Justice 101 — Powered by the Eastern State Center for Justice Education, Justice 101 is a discussion series that dives into some of the most pressing issues in criminal justice today, through a historical lens and with a focus on civic education. Each program includes interactive online or in-person elements, expert voices, and opportunities for community dialogue.
Justice 101: Civil Rights Behind Bars
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
2:00 - 3:00pm EST
Online event.
Join us for a compelling conversation on the history of civil rights movements inside American prisons. In this discussion, we'll examine how incarcerated people have organized, advocated, and fought for their fundamental rights and human dignity against a system designed for control and dehumanization.
Dr. Dorothy E. Roberts will join us to explore key moments, movements, and figures highlighting the struggles for religious freedom, due process, and humane conditions that have fundamentally shaped the fabric of our nation. This is a history of reasserting agency, challenging injustice, and the enduring quest for liberation within the country's most restricted spaces.
Moderated by Kerry Sautner, this conversation will feature leading voices in prison history and carceral justice. Together, they will challenge us to reconsider the meaning of civil rights and the history of the movement behind bars.
About the Panelists:
Dr. Dorothy E. Roberts
George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society.
Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in reproductive justice, policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and essays in books and journals, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Harvard Program in Ethics & the Professions, Stanford Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. Recent recognitions of her work include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine; Rutgers University Honorary Doctor of Laws degree; Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.
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