Judas Diaz
Research Mentor: Matthew Lassiter
Mentor Department: History, LSA
Author(s): Katie Pieper, Katie Pieper
Session: Session 2 (10:00 AM – 10:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 34
Abstract
The Carceral State Project aims to bring together communities impacted by incarceration, advocacy groups, scholars, and the general public through interdisciplinary collaboration in its research project, Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance, to create a database that covers the foundations of advocacy work over the years. This is in hopes of bridging a gap in accessibility to historical documents on legislation and advocacy work in response to such with the current focus being on scanning, inventorying, reviewing, and constructing the metadata through tagging methods on Excel sheets of documents sourced from Safe & Just Michigan or CAPPS, an advocacy group working for preservation and enactment of rights for those entering, inside, and exiting the carceral systems. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide contextualization of the methods, growth, and usage of advocacy over time to document paradigms that have worked or haven’t before in enacting change within legislation and to serve as a point of reference for upcoming generations of advocates. This database, of which the first iteration will be available in the summer of 2026, will not only serve as an inventory for archival research and documentation that has been done, but will also, hopefully, be a source of inspiration for upcoming change on different aspects of incarceration within the carceral state to scholars, students, and the general public. Within my own work, I observed the exchanges between CAPPS (Safe & Just Michigan), governing bodies, and the media regarding legislation brought forth involving disability rights of the incarcerated to find several instances in which responses toward certain House and Senate bills were received negatively, as they jeopardized the rights of individuals inside the carceral state. This contextualization then aids our understanding of disability rights and provides a broader picture of how advocacy work by groups such as CAPPS (Safe & Just Michigan) is essential to upholding rights and bringing to light injustices for the incarcerated within the carceral state.
