Come join the Human Rights Institute (HRI) at Kean University as it hosts its ninth annual HRI Conference. The conference, Locked Up In America: The Business of Incarceration, will be held on Friday, April 8, 2016, and will focus on the topic of incarceration and the United States justice system. 

“The United States has the highest prison population in the world; around 2 million inmates at 724 people per 100, 000,” comments Lina Caswell, the Graduate Assistant at the Holocaust Resource Center, which is located in HRI. The private-prison industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that is supported by the amount of people sent to prison. “The significant aspect of the United States incarceration rate is that it disproportionally affects minorities, especially African Americans,” continues Caswell, “the consequences of this over representation in the prison population is a reflection on American’s relative silence to the conditions under which communities of color live in the United States.”

The conference will focus on three different angles from the business of incarceration. This includes, as Caswell says, “prison profiteering; who is making money and how they are doing it; and the system that supports it. This presentation [will show] that schools in poor communities are the breeding grounds for future inmates.”

At the conference there will be three presenters, which will include the following: Alexander Shalom, who is the Senior Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union; Christopher McNabb, who is the Organizer at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in New Jersey; and Thena Robinson-Mock, who is the Director of the End the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track. Shalom will be presenting on prison profiteering, while McNabb will be presenting on solitary confinement limitations and Robinson-Mock will be presenting on drawing an end to the “Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track.”

Not only that, but as a part of getting the awareness of incarceration in the United States, HRI is collaborating with The National Religious Campaign Against Torture and from Wednesday, March 30, 2016, through Friday, April 8, 2016, there will be a replica of a solitary confinement cell. “Students and [members of the community] will have the opportunity to experience for a few minutes the isolation and despair that thousands of men and women experienced in prisons across the United States,” Caswell says. “The replica provides a full experience with the sound effects as it is experienced by inmates at maximum security prisons.” The exhibition will be titled Breaking Down the Box.

For more information about the upcoming HRI conference please email HRI at humanrights@kean.edu or call HRI at 908-737-4670.