Marxism and Politics Lecture Series: Adaner Usmani on Mass Incarceration

Join PHL DSA for our Marxism and Politics Summer Lecture Series.  We are bringing political analysts and writers to Philadelphia to give seminars on their recent work. These lectures cover a variety of topics, but they share a common historical materialist lens by which to understand and analyze political struggles.

For this lecture, Adaner Usmani, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University, will be speaking about mass incarceration. The United States, once seen as a model of rehabilitation and humane punishment, today incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other nation on earth. How did this happen? Popular critiques see the War on Drugs, the privatized “prison-industrial complex”, or post-civil rights racist backlash as driving the growth of mass incarceration. Yet, as Usmani argues, there are good reasons to challenge many of the assumptions now fashionable among the academic and activist left.