Today I am honored to speak with Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora about their new book, Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison. Along with two research assistants, Lora and Hinton pored over hundreds of essays by prisoners, found in the American Prison Writing Archive. They then selected and organized the essays found in this volume, offering illuminating introductions to each section.
Our discussion moves through many topics—the brutal, dehumanizing, and punitive nature of the prison system, the damage it does to lives both inside and outside prison, and the ways prisoners find to survive and offer each other support, despite being pitted against each other. At base, we consider how we, as a society, are “addicted to violence,” and why and how it is crucial to understand that violence can only produce more violence. These essays organically blend personal observations and stories with a deep understanding of the broad, systemic nature of violence.
Elizabeth Hinton is one of the nation’s leading experts on the roots of mass incarceration and enduring inequality in the United States. The Class of 1954 Professor of History, Black Studies, and Law at Yale University, Hinton serves as the founding director of the Justice for Everybody Movement J4EM, a university-based center focused on promoting public safety through education, research, and coalition-building. At Harvard, she is the founding co-director (with Brandon M. Terry) of the Hutchins Center’s Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety.
Hinton’s groundbreaking books—From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and America on Fire—were each named New York Times Notable Books and have become essential texts in policy and social justice circles. A sought-after public intellectual, Hinton’s commentary appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and beyond. Her research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Guggenheim, Mellon, and Ford Foundations. Hinton served on the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System and in 2022 was elected to the American Philosophical Society as one of the youngest members in its history. At J4EM, Hinton is building the infrastructure for a more just and robust democracy—where education is not a privilege, but a cornerstone of public safety.
Elsa Julien Lora is a U.S. historian and interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on the history of American prisons and the texture and intimacy of family life. A Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Columbia University Society of Fellows, Elsa is at work on her book, Life in Prison: An Intimate History of American Punishment. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the American Society for Legal History. Elsa’s writing about race, justice, and family has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Aperture, and Public Books, and she is currently producing a documentary about her grandmother, boundary-breaking modern dancer Mary Hinkson. She holds a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School.
