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.

About the author:

Brittany Friedman is an award winning sociologist and expert on politics, cover-ups, and the dark side of institutions. She holds an appointment with the American Bar Foundation as an Affiliated Scholar and previously as a 2021-2022 Access to Justice Scholar. She is a 2023-2024 American Fellow of the American Association of University Women.

Her first book, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, is listed in Sociology, African American Studies, and the special series, “Justice, Power, & Politics,” home to a long list of award winning scholarly monographs.

Dr. Friedman is Co-founder and Creative Director of the Captive Money Lab and Co-PI (w/ Drs. April Fernandes and Gabriela Kirk) of a cross-national comparative study of inmate reimbursement practices, also known as “pay-to-stay.” Their project expands the study of monetary sanctions to include empirical analyses of the historical and contemporary evolution of pay-to-stay practices, debt, and inequality. They have submitted written testimony at the state (Connecticut General Assembly Judiciary Committee) and federal (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary & Federal Bureau of Prisons) levels, summarizing their peer-reviewed research findings for lawmakers.

Dr. Friedman’s research has been supported by external funding from Arnold Ventures, American Bar Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women, the American Society of Criminology, and university funding from several institutions.