About

In September 2019, the U-M Carceral State Project received a two-year research project grant from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory to launch its major research initiative, Documenting Criminalization and Confinement. The Documenting initiative is a major humanistic study of the impact of criminalization, policing, incarceration, and criminal justice control in the United States. This initiative will mobilize faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, archivists, impacted persons, and community partners in a series of collaborative and multidisciplinary research projects that span the domains of art and performance, history, visual culture, anthropology, literature, public health, digital humanities, and public engagement. Our agenda is to chronicle and challenge the policies and discourses that have propelled criminalization and mass incarceration--particularly in racially and economically vulnerable communities--in the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, and across the United States.

Documenting Criminalization and Confinement will publish investigative reports and create local, state, and national-scale archives of qualitative documents and humanistically contextualized quantitative data to demonstrate how carceral control operates and how impacted communities have responded. The initiative comprises eight interrelated research projects designed and conducted by intergenerational teams of faculty, students, staff, and community partners. They are united by their humanistic research methodologies, contributions to the digital humanities, and commitments to confronting the carceral state. Together, these research projects will demonstrate the human and social costs of criminalization and confinement by centering humanistic research questions about topics that have been dominated by the fields of law, public policy, and the quantitative social sciences.