Carceral Apartheid: An Interview with Brittany Friedman
In today’s post, Dr. Robert Greene II, the President of AAIHS and Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University, interviews award-winning sociologist Dr. Brittany Friedman about her first book, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Dr. Friedman is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. She is an expert on politics, cover-ups, and the dark side of institutions. She holds an appointment with the American Bar Foundation as an Affiliated Scholar and previously as a 2021-2022 Access to Justice Scholar. She is a 2023-2024 American Fellow of the American Association of University Women.
Her first book, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, is listed in Sociology, African American Studies, and the special series, “Justice, Power, & Politics,” home to a long list of award winning scholarly monographs. Dr. Friedman is Co-founder and Creative Director of the Captive Money Lab and Co-PI (w/ Drs. April Fernandes and Gabriela Kirk) of a cross-national comparative study of inmate reimbursement practices, also known as “pay-to-stay.” Their project expands the study of monetary sanctions to include empirical analyses of the historical and contemporary evolution of pay-to-stay practices, debt, and inequality. They have submitted written testimony at the state (Connecticut General Assembly Judiciary Committee) and federal (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary & Federal Bureau of Prisons) levels, summarizing their peer-reviewed research findings for lawmakers. Dr. Friedman’s research has been supported by external funding from Arnold Ventures, American Bar Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women, the American Society of Criminology, and university funding from several institutions.
Robert Greene II (RG): Your latest book, Carceral Apartheid, grapples with two core themes that are central to your scholarship: racial injustice and mass incarceration. Can you tell more about the origins of Carceral Apartheid? What factors motivated you to write this important study?
Brittany Friedman (BF): The path to writing my new book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons emerged from over a decade of scholarly investigation and a lifetime of personal conviction. I grew up in Missouri with strong family ties to the Deep South—places where obedience was often mistaken for virtue and questioning power could make you the problem. But even as a child, I knew when something didn’t sit right. I could feel the lie humming beneath the surface of what adults called truth and from a young age, continuously questioned and sometimes challenged those positioned as authority figures. I come from a line of women who carried that same knowing. In the prologue of Carceral Apartheid I write about my grandmother, Early Ida Marie Coffee Wilderness Avery, was born in 1914, a sharecropper and young mother who was evicted from her home and forced to make a way out of no way. Her resilience lives on with me. I was, and still am, a seer. Someone who couldn’t unsee injustice once I recognized its shape or who the perpetrators are. Someone who sensed early on that the world we were living in had been built on stories meant to keep us in line.
That instinct—what some might call defiance, I call clarity—never left me. It followed me into my work as a sociologist and theorist, where I became obsessed with a single question: what if the system isn’t broken? What if the violence we witness—police killings, overcrowded prisons, communities starved of resources—isn’t a failure of democracy, but the product of something more deliberate and calculated such as racist intent?
Carceral Apartheid is the result of years of sitting with that question. It names what I came to understand: that the U.S. prison system is not a malfunction—it is a mechanism. A system built to govern through disappearance, through containment, through fear. It is a racialized regime of control that has evolved through settler colonialism, from plantation slavery to convict leasing, from Jim Crow to the modern prison industrial complex.
My book uplifts the voices of Black political prisoners who saw clearly what the state was doing—and dared to resist. It traces how prison officials didn’t just tolerate the plots of imprisoned white supremacists, but empowered and armed them to suppress Black organizing from the inside by encouraging extralegal violence. It exposes how the state itself has played an active role in orchestrating racial violence behind bars to neutralize people labeled as political threats, typically covering their actions in a clandestine manner.
I coin the term “carceral apartheid” to describe this governance system as originating through settler colonialism —not just to provoke, but to clarify. Apartheid is indeed about separation and racial division. Yet this is achieved through carceral means, which enact domination via political warfare, spatial isolation, behavioral readjusting in containment units, and finally through the manufacturing of hopelessness. Carceral Apartheid is about structuring society so that whole groups of people are managed rather than supported, warehoused rather than equal and fully included. It’s also about normalizing the idea that some lives must be caged for others to feel safe.
But the research in Carceral Apartheid is not just an indictment—it’s a blueprint for liberation. I wrote it to free minds. To help people see through the disinformation we’ve been fed: that prisons are natural, that punishment equals justice, that safety requires cages, that certain populations require a readjustment of the body, mind, and spirit – these are all lies. I wrote this book because I believe we all carry within us a deeper knowing, a memory of freedom that predates the systems meant to contain us. And I wanted to speak directly to that part of people—the part that remembers, that dreams, that refuses, and instead centers creation.
My book is an invitation, with a concluding section of poetic prose called “Invitation to Awaken.” To question what you’ve been taught. To listen to the voices long silenced. To see mass incarceration not as a social problem to be fixed, but as a form of war to be ended. It’s a reminder that we were never meant to obey. We were meant to imagine. To resist. To remake the world. To live free.
RG: One of the significant aspects of the book is how you center the voices of those who grew up in the South during the Jim Crow era. Tell us more about the process of gathering these interviews–what were some of the roadblocks you encountered and how did you navigate them?
BF: Centering the voices of those who came of age during the Jim Crow era was not only foundational to Carceral Apartheid—it was a responsibility and act of community care. These were elders whose lives had been shaped by generations of racial violence, who had migrated with their families to California with the dream of starting over, and whose stories of containment and incarceration had long been distorted, ignored, or deliberately erased. I knew early on that I didn’t just want to quote them in a stale, disconnected way—I wanted to listen to them, sit with them, build trust with their families, and let their truths shape the structure and soul of the book.
The process of gathering these life history interviews was deeply intimate and, at times, emotionally heavy. Many of the individuals I spoke with had survived conditions few can imagine—surveillance, disappearance into solitary confinement for indeterminate stays, and setups by a racist prison administration—and yet they carried themselves with grace, wit, and power. I didn’t approach them as “research subjects.” I approached them as elders and community teachers who hold a high esteem in their respective communities. That orientation changed everything because instead of extracting information, I was entering into a relationship of mutual care and respect, one where much of my work was done over a family cooked meal with loved ones listening to their elders’ life stories.
In addition to my training as a historical sociologist, my community and apprenticeship training in spiritual herbalism, care work, and ceremony guided how I conducted these life history interviews. It taught me to lead with presence, patience, and deep intuitive listening. I treated each interview as a sacred exchange—not just a transfer of information, but a moment of witness and remembrance. Before conversations, I would often engage in grounding practices for myself to clear my energy and open space for what needed to be shared. These traditions reminded me that storytelling is healing work, and that the way we hold a story is just as important as the story itself. When people speak their truths—especially truths long buried or punished—they deserve to be held in care, not just citation as we are trained in academia.
Still, there were roadblocks that I encountered—both practical and spiritual. Gaining access to elders who had been incarcerated during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Freedom Movement and co-founded significant prisoner organizations such as the Black Guerilla Family was not simple. Some had passed, and others were understandably guarded after years of surveillance and feared re-incarceration. Trust had to be earned, and that took time. There were times when weeks would go by between conversations and I had to be vouched for every step of the way. I learned to wait. To show up consistently. To demonstrate through my actions and transparency that I wasn’t there to exploit their pain but to carry their stories forward with care.
Another roadblock was institutional: some archives were restricted, some records were “missing,” and some academic gatekeepers didn’t see the value in what I was trying to do. But I had already learned—first from my grandmother, and later from the people I interviewed—that when official records go silent, the body remembers. The community remembers. That’s why life history and investing time in private, community archives was so vital to this work. It allowed me to also document truth what exists beyond the written word, truth passed down through breath, memory, and emotion.
There were also internal spiritual challenges as I learned with practice how to properly release the weight of holding these stories and knowing the emotional toll it takes to write about violence with both honesty and integrity. I often returned to ritual: breathwork, prayer, grounding in the earth to help me through. These were not just coping strategies—they were part of my methodology in addition to my training in historical, interview, and ethnographic methods. This synergy allowed me to remain present and accountable to the people whose lives I was documenting, but also adequately practice care for myself in the process.
Navigating these roadblocks taught me that the process of research is never separate from the ethics of care. You can’t write about people’s trauma without being changed by it. You can’t claim to center voices unless you are also willing to listen when it’s inconvenient, when it’s uncomfortable, and when it calls you to be more human. What emerged from these interviews was not just history and sociological theory—Carceral Apartheid is a living archive of resistance, a constellation of dreams that refused to die. And it’s that spirit that I hope readers carry with them as they move through the book.
RG: Carceral Apartheid offers valuable insights into the lives of incarcerated people in various states, including California. As you point out, some Black Southerners migrated to California in the hopes of escaping racism and discrimination. Your focus on California helps readers move beyond the North-South divide that so often dominates the scholarship. Can you tell us more about the state’s prisons and how they compare to prisons in other states across the country?
BF: California plays a central role in Carceral Apartheid and reveals the limits of thinking about racism as a strictly North-South problem. Many Black families migrated to California believing they were leaving behind the harsh, codified racism of Jim Crow, and some I interviewed described family experiences with the Ku Klux Klan. But when they arrived in California, what they found was something just as insidious, and in their words, at times worse.
California is often perceived as progressive, but it operates one of the largest and most punitive prison systems in the world. The state was an early adopter of harsh sentencing laws, including Three Strikes legislation, and has long been a testing ground for carceral innovations that other states later replicate.
In the archives I found letters, for example, from prison officials across the country asking California prison officials how they deal with incarcerated Black people described as Black militants, sympathetic to the Civil Rights and larger Black Freedom Movement. What makes California interesting and distinctive is how its prison regime evolved in tandem with a strong political backlash to these movements. As I detail in the book, California authorities not only criminalized Black political resistance, recreating their own version of the FBI’s COINTELPRO within California prisons —they strategically empowered white supremacist groups within prison walls to suppress Black resistance. This level of state collusion is critical to understanding how a racial order of carceral apartheid is maintained in modern carceral institutions.
Like many Southern states that rely heavily on public rhetoric about “law and order,” California did the same, but interestingly, also cloaked its carceral violence in the language of reform. For example, I show how California prisons have served as a site of experimentation: from Adjustment Center units designed for sensory deprivation and political readjustment, to gang validation systems that target Black organizers, to “gladiator fights” staged by guards that pit incarcerated people against one another. These practices, while often denied or hidden, are not anomalies—I argue they are a myriad of official, extralegal, and clandestine policy decisions rooted in carceral apartheid as governance.
Comparing California to other states also helps dismantle the myth that mass incarceration is regionally isolated. States like New York, Illinois, and Michigan have their own violent carceral histories, but California’s scale and complexity make it a blueprint for the national prison regime. It has shaped the federal model through litigation, administrative structures, and the expansion of supermax confinement, with Pelican Bay Supermax becoming a national model. And while many look to California for signs of reform—such as court-ordered policies that signal decarceration or new parole policies—these changes exist within enduring structures of carceral apartheid.
Overall, the dissonance between that dream of families migrating to California for a better life and the reality of what they encountered is profound. This betrayal—of hope, of movement, of belonging—is felt across generations and in that sense, California is not an exception, but a societal mirror.
RG: You make a compelling argument in the book that prison systems uphold a “plantation-style hierarchy.” Can you please elaborate on this point for those who might be new to studies on the carceral state?
BF: To understand the phrase “plantation-style hierarchy,” we must begin with the plantation itself—not only as a site of racialized labor and violence, but as a technology of control foundational to the American nation building project. The plantation was embedded within a settler colonial regime that sought to eliminate and readjust Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. These logics—elimination, readjustment, and containment—form the architecture of what we now call the carceral state.
When I say that today’s prison system upholds a plantation-style hierarchy, I mean it literally and not as a metaphor. I show in Carceral Apartheid how prisons carry forward the political, economic, and racial relationships born on stolen land and sustained through stolen labor. They are the enforcement arm of the settler colonial state, supporting the racist intention of control, discipline, and extraction from racialized bodies deemed threatening and problematic to the social order.
For example, on the plantation, labor was violently coerced. In prison, it still is. Across the United States, incarcerated people—disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous—work for cents an hour, often under threat of punishment. They clean, cook, manufacture, and fight fires, often without the basic rights or protections afforded to free-world workers. This labor does not rehabilitate—it reproduces a racialized economy built on exploitation. In California, in November 2024, efforts via Proposition 6 to revise the state constitution to prevent slavery as punishment for a crime, which legally allows for coerced prison labor, were rejected by a popular vote.
My work demonstrates that settler colonialism is not simply an academic theory or a figment of a distant past—it is an ongoing structure of political warfare actively seeking to label undesirables, remove, and then contain through systems of spatial control. Just as Indigenous peoples were confined to reservations and boarding schools, and Black people to plantations, today’s incarcerated are confined to prisons, often in rural and isolated regions, far from the communities that shaped and love them. These institutions are embedded in the geography of conquest as previous historical and sociological scholarship has shown. They are built on Indigenous land and maintained through policies that uphold racial dominance and dispossession.
Carceral Apartheid contributes to this conversation by documenting what happens once people are incarcerated, showing the racial hierarchy of the plantation remains alive inside prison walls. On plantations, overseers upheld the order of the master. In prisons, correctional officers enact carceral apartheid—through surveillance, brutality, sowing racial division, and bureaucratic systems that target political consciousness – while scientists conduct human experiments on the incarcerated that are sanctioned by prison officials. For example, I ended up basing an entire chapter of my book, Chapter 2, on obscured archival records, memoirs, and life history interviews to make a significant contribution to the historiography of a little known penal innovation – the Adjustment Centers—and how they link to a eugenicist framework of transforming political prisoners into desirable tame subjects, and how the California Department of Corrections allowed their chief surgeon at San Quentin, Dr. Leo Stanley, to perform over 10,000 human experiments claiming to transform incarcerated men he deemed “at their worst.”
I also show throughout the book how correctional officers empowered white supremacist groups within prisons as an extralegal method to contain and disempower Black resistance as a political strategy.
And like the plantation, the prison legitimizes itself through lies—myths of danger, criminality, and deserved punishment. These lies allow society to look away. But there is nothing natural or inevitable about this system. I end my book with an “Invitation to Awaken,” because this system was built—and therefore, it can be dismantled.
To truly understand the carceral state, we must see how the plantation hierarchy and settler colonialism converge in the prison. We must see mass incarceration as rooted in colonial conquest.
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