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Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have been subject to increasing confinement, starting with prisons in the 1970s and 1980s and growing into a regime of checkpoints and walls that encircle entire towns and villages. After a historical review of the incremental stages of this incarceration, the article examines the overall impact of prisons, checkpoints, and walls, based on observations garnered from more than a dozen research trips over two decades and a review of research by others. Although these architectures are built and used in the name of security, findings show that mass imprisonment debilitates the Palestinian economy, forcing Palestinians to flee or resist. The final section compares the Israeli carceralization of the Occupied Territories to the US occupation of Iraq, suggesting that similar, albeit more violent, processes are underway.

This research describes and assesses Critical Race Theory (CRT) pedagogy in a higher education ethnic studies course for police officers. CRT pedagogy aims to help students overcome "color-blind" thinking, which minimizes awareness of racism, by raising their critical understanding of racism and framing it as a pervasive and institutionalized reality that everyone has a responsibility to change. Using the Color Blind Racial Awareness (COBRA) Scale, critical awareness in three cluster areas, white privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racism, is measured among those completing the ethnic studies course and a comparison group of officers completing a different college course for police. Conclusions reflect on the impact of the course on students' awareness of racism, the correlation of identity and awareness of racism, the hypothetical impact of such awareness in policing and possibilities for future research.Decades of positive change in police practices and increasing racial diversity in the composition of department personnel have not eliminated racial disparities in criminal justice systems in the US. Mistrust persists between police and communities of color. Despite the importance of this issue for police leaders, for community leaders, for youth of color, and for police officers, there is surprisingly little pedagogical theory on how to prepare police for dealing with it. This article describes and scientifically assesses a semester-long, higher education course for police officers grounded in CRT pedagogy. In general, CRT pedagogy aims to move students from "color-blind" non-racist thinking to antiracist thinking. The color-blind discourse, insightfully explored by Bonilla-Silva (2006), minimizes awareness of racism by framing it only as individual bigotry and as something exaggerated by people of color. Through avoidance, colorblind thinking presents itself as "non-racist." CRT pedagogy, on the other hand, aims to raise awareness of racism by reframing it as a pervasive and

During the first intifada uprising (1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993), thousands of Palestinians were arrested annually, and mass incarceration affected as many as 100,000 families. Relying on several recent ethnographies, and other published research including some of my own, this article describes the contests over Palestinian prison ontology as organized by (a) the jailers, (b) the prisoners, (c) the families of prisoners, and (d) a service agency in the emerging Palestinian Authority. What becomes evident is that mass incarceration involves ontological struggles over the framing of justice, agency, and gender. The conclusion asks how these ontological struggles may be part of other modern prisons.

Between 1987 and 1994, well more than one hundred thousand Palestinians were incarcerated as “security” prisoners by Israeli occupation forces. The experiences of these men presented particular problems of representation. While the author tried to empathetically write about their human experiences of suffering, he discovered that trauma can be appropriated by different groups and invested with different emotional and political meanings. During the uprising called the Intifada of the 1980s and early 1990s, the nationalist youth described prisoners (often themselves) as a vanguard in the Palestinian struggle. After the arrival of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the prisoners were recast as victims in need of rehabilitation, and many became rank-and-file members of Palestinian security. The process of ethnographic discovery described here suggests that ethnography aimed only at providing a “native's point of view” is insufficient. Politically engaged anthropology can and should do more than trying to humanize cultural others who suffer.