Carceral Apartheid with Brittany Friedman (Episode 34)

Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society. White supremacy within the institutional conditions in US prisons produces a power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Professor Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid. 

Host Sahar Aziz discusses the many shocking discoveries that Friedman finds from the research for her book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prison published in 2025. Beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. 

In Carceral Apartheid, Professor Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. 

Professor Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

#MassIncarceration #Apartheid #WhiteSupremacy #Prison #BLM #Racism