Imprisoned: Conception, Construction, Abolition, and Alternatives
This interdisciplinary seminar, in which law students join fellows and faculty at Yale School of Medicine's Program on Forensic Psychiatry, considers the history and conception of incarceration that has produced “prison” as it is constituted in the United States and the impact on people held within it. We examine the racial and gender dynamics as well as growing concerns about the public health consequences and the costs—dignitary, social, political, and financial—of the system now in use.
The class explores facets of the law addressing prisons, the market for prisons, the perspectives of people who live in and work in prisons, and the effects of incarceration on the body politic. We probe concerns about “safety” and “security” in animating the expansion of the use of incarceration and in justifying efforts to control movements and autonomy of people in detention. Our topics include the sources and development of prisons and prisoners’ rights; the use of specific forms of in-prison punishment and detention such as compulsory labor and solitary confinement; the health harms experienced by imprisoned people and their families, prison staff, and the community; administrative authority; and the role of the private sector. In addition, to excavate the political infrastructure and economy of incarceration and potential sources of change, we examine regulatory efforts through national and transnational bodies, such as the first set of Standard Minimum Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners (League of Nations, 1934), the 2006 European Prison Rules of the Council of Europe; and the 2015 U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (“the Nelson Mandela Rules”). Through diverse materials, the class considers the impact of courts, legislatures, social movements, and research in shaping the parameters of permissible sanctions that tolerate the profound loss of autonomy commonplace in U.S. prisons. We consider efforts to alter conditions of confinement and to undermine the legitimacy of prisons. The discussion of prison abolition includes learning about alternatives to the current punishment regime.
For more information, contact Liman Center Executive Director Kate Braner.