HISTORY 103D:
Locked Up: The Carceral State in the Twentieth Century
Spring 2017 – UC Berkeley
History 103D
M 4-6pm
Instructor: Yana Skorobogatov
[email protected]
Office Hours: M, 2-4 pm, Dwinelle 2413
Course Description
The United States is home to the world’s largest prison population. According to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics, in 2016, correctional facilities across the country caged around 2 million women
and men at any given moment. In 1910 that number stood at 57,070. How did a century that
witnessed a civil rights movement, unparalleled economic prosperity, mass immigration, human
rights, and the emergence of the United States as a world economic and political “superpower,”
engender the rise of one the largest carceral regimes the world has ever seen? How did race,
ethnicity, gender, and class shape how deviance was defined, policed, and punished? And how did
the people who entered, fell victim to, or survived the American prison system influence our
understanding of the prison as a site of political, social, cultural, and economic significance? This
course will examine how historians, theorists, writers, and prisoners themselves tried to answer these
questions.
This course will focus primarily on the United States during the twentieth century. Forays
back in time - to antebellum and reconstruction-era America - early in the semester are designed to
provide historical context. Trips overseas - to Russia, occupied Palestine, and French Indochina will illuminate similarities and differences between American and non-American cases, as well as
illustrate how “imprisonment” abroad responded to, reinforced, and shaped the discourse and
practice of American imprisonment and “carceration” throughout the twentieth century. No matter
the time or place, our broader objectives will remain the same: to explore different sources of
historical causality, trace thematic change over time, and identify different types of human and nonhuman agency.
Course Goals
1. Consuming history To read, engage with, and discuss how historians, writers, theorists, artists, and ordinary people have
written about and conceptualized the carceral state during the 20th century. We will work on building
skills for “consuming history” during Weeks 2-4.
2. Producing history To brainstorm and select a topic for your own history thesis or final paper. We will work on building
skills for “producing history” during Weeks 6-8.
3. Writing history To learn about and practice the craft of historical writing, from writing a sentence to writing a
section of a research paper. We will work on building skills for “writing history” during Weeks 9-11.
Required Texts
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The following texts are not available online and should be purchased in hard-copy:
Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
Heather Ann Richardson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
The following texts are available online but would best be purchased and read in hard-copy:
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Control
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in
America
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban
America,
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Text Access
* = Available on bCourses
** = Available on OskiCat
Books without asterisks will be scanned in full and posted to bCourses, but should be obtained in
hard copy.
All books can be purchased in used condition on Amazon.
All books will be available on reserve for 2-hour loan at Moffitt Library.
All media items will be posted to bCourses.
Please see me in office hours with problems with and concerns about text access and affordability.
Week 1 - January 23: Introduction: Defining the Carceral State
*Rachel Aviv, “Surviving Solitary,” The New Yorker, January 16, 2017
*Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, Introduction and Part One (pp. 13-84)
Week 2 - January 30: Unfreedom
*Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments, Selections
*Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, Introduction and Chapters 1-2, 4 (pp. 3-72, 106-137)
*Text of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
**Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment, Chapters 3-4 (pp. 87-192)
**Peter Zinoman, Colonial Bastille, Chapter 1 (pp.13-37)
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Skill: Detecting themes
Week 3 - February 6: Borders
**Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Control
*Torri Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State”
Skill: Historical Methods
Week 4 - February 13: Terror
*Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: “Torture,” pp. 3-16; “Panopticism,” pp. 214-247.
**Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, Chapter 4 (pp. 157-197)
**Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, Chapter 6 (pp. 223-284)
*Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation:
“Arrest,” “The Archipelago Hardens,” “Our Muzzled Freedom.”
Media: Press coverage of the release of Gulag Archipelago: Times Wire Service, “Smuggled Book
Charges Soviet Horrors,” The Los Angeles Times, 29 December, 1973, 1.
Skill: Finding and argument
Week 5 – February 20: Presidents’ Day - NO CLASS
*Possible screening of Ava DuVernay’s 13th one evening this week*
Week 6 - February 27: Holocaust
*Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland,
Preface, Chapters 1-8 (pp. xv-77)
*Robert-Jan van Pelt, “A Site in Search of a Mission,” in Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenmaum
(eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
*Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (If this is a Man), Selections
*Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity and the Holocaust”
*Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Selections
Media: Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony”
Skill: Brainstorming ideas
*First source reading due in class in hard-copy*
Week 7 – March 6: Knowledge
Syllabus - Page3
*Visit to Doe Library*
*Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Asylum,” in Madness and Civilization
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
Media: Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; Images from Laura Poitras’s Whitney Museum exhibit, “The
Art of Total Surveillance”
Skill: Initial research
Week 8 - March 13 - The City
**Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern
Urban America, Introduction, Chapters 2, 4, 5-6
**Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in
America, Introduction, Chapters 1-3 (pp. 1-133)
*Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late
Twentieth Century War on Drugs”
Media: Video of the demolition of Pruitt-Igo
Skill: Gathering sources
Week 9 - March 20: Resistance
Heather Ann Richardson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, Parts I-IV
(pp. 3-204)
*Penny Johnson, Lee O’Brien, and Joost Hiltermann, “The West Bank Rises Up,” and Joe Stork,
“The Significance of Stones,” in Zachary Lockman and Joel Benin (eds.), Intifada: The Palestinian
Uprising against Israeli Occupation
Media: Photographs of Soviet prisoner tattoos
Skill: Creating an outline
*Second source reading due in class in hard-copy*
Week 10 - March 27: Spring Break – NO CLASS
Week 11 – April 3: Political Prison
*George Jackson, Soledad Brother, Selections
*Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
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*Padraic Kenney, “‘I Felt a Kind of Pleasure in Seeing them Treat us Brutally’: The Emergence of
the Political Prisoner, 1865-1910”
Media: Angela Davis’s “FBI Most Wanted” and “Free Angela Davis” posters
Skill: Writing a sentence
Week 12 – April 10: Exile
Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship
*Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Selections)
Skill: Writing a Paragraph
*Third source reading due in class in hard-copy*
Week 13 - April 17: Mass Incarceration
**Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
**Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Chapters 4-5, 8-9 and Epilogue (pp.
134-340)
Media:
NWA, “Fuck tha Police” from Straight Outta Compton
Gucci Mane, “No Sleep (Intro)” from Everybody Looking
Skill: Writing a Section
Week 14 - April 24: The Crisis of Imprisonment (?)
*Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
We will decide the topic of our final set of readings as a class. Possible thematic topics include:
police brutality, prison privatization, the war on terror, Guantanamo Bay Prison, prisoners and
human rights, decriminalization, solitary confinement, death penalty abolition, the new factory
floor.
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Grading
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Meaningful attendance and class participation: 40% - Weekly attendance
throughout the semester; respectful and focused engagement with classmates
(looking at and actively listening to the person speaking), contributing to the
discussion with thoughtful questions and comments (frequent comments are
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•
•
encouraged but quality of contribution is as important as quantity); participation in
bCourses forum through comments and posts regarding course-relevant resources
will be encouraged and valued.
Research Prospectus (1000-1200 words): 30%;
Three, short source readings (400-700 words each): 30% (10% each).
My Expectations
This semester, I expect you to bring energy, focus, and curiosity to each class meeting. Completing
the reading before our meetings, completing all written take-home assignments, and arriving to class
rested and prepared to speak with and listen to your classmates are three concrete steps to take in
order to meet this expectation.
Visiting me in office hours to discuss questions, concerns, and challenges that you may have about
the reading, classroom discussion, or history in general will also help you meet this expectation, and
further enhance your experience in our class. The door to my office (Dwinelle 2413) will remain
open every Monday immediately before class, from 2-3:50pm. During office hours, we can speak
informally one-on-one about many things: from making you more comfortable participating in class
discussion to brainstorming where to find sources for a paper assignment to clarifying information
in our reading to resolving challenges that you may experience keeping up with the demands of the
course. I share my office with five other GSIs, but I have the office to myself during my office
hours. The room itself may be under-decorated and overly bright, but my goal is to make it as
comfortable and welcoming for my students as possible.
Finally, I expect you to respect your fellow classmates during classroom discussions. This involves
letting your colleagues speak without interruption, and listening and responding to their remarks
without judgment. Students who enroll in 103s do so with varying range of preparation, but I expect
you to treat your peers as intellectual equals and grant them the attention, respect, and empathy that
their equal status deserves.
Your Expectations
The class expects the instructor to meet their comments with understanding and empathy; to offer
her own expertise where appropriate; to provide it with guiding questions to assist them with course
readings; to inform it of any articles, events, news items that may be of interest to them; to engage
with each and every student comments; to offer descriptions of a reading’s contents in advance.
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