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.
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
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