Our aim

To recover untold and suppressed histories of organizing and institution-building led by people in prisons and jails in the United States—with the concrete goal of completing 200 interviews by August 2026.

Our contribution

To deeply explore political imagination and organizing, topics largely missing from today’s archives about people’s experiences with the prison system.

Overview

The United States is home to one of the world's largest prison populations, both on an absolute and per capita basis. Moreover, this population has increased dramatically—by roughly five times—since 1980. In response, a growing national conversation has attempted to address the sentencing laws, drug policies, racial disparities, systemic inequalities, and other factors that have contributed to mass incarceration.

Among the most important change agents influencing the national conversation on prison and jails are incarcerated people themselves, who act by developing political visions, organizing networks, building and influencing institutions, and educating and challenging non-incarcerated publics. Incarcerated activists and organizers develop political orientations, skills, practices, and networks from within US penal institutions. Incarcerated organizers and cultural workers share a mutual set of practices that refuse the logics of prison and that transform or repurpose that time extracted from their lives into something else—be it new legal pathways to get out of prison, mutual aid projects that protect the health of people who are incarcerated, or artistic creations that educate and challenge non-incarcerated publics on the outside. Despite these contributions, incarcerated people are underrecognized. At present, the United States does not have a formal home with which to archive and elevate the political visions and freedom organizing.

Headed by David Knight and supported by a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab will create a first-of-its-kind archive that centers the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated people. The Lab will focus on movements led by Black and Brown people who have experienced incarceration, in addition to allied individuals and organizations outside of prisons. In doing so, the lab will work toward several goals, including creating go-to historical source materials, facilitating fellowships and participatory opportunities wherein individuals and organizations can create derivative works from the Lab’s source materials, and resourcing movements that can be supported from preserving and sharing movement histories, including their own.

Between December 2023 and March 2026, the Movement Lab will conduct oral history interviews with 200 organizers, activists, and politically oriented artists who are directly impacted by incarceration. To conduct this work, the Lab is partnering with five grassroots social-change organizations in five US geographies.

The Lab has confirmed partnerships with the following five social-change organizations across the US: the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, based throughout California (with hubs in Oakland and Los Angeles); the Chicago Torture Justice Center in Chicago, Illinois; Both Sides of the Wall in Birmingham, Alabama; the Women Transcending Project in New York, New York; and Barred Business in Atlanta, Georgia.

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