Public histories of incarceration: reflecting on museums and social change

ABSTRACT California has a long history of criminalizing youth of color. Gang injunctions and the policies which structure the “school to prison pipeline” are contemporary expressions of this. As members of the graduate student curatorial team at the University of California Riverside, our contribution to the Humanities Action Lab’s national exhibition States of Incarceration was to chart the genealogy of sites of surveillance and policing of bodies of color, from the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, CA, to the streets of 1940s Los Angeles, to the public schools and diverse urban neighborhoods of the twenty-first century. In Detention: The War on Youth treats the policies, practices, and sites of policing and surveillance of youthful bodies as the building blocks of a carceral state which has as its end goal the social control of particular kinds of racialized bodies. As our nation’s carceral project continues to expand, we, as public historians, are called to respond to the crisis. We must continue to make public the histories of surveillance, policing, and incarcerating black and brown bodies.