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 sociologist, author, and USC Assistant Professor Brittany Friedman, PhD, 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.
In case you aren’t yet familiar with her work, Dr. Friedman is a Black feminist sociologist known for producing big ideas that blow the whistle on bad behavior within society. And with the release of her new book ‘Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons’, she is repositioning the framing on existing narratives around mass incarceration. Instead of wondering how we can “fix” a broken system, Dr. Friedman poses a thought-provoking question: “what if the system isn’t broken, but running the way it was designed?”
Among many shocking discoveries throughout her book, Dr. 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, Dr. Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.
Are you ready to unlearn everything you’ve been taught about the U.S. prison system and understand its foundations? Scroll below to read our eye-opening interview.
When did you begin writing ‘Carceral Apartheid’, and what was the impetus for this book?
In 2013 I was a curious graduate student, and I was very unsatisfied with what I saw being put forth in the official law enforcement narrative about Black liberation movements that have been influential in uniting the struggle for freedom across the prison and societal boundary. I could sense that what I was reading was very biased, that it was reproducing criminalization in terms of promoting a dangerous narrative that we have seen used time and time again about Black people and Black freedom fighters in the United States.
Criminalization has long been a tool to oppress, particularly when people are speaking out against the government and state sanctioned violence. For Black people that are imprisoned, the state benefits by attaching the motif of the dangerous Black man—a motif that has been promoted throughout the history of chattel slavery all the way up to the notion of Hillary Clinton’s “super predator” comment in the 1990s.
I could clearly see the racist dog whistling in these official narratives and so I decided to go and investigate. I would begin investigating what brings about this rise in freedom movements behind bars.
I then asked myself important questions that I knew I would need to answer with data—what’s the environment that even led to this happening and then what happened to the movements once they emerged? Once I had findings, I began to question: how does this cycle of resistance and repression shift the way the prison was run and what does that ultimately mean for the way that our society is governed more broadly?
And so, the journey of unearthing began.
You draw on years of history examining the deeply flawed US incarceration system, honing in on how white supremacy plays a role in this. Can you give us a snapshot of why this matters and why we need to care about it?
We should care about how white supremacy is fundamental to the origin of prisons because white supremacy undergirds the birth of the colonial expansion that created America. White supremacy is the bedrock of why our nation originated as one of violence through containment and detention.
The fact that from our nation’s beginnings, prisons have been used as a tool of political warfare against populations that the government sought to control, beginning with the Native Indigenous populations and with those who were displaced Africans that were also Indigenous to their homelands, but then stolen from their lands to work as slaves in this new country allegedly built on democracy. At the time, the scientific justifications for deploying white supremacist violence in this way were widespread.
The eugenicist frameworks that put whiteness on a pedestal to justify the intentional othering of populations and then the using containment tools to decimate them is why I very much think that we should care about the role of white supremacy. Without white supremacy, America would never have existed. It is why the state, and many Americans hold onto white supremacy so dearly and deny its existence as real. In order to keep America as they know it, they must perpetuate this lie.
With books like Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow’, and Ava DuVernay’s documentary ‘The 13th’ we are starting to see more widespread awareness of the impact of U.S incarceration, and the insidious racism it was founded on. How do you envision your book building on this growing awareness culturally?
My book ‘Carceral Apartheid’ demonstrates that it is not just white supremacy that is fundamental to the widespread use of incarceration in the United States, but it is also lies and illusion. This means lies are institutionalized to perpetuate white supremacy. Lies have become a routine way to get rid of political opposition in the form of Black and Indigenous protest. Lies are a way to systematically distort narratives and portray populations as criminal, or as naturally deviant, in order to imprison them.
What is especially insidious about this is that it, lies permeate every aspect of our society ranging from the way that children are raised very young to see difference, all the way up to the way that politicians speak about communities that are most impacted by incarceration.
I also envision that ‘Carceral Apartheid’ will contribute to discussions around what I term “racist intent” in the book, meaning that we need to look at and dissect the intentions of racism rather than seeing what I’m describing as solely being the product of collateral consequences. Instead, there is a state intention behind the development and promotion of what I term “carceral apartheid” as a system of governance.
Your book also exposes the lies the system was founded on. Can you tell us what some of these are, and how they also filter into life outside prison walls?
There’s a whole host of lies but one I will start with is the belief that whiteness is supreme to any other socially constructed racial group; this is a foundational lie that continues to harm as I demonstrate in my book.
Second, the notion that race is a biological category has been wielded for generations as a tool to create harm through justifying incarceration but also as I show in my book, once people are incarcerated the level of torture that they face on the basis of the lie that is white supremacy is profound and the lie that race is a biological construct.
When you promote those eugenicist lies then it justifies the experimentation that took place in California prisons on thousands of incarcerated people, many of whom were Black, as a means of allegedly “readjusting” them. Further, the state created Adjustment Centers using this same justification, which were essentially solitary confinement with “treatment” techniques.
All of these carceral technologies are based on lies and a legacy of colonial expansion and containment. Another important fact about this is the distortion of the narrative and the propaganda that the prison system has engaged in, in terms of trying to make it seem like they are the heroes of society and keeping people safe, when in reality they along with law enforcement are the perpetrators of the most state violence in our society.
These lies don’t just permeate prisons, right? Prisons are a microcosm of society. Instead, they really just create so much mass illusion that even when you hear people espouse different pro law enforcement talking points it’s almost like they are regurgitating information. They have just accepted what they’re fed through socialization versus doing the critical work of deconstructing and decolonizing their minds.
In recent years we saw investigative reporting exposing the white supremacist gangs in Los Angeles law enforcement. Can you help us draw the connections with this and what is happening behind bars?
Absolutely. The history of law enforcement and its connections to white supremacist groups is a fact and a through line, meaning that since the inception of America, there has been a strong overlap where members of law enforcement are either members of organized civilian white supremacist groups or they are directly allowing such groups to cause harm because they benefit.
My book shows that when law enforcement believes a white supremacist group is targeting a similar enemy, such as a group fighting for Black or Indigenous liberation, law enforcement will not only encourage the violence but often participates and directly aides.
I show this specifically in terms of how when incarcerated Nazis that eventually founded the Aryan Brotherhood were attacking Black freedom fighters who eventually founded the Black Guerilla Family, officer’s allowed it to happen and even enabled it in terms of creating situations and setups where it was easier for them to go after their targets. Another case of law enforcement seeing themselves as having similar priorities and common enemies to white supremacist groups, whether in society or within prison.
I think that when we think about this recent investigative reporting and showing this in Los Angeles and given the history of the LAPD, I think that we have to begin to question the rebuttal that this is a one-off case of bad apples.
Instead, I show in ‘Carceral Apartheid’ and argue that this is a systemic pattern and an intentional tool of political warfare. This alliance is fundamental to how our society is organized and to how elite groups of people maintain power in our society. I think this takeaway is what’s most important. Examining this white supremacist alliance behind bars, for me is another way of showing how deeply ingrained this is in our society as a broad social pattern.
Life after incarceration is so difficult in the United States, and this has also become well-documented by numerous activists, non-profits, and news reports. How will your book enlighten systems outside prisons to understand what we need to do to better serve the formerly incarcerated community, especially Black and Brown folks?
I think that ‘Carceral Apartheid’ shows we need to create spaces of healing and reconciliation. There are abolitionists that have been long-standing in doing this work, organizations such as Critical Resistance, and others. Groups that are working together with communities to promote healing and centering that healing is paramanoutn for everyone and on all sides.
I believe there also needs to be a focus on reparations for what communities have endured because of the system of carceral apartheid that I describe. Reparations for chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, and the decimation of people once they are incarcerated.
I think that what happens within our prisons needs to be added to our conversation on reparations and how those reparations can serve Black and Brown communities more broadly.
Our communities care for people that are both directly impacted through their own incarceration and system-impacted, meaning people have relatives, friends, and neighbors that have been incarcerated.
When we’re talking about how to serve communities, I think that reparations for this harm must be at the forefront. There must be accountability and justice for what has been done and what is currently happening.
Why has “law and order” and mass incarceration become our go-to in the United States, instead of more community-based or socially-minded programs and initiatives?
Historians have shown that law and order stems from this belief that incapacitation is the only way to truly provide public safety. However, I would argue that law and order is a euphemistic public statement that we have received by politicians and by law enforcement.
In reality law and order has been a logic of control for particular communities, not for everyone. For example, Indigenous communities, Black communities, and Latinx communities have never been conceived of as deserving of socially-minded or community-based programs. If we look at the distinctions politicians and everyday people make between people, for example, with the most recent War on Drugs children living in white suburbs were framed as deviant and in need of help, while Black children were framed as criminals needing prison.
It is this distinction that directs whether a group of people will be seen as more deserving of punishment or more deserving of care. This is the way our society is divided because of white supremacy and a fundamental reason why we continue to have law and order logics used by politicians and everyday people, leading to spikes in containment whether through prison, migrant detention, or the violent relocation of Indigenous peoples onto reservations.
Law and order has long been a euphemism for the containment for non-white peoples.
There are people who refuse to acknowledge the presence of white supremacy in the United States today. What message do you have to them, that you share in your book?
My only message for people who refuse to acknowledge the presence of white supremacy in America today is for them to think about how they currently benefit from closing their eyes. They should ask themselves: how do I benefit by staying asleep?
That’s all I have for them.
How does ‘Carceral Apartheid’ help us make sense of our current political reality? You focus specifically on prisons in California, which have an ugly history of racism toward African American prisoners. We’ve also previously featured a documentary about the forced sterilization of Black, Brown and Indigenous women in California, which has been happening in recent years. What do you want people in this state to demand from elected leaders and officials once they understand what is happening behind bars?
My book encourages us to continually point the finger at racist intention, to continually disrupt any sort of false narratives that try to promote that violence happens by collateral consequence. Instead, ‘Carceral Apartheid’ shows that this political reality is carefully coordinated and happening intentionally. Things are designed and there is a particular plan in place to decimate our communities. This has been shown time and time again and that is what my book leads with.
There is a racist intention to declare war on communities and that this is not a conspiracy theory. ‘Carceral Apartheid’ helps us to make sense of this truth, and lays bare the true meaning of what America is.
How do you define justice and liberation, and what can each of us to do champion these values today, especially under a Trump administration?
I think of justice as holding the perpetrators of harm accountable to the truth. Our voice is our greatest liberation. I believe liberation really comes through using our voice and pushing against efforts to silence us.
Our collective voice can shift society into one that values true justice, that values the truth, and that values humanity. What we can continue to do is use our voice, to find courage in the dark and release fear.
If you are afraid, find support in community. Especially under this current administration, which is brazen and overt in its plans of decimation, we must continue to use our voice.
We must never back down. We must stay strong in knowing that we hold the seeds of the truth and must carry them forward for ourselves, and our descendants, just like our ancestors before us.
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