ROBERT CHASE
On leave, Fall 2021
Associate Professor (Ph.D., University of Maryland, 2009)
Office: SBS N-331A
Email:
robert.chase@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Carceral Studies; Post-1945 U.S.; civil rights law and politics; the Civil
Rights, Black Power, and Chicano movements; prisons and policing; labor and working
class; public and oral history
The nexus of my research centers on the ways in which social justice movements, civil
rights, and the prisoners’ rights movement have confronted mass incarceration and
the carceral state. My book,
We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar
America
(UNC Press, 2020), examines the southern prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s and the subsequent construction of what many historians now call
the era of mass incarceration and the "New Jim Crow." This southern trustee system
was a hierarchical racial regime that constituted a vicious sex trade in which convict
guards were given the tacit approval from the prison administration to engage in what
I call state-orchestrated sexual assault through the buying and selling of prisoner
bodies as a sexual commodity that signified cultural standing and societal power.
To confront the carceral regime, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black
Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as "slaves of the state"
and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. My
work shows that this prison-made civil rights rebellion, while mounting a successful
legal challenge, was countered by a new prison regime—one that utilized paramilitary
practices, promoted privatized prisons, endorsed massive prison building programs,
and embraced 23-hour cell isolation—that established what I call a "Sunbelt" militarized
carceral state approach that became exemplary of national prison trends.
A related book project brings together historians of immigration and immigration detention
with historians of the carceral state. This project, an anthology entitled
Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Migration Detention, and Resistance
(UNC Press, 2019), explores how the carceral regimes of prisons, policing, and immigration
are intertwined in the American southwest and borderlands. My next book project is
a history of sheriffs in the U.S. South and South West. As elected politicians and
as law enforcers, sheriffs occupy a unique position in American history that mark
their policing role as significantly different than in other nations.
My work has been published in the
Journal of Urban History, the
Journal of American History, and the anthology
The New, New South (University Press of Florida, 2012); and my book projects have been supported by
fellowships at Southern Methodist University, Rutgers University, Case Western Reserve
University, and the University of Connecticut. To reach wide audiences, I have appeared
on national media programs through radio, print newspapers, and cable news television
(CNN & MNSBC).
SELECT WORKS
•
"Cell Taught, Self Taught: The Chicano Movement Behind Bars"
•
"We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the
Prisoners' Rights Movement"
•
"Slaves of the State: Prison Uprisings and Lessons of Attica" (review essay)
•
"Gun Laws and Race in Florida: Numbers Show We Aren't Safe" (op-ed)
•
"Confederate Flag Deserves History's Harsh Verdict" (op-ed)