Talking About: Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform

From September 26-28, 2019, the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas will host an interdisciplinary conference to consider the relationships among the human rights, prison abolition, and penal reform movements, titled Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform: From the Local to the Global.

The conference call is here:

"Mass incarceration and overcriminalization in the United States are subject to critique by some on both the right and the left today. Many critics increasingly talk of prison abolition. At the same time, the international human rights movement continues to rely upon criminal punishment as its primary enforcement tool for many violations, even as it criticizes harsh prison conditions, the use of the death penalty, and lack of due process in criminal proceedings. What would it mean for the human rights movement to take seriously calls for prison abolitionism and the economic and racial inequalities that overcriminalization reproduces and exacerbates? And what might critics of the carceral regime in the United States have to learn from work done by international human rights advocates in a variety of countries?"

More information about the event is available here.