Red Emma’s

Prison is neither the beginning of the inquiry nor the end. Thus, writers from across carceral institutions in the US unfold the multiple and intersecting ways that violence shapes and informs their lives, prior to, during, and after incarceration. They illuminate violence as a contextual phenomena shaped by historical trauma, cycles of deprivation, and systemic inequities. Harm and Punishment reveals the interconnectedness of personal and structural violence, tracing the way violence often emerges within the fabric of communities profoundly shaped by poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

The stories, testimonies, and reflections collected here serve as bridges toward a new imagination. They expose the limitations of punishment and move us closer to a vision of collective care and mutual responsibility. In bearing witness to the experiences of incarcerated writers, readers become part of a profound shared endeavor to dismantle the barriers of misunderstanding and fear, opening pathways to action and change.

"Harm and Punishment tells a large and layered set of stories about trauma, resistance, repair, and hope. The brilliant historian Elizabeth Hinton and her coeditor Elsa Julien Lora have curated a set of voices from the front lines of the struggle against the carceral state. They remind us that the struggle is about hard truth-telling as much as it is about legislation, protest, and court cases. Eloquent and impactful." —Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century

Elizabeth Hinton is professor of history, African American studies, and law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the twentieth-century United States. Hinton is the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Her articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, Science, Nature, Time, and elsewhere.

Vesla Mae Weaver (Ph.D., Harvard, Government, and Social Policy) is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and faculty affiliate of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale University. Weaver’s books include Arresting Citizenship _and Creating a New Racial Order.  Her next book, The State From Below: Racial Authoritarianism in US Democracy, amasses the_ most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police—by those who are policed—to date, using a new civic infrastructure called Portals. She co-directs the American Prison Writing Archive, the largest and first fully searchable digital archive of imprisoned people writing about their experience inside confinement in four hundred prison and jail facilities.

Uhuru Rowe is a formerly incarcerated writer and New Afrikan activist.