Sociologist Brittany Friedman defines carceral apartheid as “an intentionally racist structure dually governing confined and free society.” The goal? To “solidify white supremacy over class consciousness” by spreading disinformation to divide, and ultimately conquer, Black resistance in U.S. prisons and beyond. Its tools — including courts, jails, parole, police, prisons, probation and surveillance technology — are, Friedman writes, specifically directed toward those who oppose the racial and economic status quo.
Suppressing resistance has a long history, and Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacy Run Our Prisons traces the explosive growth of Black imprisonment since Reconstruction. While Friedman focused her writing exclusively on California’s men’s prisons, and zeroes in on the ways lies, obfuscation, and isolation have been used by prison managers to stop inmate organizing, the facts she uncovers are universally applicable.
Carceral Apartheid starts with history, revealing that throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous approaches were used to discourage inmate activism. Nonetheless, it was only after the creation of so-called “adjustment centers” in the 1950s — units initially established to sequester anyone who “displayed hostility toward authorities” or was deemed anti-social or psychotic — that large numbers of outspoken, politically engaged Black men were placed in these segregated cages. Black Muslims, Friedman reports, were the first targets.
The growing nationwide prison-abolition movement continues to work to not only end incarceration but end race-based political retribution and carceral injustice.
Despite being restricted to these units, the men were less docile than prison administrators expected, with some finding attorneys and suing the California Department of Corrections (CDC) over abusive treatment. Unsurprisingly, the lawsuit failed, and the courts gave the CDC permission to use adjustment centers to control unruly prisoners. According to the decision, “the department’s actions were justified because Black Muslims and other Black militants constitute a recognizable problem population and presented a viable threat to the safety of correctional officers, prison staff, and other incarcerated people.”
Iron-willed control was subsequently sanctioned as a legitimate expression of prison authority; virtually every manner of abuse and neglect was permitted.
The upshot, Friedman writes, was particularly dastardly: She calls it the triumph of “white above all,” a white-supremacist ethos that gave white correction officers almost limitless power. In addition, enforced racial segregation and a hierarchy that elevates the status of white and Latino prisoners over Black ones has been rigidly maintained for decades. “This facilitates the organizational creation of prisoner elites on the basis of white unity,” Friedman writes.
She explains that white prisoners who resist this hierarchy are mercilessly punished for violating the implied code of conduct. As a result, for more than a half-century, whites have joined neo-Nazi groups like the Aryan Brotherhood to assert racial solidarity. It’s ugly stuff and extends to Latino prisoners, many of whom likewise enter the Mexican Mafia or Nuestra Familia — prominent prison gangs — for protection and friendship.
More than 50 years ago, Black prisoners created groups of their own, with the influential Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) getting its start in San Quentin prison in 1970. As an arm of the then-burgeoning Black Power movement, many members aligned with the Black Panthers.
Predictably, prison administrators came down hard on BGF, using infiltrators and snitches to sabotage its organizing. After the BGF’s failed attempt to free political prisoner George Jackson in 1971, repression against group leaders intensified, and most were subjected to what Friedman calls “the most brutal carceral apartheid practices ever recorded in California history.” With its facilitators out of the picture — in adjustment centers or in other forms of solitary confinement — a new crop of BGF leaders emerged. Most, Friedman writes, were eager to push politics aside in favor of involvement in the illicit drug market.
But the story did not end here. Although it’s unclear how prison activists got to this point, in 2012, the leaders of four prison groups joined forces to launch a hunger strike in facilities across California. In tandem with a federal class-action lawsuit by prisoners locked in the Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay, members of the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and Black Guerrilla Family began a short-lived period of unity. While the peace did not hold — and the lawsuit to end indeterminate placement in the Secure Housing Unit was unsuccessful — the growing nationwide prison-abolition movement continues to work to not only end incarceration but end race-based political retribution and carceral injustice.
Friedman names white supremacy as central to carceral logic. Her research, using archival sources and in-person interviews with formerly incarcerated members of the Aryan Brotherhood and Black Guerrilla Family, reveals the ways racial bigotry props up an unequal and unjust social order. Although I wish she’d interrogated how these mechanisms work in women’s prisons and among non-white correction officers, these topics remain fodder for future researchers and scholars.
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Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacy Run Our Prisons
By Brittany Friedman,
The University of North Carolina Press
232 pages; $27.95.
