CMU Professor Jay Aronson comes to Riverstone Books to discuss his book Death in Custody with Tanisha Long of the Abolitionist Law Center. They will address ways of reducing the harm caused by the criminal legal system in the short term and radically re-envisioning how we understand notions of safety and justice in the long-term.
The United States significantly undercounts the number of people who die in law enforcement custody each year. How can we fix this?
Deaths resulting from interactions with the US criminal legal system are a public health emergency, but the scope of this issue is intentionally ignored by the very systems that are supposed to be tracking these fatalities.
In Death in Custody, Roger A. Mitchell Jr., MD, and Jay D. Aronson, PhD, share the stories of individuals who died in custody and chronicle the efforts of activists and journalists to uncover the true scope of deaths in custody. From Ida B. Wells's enumeration of extrajudicial lynchings more than a century ago to the Washington Post's current effort to count police shootings, the work of journalists and independent groups has always been more reliable than the state's official reports. Through historical analysis, Mitchell and Aronson demonstrate how government at all levels has intentionally avoided reporting death in custody data.
Jay D. Aronson is the founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a professor of science, technology, and society in the Department of History. He is the author of Who Owns the Dead? The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero and Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling.
Tanisha Long is the Allegheny County Community Organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center, a Pittsburgh-based public interest law firm inspired by the struggle of political and politicized prisoners. The organization works to abolish class- and race-based mass incarceration in the United States. Additionally, she is founder and CEO of RE Visions, an education-focused tutoring, mentoring, and outreach nonprofit based in Pittsburgh.