formed in opposition to this violent regime. Jessica (Yesika) Ordaz is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ordaz studies Chicanx/Latinx history, US/Mexico border studies, radical social movements, migration and migrant politics, labor history, the carceral state, the detention and deportation regime, and food justice

On this episode, Dr. Keramet Reiter discusses a new architecture of incarceration that isolated, separated, hid, and repressed imprisoned populations as well as the organizing efforts against this form of violence and repression. Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.

On this episode, Dr. Subini Annamma discusses the school-prison nexus, the way youth in schools are targeted, labeled, and criminalized, how this systemic process perpetuates ableism, sexism and racism, and the effects of this targeting. Annamma was a special education teacher in both public schools and youth prisons. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons.