Promoting Civil Discourse & Intellectual Dialogue Series - States of Incarceration

Promoting Civil Discourse & Intellectual Dialogue Series

States of Incarceration: Connecting Stories of Immigration Detention and Mass Incarceration and the Movements Against Them

The systems of immigration detention and mass incarceration are intertwined: immigrants and citizens accused of crimes are often detained in the same buildings, controlled by the same personnel, managed by the same corporations. Expansions of prisons have fueled expansion of immigration detention, and vice versa. Yet they are often understood — and contested — separately. This event will bring together faculty, students, and advocates ​in both immigration detention and justice-impacted communities, from Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Texas. They will share first-hand stories of crackdowns on immigrant communities in each of their communities, and their connection to experiences of incarceration. They will also reflect on the narratives that have divided the movements against immigration detention and mass incarceration, and envision what stories, scholarship, and pedagogies can help bring them together. These discussions are the first step in a process to reimagine States of Incarceration, a participatory public memory project on mass incarceration and immigration detention created by students and directly impacted people in 30 states.

Panelists:

Calvin John Smiley, Ph.D. is an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College-CUNY. His research and scholarship broadly focus on issues related to justice, inequality, and race. Smiley is the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home (Routledge, 2020). He is the author of the award-winning Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), which explores how system-impacted

individuals navigate and negotiate the reentry experience with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas. Further, he is the author of Defund: Conversations Towards Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024), which considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Finally, Smiley has published in an array of peer-reviewed journals and public outlets.

Beyond his academic work, Smiley is committed to public sociology and praxis. He has been a regular contributor to several news and talk show outlets. Additionally, he is the founder and director of Till Everything Better LLC, which works with system-impacted youth through restorative justice practices within New York City youth detention facilities. Finally, Smiley is the Project Director for the CUNY New Paths and Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) program to offer system-impacted youth college-credit courses. For more information about Smiley’s research, service, and teaching, please visit: www.cjsmiley.com

Sally Pillay, is a native of South Africa who is an anti-apartheid and a progressive activist for immigrants rights. Sally’s commitment to immigrant rights began in 2008, baring witness to the impact prolonged isolation has on the psyche of immigrants in detention instilled in her a passion to continue to fight to end the incarceration of immigrants and asylum seekers. She obtained her MSW in International Community Development, with a focus in Human Rights and Social Justice. Sally believes that we all have a responsibility -moral ethical responsibility- when we see injustices that we to should stand up and raise our voices.

Melissa Radcliff has been with Our Children’s Place (OCP) of Coastal Horizons based in Wilmington, North Carolina since February 2007. OCP is a statewide education and advocacy program focused on community support for children of incarcerated and returning parents. She has worked in the area of victim services since the 1990s at a domestic violence agency, rape crisis center, prosecutor’s office, and police department in Rhode Island, Arizona, and North Carolina. She is currently overseeing the FRESH (Family Re-Entry Support and Help) program in 14 re-entry prison facilities. Melissa has extensive experience working with correctional facilities, community organizations, and other entities to develop opportunities for children to connect with their incarcerated parents and generate community support for the children whose parents are incarcerated or being released.

She has presented (in person and virtually) at the local (individual schools and school districts, county social service offices, and Smart Start programs, etc.), state (statewide conferences for afterschool programs, school social workers and counselors, Head Start and Early Head Start, among others), and national (Smart Start, national TASC, National Organization for Victim Assistance) levels to teachers, school counselors, social workers, nurses, social services professionals, afterschool and child care providers, school resource officers, treatment professionals, and Adult Correction and Juvenile Justice staff.

Dr. Breea C. Willingham is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University at Buffalo and brings over two decades of experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership. Before entering academia, Dr. Willingham spent ten years as a newspaper reporter covering crime, murder trials, and education in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Upstate New York. Her research is deeply informed by her personal experience as the sister and aunt of two men serving life sentences, and by a broader commitment to confronting racial and gendered injustice. Dr. Willingham’s scholarship centers mass incarceration’s impact on Black families and the role of trauma in shaping Black women’s experiences within the criminal legal system. Her work on incarcerated fathers and their children, Black women’s prison narratives, teaching in women’s prisons, and police violence against Black women has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

Dr. Willingham has presented her research at academic conferences across the United States and internationally, and has delivered lectures at universities in the U.S. and the U.K. She has also facilitated writing and reentry workshops in both women’s and men’s prisons, and regularly shares her expertise on race, gender, crime, and higher education in prison through webinars, panels, and podcasts.

She served as the inaugural Managing Editor of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the first scholarly journal dedicated to publishing research on prison education. She is also the editor of Punishment and Society, an anthology she curated for educators teaching about the broader societal ramifications of incarceration.

Dr. Willingham is currently completing two book projects: Black Feminist Disappearance Theory: A Critical Framework for Confronting the Erasure of Black Women and Girls, under contract with Routledge, and Black Women in Higher Education in Prison, under contract with Lexington Books.

Mary Rizzo is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. She works at the intersection of inclusive public history, digital humanities, urban studies, and 20th century U.S. cultural history. She is a co-founder of the Chicory Revitalization Project, which uses the black community poetry magazine Chicory to spur intergenerational dialogue on place and social justice. In 2026, University of Iowa Press will publish Baltimore’s Black Arts Then & Now: Behind the Scenes of a Collaborative Public Humanities Project, written by her and several collaborators. She is also the author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle (University of Nevada Press, 2015).