Police, Prisons, and Power:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Criminal Justice
The Prison Studies Group’s
Third Annual Graduate Student Conference
April 12, 2013
Graduate students are invited to submit proposals for The Prison Studies Group’s third annual interdisciplinary graduate student conference to take place at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York on April 12, 2013. This year’s conference is entitled “Police, Power, and Prisons: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Criminal Justice.”
The aim of the conference is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for emerging scholars whose research relates to the prison and criminal/juvenile justice systems. We welcome papers across academic fields, and we encourage submissions on a broad range of subjects on the general theme of crime and punishment – past and present, domestic and international.
Topics might include:
The power of police and policingRacial profiling
- Stop and frisk
- Police shootings
- Vigilante policing
- Technology, surveillance, control of public space
- Immigration enforcement
- Comparative international or transnational policing
The power of prisons and imprisonmentPolitical economy of mass incarceration
- Trends in sentencing
- 40 years of mandatory minimums in NY (Rockefeller Drug Laws)
- Immigration detention
- School-to-Prison pipeline
- Inmates and correction officers
- Satisfying the need for justice: blame and criminal accountability
- Struggles and successes of reentry
The power of people and knowledgeThe prison as a site of the production of knowledge
- Increased political, academic, and public concern over mass incarceration. Is this a moment of change?
- Educational and other programs in prisons
- Preventing crime, criminalization, and incarceration
- (de) construction of criminality
Each presentation will be 12-15 minutes long, with time reserved at the end of each panel of presentations for Q&A.
Graduate students interested in participating should submit the following as an email attachment (.doc/x or .pdf) by Monday, February 25, 2013 to prisonstudiesgroup@gmail.com:
- paper abstract not exceeding 300 words;
- name as it should appear in the program;
- graduate program in which student is enrolled (school, department and degree working toward);
- brief bio to be read as an introduction at the conference;
- an indication of any a/v needs such as power-point, dvd, video, etc.
Participants will be notified by March 1, 2013.
Rwanda went through a tragic past that was worsened by the 1994 genocide against tutsi which cost life of thousands of Rwandans leaving prisons, widows and orphans. Currently, there are number of prisons where persons accused of or indicted with genocide or ordinary crimes are detained waiting for justice. Amongst them many women live with their children. These kids innocently suffer a prejudice. They are extremely vulnerable. They live and grow up in a lockup environment. These children share the same fate with their mothers, which is legally unfair since they are deprived of almost all advantages offered by the Rwandan society.