Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab
The research David produces is part of a broader scholarly undertaking within the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab, a public sociology and human rights documentation project that David founded with a $1.7 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, through its Imagining Freedom Initiative. Based out of the Incite Institute in New York City, the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab (Movements Lab for short) uses archival and survey methods to explore the politically contested nature of the prison state.
The Movements Lab’s aims are threefold: 1) to document anti-carceral political mobilization emerging from prisons over the past three decades, 2) to produce cutting-edge research on politics within and around the prison system, and 3) to serve as a hub in which to mentor students and engage the public (social scientists, historians, journalists, and others) in crafting more accurate narratives of mass incarceration in the United States. The Lab focuses especially on understanding the role that Black people in prison have played in politically advocating for reparations as well as for state-level legal and policy changes to the prison system that are considered best practice today.
A critical component of the Movement Lab’s work is partnering with leading social-change organizations (including the Chicago Torture Justice Center and Memorials and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, among a others) to engage in oral history interviews with over two hundred formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated activists and organizers. These oral histories form the first archive of its kind that centers the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated people, and it will be housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as at other archival hubs throughout the country, including at the Freedom Archives in California and the Invisible Institute in Chicago.
The Movements Lab also aims to demonstrate that rigorous social science and public engagement can go hand in hand. In addition to the emerging oral history archive, David has a partnership with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist organization, The Marshall Project, to analyze large-scale survey data on the political attitudes, racial politics, political participation, and collective action of incarcerated people in the United States. In the summer of 2024, over 29,000 people in prisons and 11,000 people in jails were surveyed.
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Black Political Mobilization and the US Carceral State
READ MOREThis review highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives.
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Limited Scopes of Repair: Black Reparations Strategies and the Constraints of Local Redress Policy
READ MOREWe consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago.
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Residential mobility and persistently depressed voting among disadvantaged adults in a large housing experiment
READ MOREThis study examines the impact of residential mobility on electoral participation among the poor by matching data from Moving to Opportunity, a US-based multicity housing-mobility experiment, with nationwide individual voter data. Notably, the study finds that receiving a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood decreased adult participants’ voter participation for nearly two decades—a negative impact equal to or outpacing that of the most effective get-out-the-vote campaigns in absolute magnitude.
