The Carceral State Project (CSP) is an interdisciplinary collaboration designed to bring impacted communities and advocacy organizations together with researchers–including faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates–from the University of Michigan. The CSP’s umbrella research initiative, Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance, is a multidisciplinary and multifaceted investigation of the historical and contemporary conditions of state violence, incarceration, policing, immigrant detention, and the ongoing struggles against these and other forms of carceral control in the state of Michigan and in the United States.

The Carceral State Project’s agenda is to chronicle and challenge the policies and discourses that have propelled criminalization and incarceration, especially in racially and economically vulnerable communities, and to document diverse forms of resistance to the carceral state. We seek to historicize contemporary systems of criminalization and confinement, chronicle the voices of those most directly impacted, provide resources to public and academic audiences, inform policymakers and journalists, foster community partnerships, promote inclusive methodologies and abolitionist frameworks, and preserve records of the impact of racialized criminalization and mass incarceration for future generations.