Countering the Carceral State

Countering the Carceral State is CSSD’s yearlong program of events that explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. 

The program is organized the occasion of the centennial of Malcolm X’s birth and in light of CSSD’s thematic focus on crisis for 2025-2026. Countering the Carceral State is rooted in Malcolm X’s political awakening related to the deep study that he undertook while he was in prison and that planted the seeds for his internationalism. It is inspired by his understanding of the plight of Black people in America not as a civil rights matter but a human rights one and as tied to the struggles of Black and brown peoples in the ‘Third World’ and elsewhere. As such, the program explores racialized violence as it manifests at different scales of American empire and the warfare being waged domestically and internationally.

Program events will probe continuities between policing, racial profiling, and police militarization; the prison industrial complex; immigrant detention; forever wars in the Middle East/Central Asia and imperial prisons like Abu Ghraib; and the transformation of war zones such as Gaza into technological testbeds from which tested weapons and techniques are exported back.