The U-M Carceral State Project (CSP) is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings impacted communities and advocacy organizations together with researchers, writers, and artists from the University of Michigan to address the current crisis as well as collateral consequences of mass incarceration, policing, and immigrant detention, in the state of Michigan and beyond, and to work towards more just responses to the safety concerns and social needs of this region.
Matt Lassiter is co-director of the Carceral State Project, which launched in 2016 under the leadership of Heather Ann Thompson (History, African and Afro-American Studies, Residential College). Lassiter and Thompson are also the co-PIs, along with Christian Davenport (Political Science), of the CSP’s $2 million “Meet the Moment” research grant from the College of LSA from 2022-2027 for its Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative. Lassiter was previously the co-PI, along with Ashley Lucas, of the CSP’s initial Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (DCC) research collaboration, which received a $500,000 major project grant from the U-M Humanities Collaboratory for 2019-2022. Lassiter is also the director and primary investigator of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, a CSP component project launched in summer 2018 that involves undergraduate and graduate students in research projects to excavate and publicize histories of police violence and misconduct in Detroit and Southeast Michigan.
Please visit the websites of Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance and Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab for more information and for the research publications of each initiative.