Spotlight! Symposium: Kevin Muhitch

This talk examines community struggles against the expansion of Maryland’s prison system in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, it illustrates how an eclectic group of activists in Baltimore helped to make prison projects in the city untenable. While state actors pursued several sites in Baltimore, such as docking a “prison ship” in the Baltimore harbor, city residents successfully organized to prevent them from being built. By the 1980s, state officials resumed prison expansion efforts in rural Somerset County, where they found a political system more willing to accept the ramifications of mass incarceration. In tracing the politics of prison siting, this talk illustrates the contested ways urban activism, and the decisions of state actors, shaped the geography of mass incarceration.