About The Carceral Connecticut Project

Generously funded by the Mellon Foundation’s “Humanities for all Time” Initiative (HfAT), the Carceral Connecticut Project (CCP) is an interdisciplinary, humanistic exploration examining the past and contemporary resonances of the histories of slavery/race, industrialization/capitalism, and the way these remain inextricably connected to issues of incarceration in Connecticut and the nation. The notion of incarceration is understood here in two registers: in the conventional sense of being held in a correctional facility, but also more broadly in the sense of having one’s life opportunities (housing, education, access to legal and financial resources) restricted due to social arrangements that determine a person’s status.

The CCP engages these themes with a focus on local and regional history, social justice and law, and finally policing in Connecticut, and does so through curricula, an exhibition, a conference, a documentary film, and online resources.

In the HfAT call for proposals, a central objective of the initiative has been “to increase humanities enrollments among a broad and diverse undergraduate population,” and to do so “by clearly articulating the distinctive aims and methods of humanistic analysis and demonstrating the importance of such analysis for the social-justice objectives to which so many students are rightly committed.” In this regard, the CCP introduced fifteen new courses into the Wesleyan curriculum. These include courses on the role of juries, the history of guns in America, the history and present of policing in the United States, memorializing slavery in museums and monuments, and the history of Black migration to and settlement in Middletown, Connecticut.

Research and curricula on the US jury system culminated in a conference reflecting on the advent and activism of the Black Panther Party in New Haven. This gathering brought together scholars on the Black Panthers, including a historian who has studied their role in the Black Power movement in New Haven, a biographer of Erika Huggins, and a political scientist examining the voir dire of the trial of Bobby Seale and Huggins, reputed to be the longest in Connecticut’s history. One of the conference’s panels examined the contemporary dynamics of incarceration in Connecticut, and attendees heard from formerly incarcerated men who have gone on to advocate for changes in the judicial system.

In collaboration with the Middlesex County Historical Society, an exhibition in two parts is currently being mounted. The first part examines local responses to and effects of federal urban renewal policy between 1949, when the Federal Housing Act ushered in urban renewal, and 1979, when Middletown ended its three-decade reshaping of the city. The second part focuses closely on the South End of Middletown, a nearly all-African American neighborhood that urban renewal almost completely demolished. Major themes of the exhibit include how race and residential segregation shaped redevelopment in this northern city, how Black residents constituted and reconstituted community in the face of widespread demolition, and how this demolition reshaped the identity of Middletown.

A documentary film, Futureproof expands the themes of the Carceral Connecticut Project by examining how our society attempts to control fears of the future, a story that begins with the insurance industry in Hartford, Connecticut. 

Policing is a central theme of the CCP’s investigation into carcerality, which is examined over half a century in the state capital. The project elaborates this history through two digital resources: Politics and Policing in Hartford, 1970, and an interactive timeline of the Cintron v. Vaughn Consent Decree. This latter work follows the fifty-year lifespan of the consent judgment which placed the Hartford Police Department (HPD) under judicial oversight from 1973 to 2023. The case began with the 1969 class action lawsuit Cintron v. Vaughn brought against members of the HPD and city government by community organizations joined by Black and Puerto Rican citizens who had experienced both under- and over-policing. Cintron may be the first and longest-running consent decree entered into with law enforcement, and yet it is relatively unknown in public discussions and scholarly treatment of policing in the United States. In keeping with the CCP’s humanistic lens, these digital resources attend to the narratives hidden beneath the legal record, beginning with the context of Hartford’s fraught police-community relations in the late 1960s and the dedicated efforts of local organizations who pushed for accountability. Taken as a case study into the complicated relations undergirding change “within the system,” this research reveals ongoing dynamics within policing and the effectiveness of current approaches to police reform in the United States.

Image Attribution Policy:
The Carceral Connecticut Project is a public history endeavor made accessible for purposes of education and research. CCP has given attribution to rights holders when possible. However, we are not always able to identify this information. If you hold the rights to materials utilized by CCP that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.