Lectures on Tap - Carceral Abandonment: Punishment in Contemporary Prison

Professors, experts, and storytellers giving thought-provoking lectures in LA bars.

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🧠 Lecture: Carceral Abandonment: Punishment in the Contemporary Prison

🎤 Speaker: Dr. Timothy Malone

Join us for a powerful evening as Dr. Timothy Malone examines what truly constitutes punishment inside contemporary prisons. Drawing from his lived experience of eight years in California correctional facilities, Dr. Malone argues that the most immediate and severe punishment is not isolation, deprivation, or guard abuse, but the ever-present threat of inmate-versus-inmate violence—violence the state guarantees and delegates within the carceral interior.

This lecture will trace how such violence came to define prison life, whose interests it serves, and what might be done to dismantle it. Dr. Malone, a formerly incarcerated scholar, holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University, where he wrote his dissertation “The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination and Sacrifice in the Contemporary Prison.”

In 2023–24, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, participating in a seminar on revolution and teaching “Carceral Crisis: The Question of Abolition” in Africana Studies. He is currently working on his book, The Carceral Thresher.

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