Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons explains a lot. Dr. Brittany Friedman uses research centered in California prisons to illustrate how racist intent operates in the U.S., domestically and internationally, in- and outside prisons. Detailed interviews, correspondence, and analysis illuminate historical patterns. Those patterns are viewed within a wider scope, with carcerality and warfare as twin throughlines encompassing U.S. support for exterminating the Palestinian people, Proud Boys publicly fist-bumping DC police officers, “social ailment” policy of the early 20th Century, and the 19th Century’s “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Individual lives and experiences are not lost in the telling, however, and violent specifics are shared without sensationalism or dehumanizing distance. The result is a book with a powerful relationship to the material and a poetic voice.

“Poetic” might be an unusual adjective for an academic title on such a disturbing topic. But a number of author interviews and book reviews concur with this description. And the poetry of Carceral Apartheid is not a quirky, incidental feature but an essential aspect: The author’s voice gives readers a sense of being in this with her, rather than left to experience the material’s brutality alone.

And it is brutal, in its wider contours and in some extensive details. Some passages might be triggering for some readers, but skipping Carceral Apartheid entirely would be a loss.

Some might think, “I don’t need convincing that prisons are racist or powered by lies.” Some might deem a book centering the Black Guerilla Family, which began in California prisons in 1970, too specific for today’s urgent challenges. Those fortunate enough to consider incarceration as someone else’s problem might believe Carceral Apartheid unrelated to their concerns. Whatever work we’re trying to do in the world, however, this book offers essential tools for understanding and functioning at this crucial time.

Moreover, Friedman’s research approach suggests a strategy that can be of wider use in these challenging days:

I everyday have to set the intention that my job is to observe, document what I see, and just make it plain, but not absorb it…. Observe, don’t absorb — because I want to be part of creating a new world that does not replicate history, does not replicate these systems
— “Friends Like Us,” with Marina Franklin and Akeem Woods, March 12, 2025 (time stamp: 1:01)

In addition, Carceral Apartheid points to seeds of “community-led justice, cross-racial coalitions, and what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms ‘life-giving institutions'” (p.164). Hope for those seeds’ fruition is ultimately the point:

Carceral apartheid never sleeps, but just like with any golem, we can create the means to dismantle it and the pathways to build the structures needed to survive. — Carceral Apartheid, p.163

Everything Else Will Confuse You

DC-area teacher and activist Neely Fuller, Jr (1929-2025) famously taught: “If you do not understand white supremacy – what it is and how it works – everything else that you understand will only confuse you.” Similarly, failing to grasp “carceral apartheid” fosters confusion around everything we think we understand about law and public safety, about who commits violence and how, and about what and who is a “social problem.”

Fuller insisted that every aspect of human activity, from sex to economics, for “all of the people of the known universe” (a favorite phrase), is influenced by “The System of White Supremacy.” For decades, he argued that the remedy was active use of “Counter-Racist Code” (The United-Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept Textbook, 1984, Produce Justice). In a similar vein, Friedman helps us “watch out for the puppet strings attached to the state’s hands, where white supremacy as carceral power rests on lies…” (Carceral Apartheid, p.9). Friedman’s potent clarity, in itself, is of great value at a time so driven by falsehood and cover-up.

Carceral Apartheid uses interviews and archival research to produce “both social facts (patterns and themes) and historical facts (dates, places, events, and people),” and, in the process, creating a “rebel archive” (p.166). In this way, the material gathered serves both as a model of “truth-telling as method” and as a source of documentation on the book’s claims.

Intent can be difficult to prove, and intent is central to Carceral Apartheid:Friedman’s thesis is that racism is not simply reflected, or experienced as some kind of side-effect, in U.S. prison systems but their purpose. Using words and deeds from the California Department of Corrections itself, Friedman illustrates that systems were designed and employed for racist ends. Police, military, courts, jails, detention, probation and parole, and surveillance technology have been organized, Friedman shows, with specific intention to destroy Black power movements and undermine Black communities.

A related essential is that “carceral apartheid” is not solely about prisons or about official functions alone. Friedman defines the phrase as follows:

State governing through the deployment of official carceral apparatuses (i.e., police, military, courts, jails, detention, probation and parole, and surveillance technology) to achieve the imperial management, division, and decimation of racialized, target populations. These carceral apparatuses rely on…surveillance, arrest, conviction, imprisonment, and supervision [and]…clandestine controls that are at times extralegal (i.e., disappearances, torture…and corrupt alliances between civilians and law enforcement) to ensure a white supremacist victory… — Carceral Apartheid, p.5-6

Effecting change will mean understanding and addressing “clandestine controls” along with “official carceral apparatuses.” This includes close examination of the stories we are told, in press and in entertainment, about who is incarcerated — or under surveillance or worthy of deportation — and why:

Carceral apartheid is the carceral arm of empire and manifests domestically and internationally as warfare against any population deemed problematic and in need of social adjustment–whether this is accomplished through extermination or propaganda–the use of carceral techniques to achieve success is foundational. Lies remain a key means of maintaining this governing structure, with white supremacy being the first lie. Often the second lie is that violence is not taking place in its name. — Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, p.13-14

Effecting change will also mean coming to grips with ways in which people from many backgrounds are controlled by the white supremacy at the heart of U.S. carceral systems. Friedman shares extensive details about forced racialization of men incarcerated in California, including the story of “Andrew” (living persons are identified by pseudonyms), a white man who became part of Aryan prison organizations:

Men who similarly identified as white, but also Black, Chicano, Asian, and Native, described coming into prison with their early life stories and being fundamentally shaped and changed by their experiences during the incarceration. — Carceral Apartheid, p.68-69

Complementary Quests

The framing of Carceral Apartheid differs substantially from that of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (“The Long Revolt,” October 2023). But Orisanmi Burton’s work, focusing on New York state, and Friedman’s in California — separately and together — illuminate essential patterns, in- and outside of prisons. The two books are, in a sense, complementary quests with similar conclusions:

I focus my empirical analysis on social order within prisons to ultimately make a broader conceptual claim that carceral apartheid as governance flows within and beyond confined walls. Penal organizations, such as prisons, are but a microcosm of society, a mirror that illuminates how social order is maintained in what we ironically term “free society.”

At the root of carceral apartheid is the desire to maintain control of the past, present, and future at all costs–it is a quest for total power….Where we focus our intention, our creative energy, herein lies the key to the new world… — Carceral Apartheid, p.27, p.163

Tip of the Spear engages with repression and reform as complementary tactics of war that facilitate what scholars have variously termed “movement absorption,” “movement capture,” “movement channeling,” and the “institutionalization of dissent.” …Without an understanding of this critical aspect of counterinsurgency theory and practice, weaponized reforms will continue to thwart the development of revolutionary and abolitionist projects as well as their analysis and historicization.

…it offers the prison as a method for analyzing and resisting the relations of power and techniques of rule that shape the broader world….to encourage communities engaged in progressive, radical, and revolutionary struggle to consider these insights in relation to their material conditions and to reach their own conclusions. — Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear, p.17, p.229-230

Some works years in the making arrive on the scene already dated and of diminishing relevance. Carceral Apartheid, on the contrary, has only become more relevant, more prophetic, and more worrisome since its publication on January 7, 2025. Meanwhile, Burton’s recent piece on the New York’s prison guard strike demonstrates how history outlined in Tip of the Spear continues to shape events today (“The Hidden War…“).

Exploring the Long Attica Revolt and the tentacles of carceral apartheid illustrate different aspects of a landscape we must learn to better recognize and address.

In the course of presenting its basic thesis, Carceral Apartheid offers a range of historical specifics and essential wider views.

Friedman presents, for example, the work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham: Beccaria is author of the 1764 On Crimes and Punishments, and Bentham drew up penal codes and prison designs (1791). She cites David Garland’s Punishment and Modern Society (1990) for further study, along with two contemporary sources: “Five things about deterrence” (National Institute of Justice, 2016) and “Deterrence in Criminal Justice” (Sentencing Project, 2010). “Our society still,” Friedman writes,

uses both scholars as the basis for contemporary sentencing guidelines that purport to instill rational deterrence to crime, despite ample research that deterrence is at best a nuanced, mixed bag (and that is a generous assertion). — Carceral Apartheid, p.40

Further specifics illustrate how carceral apartheid shaped, and continues to shape, research, policy, and practice. In addition, Carceral Apartheid outlines shifts in the many-headed “imperial hydra, sharing intelligence to act cooperatively to the same white supremacist tune”:

I suggest that carceral apartheid is both a throughline and socially durable governance structure in that it continues to evolve during movement of perceived heightened threat within a given period of institutional (macro) and organizational (meso) memory. In these moments we witness nuance and contingency in how carceral apartheid necessarily expands organizational capacity to maintain social order at the individual level (micro).

In other words…variability in the look and scope of carceral apartheid can be traced to moments when perceived threats to social order are identified by the state and corresponding crisis management approaches are developed and implemented to neutralize these threats.

Perceived threats are most notably populations identified as problematic and thus criminally deviant, because their behavior visibly subverts norms and requires official, clandestine, and extralegal remedies. Groups who also visibly demonstrate a disdain for white supremacist subordination are considered the most threatening. — Carceral Apartheid, p. 27

Both the broad brush and the details are clues we can use in figuring out how to dismantle the golem of carceral apartheid.

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Virginia Avniel Spatz, a native of Chicago, has been living and writing in Washington, DC for decades. Her experience of incarceration is largely secondhand, through relationships with incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated individuals of various identities, as well as through advocacy and journalism. Spatz is what the U.S. calls “white,” Jewish, cis-het, and old enough to remember Fred Hampton and Mark Clark murdered, Attica Prison in uprising, and Angela Davis on trial. She volunteers with human rights, prison care, and abolitionist organizations but speaks here only for herself.

Links:

Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons. Brittany Friedman. University of North Carolina Press, 2025. Buy at Bookshop

“Friends Like Us,” with Marina Franklin and Akeem Woods, March 12, 2025

The United-Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept Textbook. Neely Fuller, Jr. Produce Justice.

“Five Things About Deterrence” National Institute of Justice (an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Justice)
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence

“Deterrence in Criminal Justice: Evaluating Certainty vs. Severity of Punishment,” Valerie Wright, PhD, Sentencing Project, 2010

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Orsanmi Burton. University of California Press, 2023. Buy at Bookshop

Carceral Apartheid book cover shows target fashioned from a US flag, with human-shape in the target center.