American Friends Services Committee

For three decades, states have expanded their use of solitary confinement and "supermax" units as a means for controlling prisoners, despite a lack of evidence that they reduce prison violence or increase public safety. While the majority of people who have been held in long-term isolation are released back into the community, most have little or no access to treatment to assist in overcoming the effects of their experiences.

Using anthropological research methods, Brackette Williams will examine the experiences of people who spent one or more years in single or multiple periods of solitary confinement in supermax units in Arizona. Williams will identify how these experiences affect re-entry and family and community reintegration, with a goal of empowering people to become leaders in progressive justice reform.

Williams received a BS from Cornell University, a master's in Education from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University. She has taught at Duke University, Queens College, and Graduate Center of New York City, the New School for Social Research, the University of California at Berkeley, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Arizona, where she also served as director of African American Studies. In 1997 she received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and has been conducting research and writing on death penalty and prison issues. The first of her two books, Making Kinds Kindly: An Ethnography of Concepts and Categories in U.S. Death Penalty Classification and Activism, is forthcoming.

Tucson, AZ