Challenging the 'Failure' Framing

In this episode, we are joined by Dalton Lackey and Teagan Murphy, co-authors of the article "The COVID-19 Murders": Prison death-worlds and the fatal convenience of crisis. Their work offers a piercing critique of how carceral institutions weaponized the pandemic—not as an unprecedented emergency, but as a tactical opportunity to deepen control, dehumanization, and death.

We'll begin by hearing from Dalton and Teagan about their political motivations, the methodologies they employed, and the intellectual scaffolding behind their analysis. From there, we'll unpack their challenge to the dominant narrative of "failure"—a framing that presumes the prison system was simply overwhelmed by crisis. Instead, they argue that the pandemic revealed not incompetence, but calculated cruelty.

We'll also examine how disaster operates as a tool of tactical evolution within prisons. As the authors write, "Rather than revealing entirely new challenges, our findings demonstrate how the pandemic instead exacerbates what the literature has suggested are the preexisting goals of carceral punishment." We'll discuss how incarcerated people themselves narrated these shifts—how they recognized the charade of "safety" and named the degradation that exceeded even the brutal norm.

From psychic death and coerced docility to the punitive treatment of those living with HIV/AIDS, we'll trace the historical continuities and contemporary parallels that shape this death-world. We'll ask how social distancing protocols, meant to protect, instead expanded estrangement—and how preexisting conditions of confinement intensified the crisis.

Teagan Murphy (any/all) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their research, conducted primarily through qualitative interviews, ethnography, and content analysis, focuses on institutional and carceral logics and the reproduction of inequities via narratives of deservingness. Their dissertation, which draws on data collected from their time as an active courtwatcher in Prince George's County, presents a critique of the distinction courts draw between criminalized defendants and "the community," resulting in a pretrial system where Black bodies are deemed public safety risks that antagonize the moral sanctity of white civil society. They also argue for a literary reframing of "courtwatching," moving from reformist interpretations to an antifascist one aligned with broader abolitionist goals. IG: @veganmurphy

Dalton Lackey (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their research broadly concerns structural anti-blackness, carcerality and punishment, revolutionary social movements, and Fanonian psychopolitics. Dalton is currently working on their dissertation project, which explores the complexities of invention and signification that emerge in the haze of radical collective action against the anti-black social order. IG: @daltonjared

American Prison Writing Archive

The COVID-19 Murders": Prison death-worlds and the fatal convenience of crisis

Some related/referenced MAKC conversations:

Joshua Myers discussion on Robinson's rebuttal to "Social Death"

Conversations with Andrew Krinks

Orisanmi Burton on Black Masculine Care Work Under Domestic Warfare

Charlie Frank on AIDS & COVID-19

From the Free Alabama Movement to The Alabama Solution featuring Renee Johnston

"Everybody Changes In The Process Of Building A Movement" - Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition Geography (responding to the question of the 13th Amendment & prison conditions)

Dylan Rodriguez on Domestic Warfare & prisons