A Year of Rethinking Prisons

September 5, 2012, 11:30am - 1pm
Nashville Public Library

Coming Back to Life: One Man's Story of Wrongful Conviction

Thinking Outside of the (Lunch) Box series at the Nashville Public Library with Ndume Olatushani, a former prisoner on Tennessee's death row who was released after serving 28 years for a crime he did not commit.

The “Thinking Out of the (Lunch) Box” event will take place from noon to 1 p.m. at the downtown Nashville Public Library. Free boxed lunches will be available beginning at 11:30 a.m. while supplies last.

The event is free and all are welcome, but a $5 donation is requested. No R.S.V.P. is required.

Monday, September 24, 10 am - 11 am
Vanderbilt Divinity School, room 122 (on the first floor beside Suzie's Café)

Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman: The Injustice of Justice on Tennessee’s Death Row

In March 1987, Abdur’Rahman was sentenced to death for the murder of drug dealer Patrick Daniels in Davidson County. Twenty-five years later he remains on Tennessee’s Death Row in the River Bend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville. His co-defendant, Harold Devalle Miller, received a term sentence for second-degree murder and was released from parole approximately 10 years after the crime.

The U.S. Supreme Court has twice refused to consider his appeals –- most recently in June -- although the record shows that he is on death row because of a combination of the trial jury not being told about childhood abuse by his parents and his mental illness, his defense counsel not providing him with adequate representation, and the prosecutor withholding evidence from both the defense counsel and from the jury.

Clemency from Gov. Bill Haslam is Abdur’Rahman’s only possible legal recourse from execution. The presentation will be made by the Abdur’Rahman Clemency Team and will include a slide presentation as well as a question and answer period. The participants will include the Rev. Joe Ingle, a member of Abdur’Rahman’s spiritual team; and Ed Miller, a Nashville attorney and Episcopalian who has written about the injustice of the Abdur’Rahman case.

October 11, 2012, 4 - 6pm
Vanderbilt University, Buttrick Hall 102

The Color of Resistance: The Life and Work of Russell Maroon Shoats

Russell Maroon Shoats is a writer, activist and political theorist. He is also a prisoner at SCI Greene, where he has been held in solitary confinement for 30 years.

In his life and work, Maroon draws connections between the decentralized political structure of maroon (or fugitive slave) communities, radical black politics, the Occupy movement, environmentalism, and global feminisms. In recent years, Maroon has collaborated with a group of ecosocialist artists and activists called Scientific Soul Sessions.

This panel discussion will address personal, political and philosophical aspects of Maroon’s life and work. Participants include Maroon's daughter, Theresa Shoatz, journalist and member of Scientific Soul Sessions, Kanya D'Almeida,Vanderbilt History professor and author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolution, Jane Landers, and Vanderbilt Philosophy professor and author of Social Death and its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement (forthcoming from Minnesota University Press), Lisa Guenther.

January 16 - February 14, 2013
Sarratt Gallery, main lobby of Sarratt Student Center, Vanderbilt University

Imagining Justice from the Inside Out

Art exhibit featuring work from prisoners currently on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
Gallery Opening: Thursday, January 21, time TBA.
Thank you to The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy for supporting this project.

January 21, 2013, 5pm
Vanderbilt University, Langford Auditorium, 2201 West End Ave.

Michelle Alexander

Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Martin Luther King keynote address, organized by the MLK Committee, based in the Office of Religious Life

March 22, 2013, 3:10 – 5pm
Vanderbilt Philosophy Department, Furman Hall 109

Richard Lippke

Professor, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Indiana, Bloomington and author of Rethinking Imprisonment.
Sponsored by the Vanderbilt Philosophy department as part of the Philosophy colloquium series.

Spring semester, TBA

Katy Ryan

Professor of English at West Virginia University and author of Demands of the Dead, Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the US.
Sponsored by Kelly Oliver

May 3-5, 2013
Vanderbilt University

Rethinking Prisons Conference

Confirmed speakers include Joy James (The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings), Susan Rosenberg (An American Radical: Political Prisoner in my own Country), Mark L. Taylor (The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World), and Colin Dayan (The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons).