punishment | atrocity crimes | social exclusion
the making of race, gender, sexuality, class, & criminality at the hands of the state
The Reimagining Justice Lab is a collaborative effort to research the ways laws, state actions, and state crimes produce and are produced by intersectional oppression. This work incorporates evidence and perspectives of justice based in social systems, community accountability, healing, growth, and transformative change. Current research is in two areas: the causes and consequences of the hidden penal state in the United States and the place of genocide in the modern world order.
Currently housed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Reimagining Justice Lab was created to provide research experience and community to undergraduate and graduate students from multiple backgrounds while advancing social science research. We have imagined this lab as a place where faculty and students can work together, learn together, and produce public-facing research together. Our research deals with pressing issues of state control and intersectional oppression, while our team focuses on mutual mentorship, mutual accountability, collective learning and analysis, and collaboration.
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
― W. E. B. DuBois
Current Research
The Hidden Sentence
In this project, we critically analyze the history behind an underrecognized part of the U.S. penal state—“hidden sentences”—to reveal previously unanalyzed ways in which penal policy operates in the U.S. social order.
Systemic Penal Exclusion and Discrimination
In a related project, we study contemporary patterns of social exclusion with a focus on hidden sentences’ role. Hidden sentences create barriers for people…
Genocide and Social Destruction
In this project, we analyze genocide not as simply mass killing, but as the social destruction or deconstruction of a racialized group—not only racially targeted violence…