While running for their respective offices, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown both lamented that Maryland incarcerates the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States and pledged to take steps to reduce these racial disparities as well Maryland’s prison population as a whole.  Also, in October 2023, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown and Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue formed the Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative, the first-of-its-kind collaboration (particularly between traditional adversaries) focused on addressing mass incarceration.     Papers written in this course may be used to satisfy the Advanced Writing Requirement.  

This seminar will aim to be of service to these commitments and to the urgency of addressing Maryland’s racialized incarcerated population. We will focus on various issues that have contributed to where we are—such as the history of incarceration in Maryland, to the various racially-coded laws, systems, and institutions that have contributed to and fueled racialized incarceration in Maryland, to policing and punishment movements (including zero tolerance policing, hyper-policing, hyper-criminalization, and the school-to-prison pipeline), and to limited meaningful opportunities of release from incarceration.  We will also focus on current movements and efforts to decarcerate in Maryland—such as recent laws that have provided second chance opportunities for individuals serving life sentences for crimes committed as children and removed the Governor from the parole process.  Throughout the course, we will focus on progress and setbacks.    Papers written in this course may be used to satisfy the Advanced Writing Requirement.  

More fundamentally, the course will ask first-order questions, including: What is decaceration? What does decarceration mean to you?  Should decarceration focus solely on prisons and jails?  Grappling with these questions will bring clarity to the depth and breadth of racialized incarceration in Maryland.  Specifically, racialized incarceration is broader and deeper than the formal criminal legal system.  Thus, as we look to decarcerate, is it enough to reduce prison and jail populations?  What about the systems and institutions that feed into the criminal legal system, which have been sources (or tools) of racial oppression and exclusion?   While our seminar discussions will scratch the surfaces, student papers will explore and analyze these issues at great depth.  The papers will contribute to the statewide efforts to address mass incarceration and to decarcerate.      Papers written in this course may be used to satisfy the Advanced Writing Requirement.  

The overarching mission of this course will be to pull up the roots of racialized incarceration in Maryland and, through solution-oriented papers, reimagine justice and accountability.  Papers written in this course may be used to satisfy the Advanced Writing Requirement.