Sun, Aug 30, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 p
The past and future of U.S. policing
Noted historian and criminologist Tony Platt will share his long research and insights into the carceral state known as the USA. Tony Platt has been involved since the 1960s in issues relating to criminal justice, race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He taught at the University of Chicago, Berkeley, and California state universities. He is currently a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society in Berkeley’s Law School. A founding member of the editorial board of Social Justice, Platt blogs on history and memory at http://GoodToGo.typepad.com. In addition to books and scholarly journals, he has published in a wide variety of popular sites, including National Public Radio, Los Angeles Times, History News Network, Truthdig, Huntington Post, The Guardian, and San Francisco Chronicle.
From teaching criminology with David Du Bois, editor of the Black Panther Party’s newspaper, and organizing California’s first major conference on prison activism in the 1970s, to more recently speaking out about the damaging social legacies of eugenics, Platt’s experience as a political activist and public intellectual informs his research and publications. In the 1970s, he was co-author of The Iron Fist and The Velvet Glove, a book that challenged prevailing conceptions of American policing. In his latest book, Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), Platt draws upon a lifetime of research and commitment to social justice to articulate a broad vision and deep historical perspective on the crisis of the American carceral state.
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