Carceral Apartheid

230 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 3 tables, appends., notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8340-9
Published: January 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8339-3
Published: January 2025

Justice, Power, and Politics

Paperback Available January 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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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 assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.

For more information about Brittany Friedman, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Brittany Friedman's concept of carceral apartheid lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding racism within American prisons and the deployment of racism and empire as a governing strategy of society."—Michael L. Walker, author of Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail

"A searing analysis of entrenched white supremacy written with unmatched clarity, urgency, and grace. This chilling account is an overdue reckoning with the pervasive racism that continues to scar our social world."—Laurence Ralph, author of Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him

"A pathbreaking work full of explosive findings on the coordination of white supremacy, corrections, policing, and the lies to cover it up. Carceral Apartheid will shock readers and make headlines."—Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, author of Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court

"Carceral Apartheid is a page-turning autopsy of white supremacy at work in our prisons and in our government, a social history of Black liberation movements, a genealogy of a murder, and a reckoning with the death-dealing consequences of our obsessions with prisons, punishment, and racial domination. There is certainly horror and abuse carefully documented across a trove of archives, but there is also hope and movement building and resistance in its pages. I could not put this book down. It will stay with me for a long time to come."—Reuben Jonathan Miller, MacArthur Fellow and author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration