"The Factory of Genocide:" Carcerality and Confinement on Boston Harbor's Deer Island

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Following historian Kelly Lyttle Hernańdez’s argument that “mass incarceration is mass elimination,” this talk by Harvard PhD Candidate Mary McNeil utilizes a place-based approach to trace the evolution of carceral regimes in Massachusetts and to theorize overlapping Black and Native geographies and histories that are inscribed upon Deer Island. This new research is organized around three flashpoints in the island’s history: the internment of “Praying Indians” in the winter of 1675-1676, the development of modern penal institutions on the island in the late 19th century, and the acceleration of political organizing by individuals incarcerated in Massachusetts’ jails and prisons in the early 1970s.