Princeton Professor Naomi Murakawa to Discuss Minorities and Imprisonment at Rutgers’ Evangelides Lecture February 26
WHAT: The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, a new book and subject of the annual Alice and Stephen Evangelides Lecture/Forum, presented by the Department of Political Science, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. The lecture is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis.
WHO: Naomi Murakawa, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, will discuss her latest book. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. Milton Heumann, Rutgers distinguished professor of political science, will host.
WHEN: Thursday, February 26, 2015, 8 p.m.
WHERE: Wood Lawn, 191 Ryders Lane, on Rutgers’ Douglass Campus in New Brunswick
BACKGROUND: The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the 20th century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at midcentury to 65 percent black and Latino today, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that shift began with the “tough on crime” policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s. Naomi Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republic and Democrat.
The Evangelides lectureship honors the late Alice Sofis Evangelides, Rutgers’ first employee counsel, who had a strong interest in public law, and her late husband Stephen.