The Long Term Book Launch

The Pozen Family Center for Human Rights presents the launch of the Human Rights Lab with a powerful panel conversation centered on a new anthology, The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom, coedited by Alice Kim, the inaugural Director of Human Rights Practice at the Pozen Center. Under the leadership of Kim, the Lab will engage students, scholars and community in human rights work addressing mass incarceration and racialized policing. 

About the Event

A panel of The Long Term contributors and coeditors will discuss the devastating effects of life in long term incarceration and what it will take to build real safety and justice.  

Thursday, October 25, 6:30pm
Arts Incubator, 301 E Garfield Blvd
Panel discussion with reception to follow.

Panelists: 
Janaé Bonsu, Codirector, BYP100
Kathy Boudin, Codirector and Cofounder, Center for Justice at Columbia University 
Alice Kim, Director of Human Rights Practice, University of Chicago 
Patrick Pursley, Founder, I Am Kid Culture
Beth Richie, author, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation

Moderator: Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago

About The Long Term

Long Term Offenders, or LTOs, is the state’s term for those it condemns to effective death by imprisonment. Often serving sentences of sixty to eighty years, LTOs bear the brunt of the bipartisan embrace of mass incarceration heralded by the “tough on crime” agenda of the 1990s and 2000s. Like the rest of the United States’ prison population—the world’s highest per capita—they are disproportionately poor and non-white. The Long Term brings these often-silenced voices to light, offering a powerful indictment of the prison-industrial complex from activists, scholars, and those directly surviving and resisting these sentences. In showing the devastation caused by a draconian prison system, the essays also highlight the humanity and courage of the people most affected. This striking collection of essays gives voice to people both inside and outside prison struggling for liberation, dismantles claims that the “tough on crime” agenda and LTO sentencing keep us safe, and reveals the white supremacism and patriarchy upon which the prison system rests. In its place, the contributors propose a range of far-reaching reforms and raise the even more radical demand of abolition, drawing on the experience of campaigns in the United States and beyond.

About the Human Rights Lab

The Human Rights Lab actively engages students and community in solutions to human rights problems. In its initial three years, the Lab will address the intersecting crises of racialized policing and mass incarceration in the United States and abroad.