It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in U.S. prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Dr. Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid. 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.

Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that, 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. Carceral Apartheid 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.

Friedman is recognized as an innovative thinker on how people and institutions hide harmful truths. She will be in conversation with Toluse Olorunnipa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and entrepreneur serving as the White House Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, and Kris Marsh, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.