Incarceration Transparency: Andrea Armstrong's Pursuit of Civil Rights for those Behind Bars

Nov. 22, 2024

By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences

Andrea Armstrong’s work is dedicated to exposing what has been hidden behind bars in order to advocate for the safety and human rights of individuals who have been incarcerated, along with remembering those who have lost their lives in the process.

Armstrong delivered the 18th Annual Anne Braden Memorial Lecture, “Civil Rights Behind Bars,” on Nov. 7. A law professor from Loyola University New Orleans, Armstrong was named a 2023 MacArthur “genius” fellow in recognition of her work to shine a light on deaths behind bars and her founding of the Incarceration Transparency Project. Armstrong’s lecture before a packed audience in Middleton Theater focused on the civil rights movement both then and now, the secrecy around incarceration and why these conditions are being hidden, and steps that can be taken to make the lives and conditions behind bars more visible once again.

“We should ground ourselves in the work of Anne Braden and the possibility of shared humanity,” Armstrong stated. “Talking about the things that make us unique as human beings – the things that we can never lose no matter what we do or how we do it – no matter the choices that we make or the situations we find ourselves in. And so, if there is one thing I want you to take away: I want you to think about what happens behind bars as in fact civil rights work. It is not just prisoner work. It is civil rights work because it relies on our shared humanity.”

Armstrong displayed an image of John Lewis, the  politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. It showed him behind bars in a Nashville city jail in 1960 after his arrest at a lunch counter sit in. Armstrong noted that he had been engaging in an interview with a news reporter while incarcerated, something that would never happen today.

“Anne Braden was in jail multiple times – the things she learned there, the people that she met, and left behind – it’s a core aspect of her civil rights work – this shared humanity. We deserve rights because we are human – we are intrinsically deserving. Conditions of incarceration did not depend on what you had been convicted of, but instead, the conditions had to be addressed because you were human,” Armstrong said. “Today, we no longer have that proximity they did in the 50s and 60s. We no longer talk about that shared humanity behind bars. Instead, we call them ‘others,’ putting them in a separate category – the ‘moral category of exclusion.’”

There are 10 million admissions to jails and prisons nationally in any given year. At the same time, there are approximately 10 million impacted people who love someone currently behind bars. The United States has more prisons than it does colleges, and there are more prison beds in Louisiana than hospital beds.

“We are stuck with a sense of a sprawling network – thousands of these spaces that are simultaneously hidden from us,” she stated.

To fully understand conditions behind bars, Armstrong shared a video of Joe Palmer, a 71-year-old formerly incarcerated individual from Shreveport, who spent 47 years behind bars out of a 90-year sentence. He recounted his time working in the prison fields, where he was forced to labor in sweltering heat, chopping crops like vegetables, tomatoes, and okra from 7 a.m. to as late as 4 p.m. with little to no break and without proper equipment. Palmer described this forced labor as legalized slavery, highlighting that he and others were paid two cents an hour for their grueling work.

Palmer emphasized the dehumanizing nature of this system, where prisoners were treated as property rather than people, and faced punishment if they failed to meet their crop quotas. His story raises significant civil rights concerns, pointing to the exploitation of incarcerated individuals and the parallels between prison labor and historical systems of enslavement.

The secrecy about conditions, according to Armstrong, enables the exploitation that Palmer and others have described. Generally applicable laws often omit or exclude prisons and jails from regulation or oversight. Law, according to Armstrong, plays a significant role in the lack of transparency.

From 2015-21, at least 1,168 people died in custody in Louisiana jails, prisons and youth detention centers. Mortality rates for convicted populations are significantly higher than national averages. Armstrong’s findings revealed alarming spikes in suicides, which on average occurred at age 36. Notably, these suicides often occurred years into an individual's incarceration—whether awaiting trial or serving a sentence—rather than within the initial days of confinement.

In addition to suicides, there has been a sharp increase in drug-related deaths, indicating an ongoing crisis within these facilities. These findings raise serious concerns about whether jails and prisons are fulfilling their basic responsibility to ensure a safe and secure environment. The presence of drugs behind bars prompts critical questions about overall security, suggesting that if substances can be smuggled in, other threats might also be slipping through the cracks.

“Anne Braden said in 2001, ‘To build multiracial organizations in a racist society is virtually impossible. Impossible means it just takes a little longer. I tell people not to get discouraged if they try and fail, but to try again,’” said Angela Storey, director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research and associate professor of anthropology. “When asked about hope for the future, Braden replied, ‘Mass movements usually start from a specific struggle. We do the battles at our door steps, bringing new people in around specific issues, and they are the building blocks.’”

The solution to these civil rights issues lies in reclaiming these institutions as “ours.”

“These are our institutions, operated in our name, and with our tax dollars,” Armstrong said.

The Incarceration Transparency project collects, analyzes, and publishes detailed data on deaths behind bars to enable broader public conversations about the safety and treatment of incarcerated people. It empowers advocates, researchers, and policymakers with the evidence needed to drive systemic change. On the morning of Nov. 8, Prof. Armstrong joined local activists from the ACLU, BLACK, and VOCAL-KY, along with scholars, for a "Research Meets Activism" breakfast at CACHe. The event brought together researchers and activists to foster dialogue on civil rights behind bars and other pressing social issues.

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