Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Founder and Publisher of Public Seminar. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics. He also runs the Democracy Seminar, a worldwide committee of scholars, journalists, activists, and citizens who seek to understand the origins of the threats, to analyze their dimensions and, most importantly, to exchange ideas and experiences about how to oppose them.
Prison was a central pillar of communism and an experience shared by generations of eastern Europeans. The USA today can also be described as a carceral society, its prison system the expression of a ‘new Jim Crow’. What does the comparison mean for the definition of the ‘political prisoner’? A conversation.