By Bill Littlefield

Brittany Friedman’s hope is that awareness of the racism she describes — in particular the abuse and corruption that she found in the prisons of California — will encourage readers to “take a critical view of society and examine the dark side of the state.”

Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons by Brittany Friedman. University of North Carolina Press, 196 pages, paperback $27.95.

In University of Southern California Sociology professor Brittany Friedman’s dense, ambitious, and sometimes jargon-laden study of carceral apartheid, the lines between what happens to Black people in prison and what happens to them elsewhere are often blurred. As Friedman writes in her prologue, “what you will read in this book are examples of white civilians who, emboldened by their whiteness, collectively berate, humiliate, and degrade Black people.” Her discussions about the specific indignities and damage Black men endure in California’s prisons are anchored in the experience of her informants.

But much of the worst of the humiliation and degradation Friedman cites does occur in the prisons of California. She recounts stories of Black men who have been forced to spend extraordinarily long and damaging stretches in solitary confinement, alternatively known as “secure housing unit” or “Administrative adjustment.” She demonstrates that Black men who have been active in efforts to organize and educate their fellows in the general population of a prison have often suffered that fate, and maintains convincingly that men identified as “Black militants” are more likely to be singled out for punishment and isolation than members of white supremacist groups or white men who identify as Nazis. She cites incidents where white corrections officers have partnered with incarcerated white men to antagonize, physically abuse, and otherwise intimidate Black men.

Friedman’s hope is that awareness of the racism she describes — in particular the abuse and corruption that she found in the prisons of California — will encourage readers to “take a critical view of society and examine the dark side of the state,” rather than continue to “employ an essentialist vantage point that privileges penal organizations such as prisons as self-justifying, legitimate sources of governance.” In this respect, Friedman seems to be on the side of those who would abolish prisons. But, though she presents a vision of “the sanctity of connection and life in the natural world – the divine grace of the earth and creation,” she does not offer specific steps that would lead to that development.

Carceral Apartheid includes chronicles of the development of a number of organizations begun by incarcerated men in San Quentin, Soledad, and other prisons in the California Penal System. Friedman focuses particularly on the Black Guerilla Family, which grew out of the Black Panthers and seemed, at least for a time, to be dedicated to educating incarcerated Black men about the various ways capitalism, racism, and various manifestations of white supremacy in the U.S. and elsewhere have combined to create a landscape that will not change — without facing brutal, murderous resistance. Friedman reports that much of what the Black Guerilla Family was trying to accomplish was subverted by white men in the prisons, both those who were incarcerated and those who were working as correctional officers. She writes that “by 1989, the department opened Pelican Bay and promptly transferred each validated leader of the Black Guerilla Family to supermax confinement.” While incarcerated at Pelican Bay, some of those men were forced to participate in “gladiator fights,” which pitted incarcerated men against each other while the guards were “laughing and joking and patting each other on the back, and betting and all kinds of crap while this is going on.”

The most encouraging moments in Friedman’s analysis involve the fragile, temporary success the Black Guerilla Family had when it united incarcerated men of various races who were or had been members of various gangs to join in a struggle against the corruption, brutality, and abuse endemic to prisons and beyond. These efforts have sometimes interrupted “the department’s fifty-year-long record to keep them (the incarcerated men) fighting each other in a race war.” But Friedman’s conclusion is dispiriting. Whatever progress the Black Guerilla Family and other groups have made, she writes, “the illusion of American progress has led to the continued torture, genocide, and caging of humans in the darkest corners imaginable…human beings our government wishes we would all simply forget.”

Bill Littlefield volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing).