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In April 2026, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax was shot and killed by her husband while their divorce was pending.

She had done what she was supposed to do. She had initiated the legal process to leave Justin Fairfax, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia. It didn’t save her.

What happened to Wanzer Fairfax has a name: femicide.

Femicide is the intentional killing of women on the basis of gender. Women are most often killed by their partner, former partners or another person who believes they have a claim on their life. It happens in living rooms and driveways and parking lots. It happens during marriage, divorces, separations and in the weeks after a woman finally walks out the door.

As a scholar focused on the intersection of firearm violence and intimate partner homicide, I examine the policy and structural conditions that determine who is at risk and where prevention efforts are falling short.

Intimate partner homicide doesn’t affect all women equally. Black women have the nation’s highest rates of homicide by an intimate partner, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Intimate partner violence by the numbers

A 2024 study in The Lancet tracking homicide deaths from 1999 to 2020 found that Black women ages 25 to 44 are killed at nearly four times the rate of their white peers.

Spring 2026 saw three such cases make national headlines.

Just prior to Wanzer Fairfax’s death, Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer Bowen of Coral Springs, Florida, was shot to death – allegedy by her husband. Also in April, in Louisiana, Shaneiqua Pugh was shot by her husband, as was Christina Snow, the mother of three of the killer’s children. Pugh and Snow are both expected to survive. Eight children, however, were killed.

Three cases. Three states. One month. All, sadly, preventable.

Intimate partner homicide claims more than 1,800 lives in the United States every year. Nearly half of victims are killed by a current or former intimate male partner – not a stranger. These aren’t random acts of violence.

Separation is one of the most dangerous times in an abusive relationship. This is why we cannot see the death of Wanzer Fairfax and others like hers as one-off tragedies. They represent a decades-long pattern of intimate partner femicide in Black relationships – a pattern driven by firearm access coupled with inadequate policy enforcement.

Guns are what make intimate partner violence so deadly. About half of the roughly 1,800 annual intimate-partner femicide cases involved a gun. And in every region of the country, firearm homicide disproportionately kills Black women.

‘The partner loophole’

If the gun is what escalates the risk, it is also where policy has its best chance to intervene.

State law can explicitly restrict perpetrators of domestic violence from purchasing or possessing firearms through two types of civil protection orders: final domestic violence restraining orders and temporary restraining orders. Research demonstrates that states with strong gun restrictions along these lines have meaningfully lower rates of intimate partner homicide.

Generally speaking, though, these laws are not working as designed.

In most states, for example, only certain kinds of relationships qualify for protective orders to be issued against an abusive partner. The most common qualifying relationship is romantic partner or former partner. This characterization poses a problem called “the partner loophole.”

Federal gun-possession restrictions had a similar limitation for decades. If the relationship was a dating partnership, the prohibition against abusive partners obtaining a firearm did not apply. This came to be known as the “boyfriend loophole.”

In 2022, the bipartisan Safer Communities Act extended the gun prohibition to abusive dating partners. While the law now covers more kinds of relationships, it does not yet offer equal protection to Black women in those kinds of relationships.

Research using the National Violent Death Reporting System found that state-level enforcement of the policy was associated with reductions in intimate partner homicide among unmarried white victims, but not among victims of color.

Firearm-relinquishment laws are another weak spot I’ve identified in protecting Black women from intimate partner violence.

When a court issues a domestic violence protective order, federal law prohibits the restrained person from possessing a gun. But this prohibition does not automatically remove guns already in the person’s possession: A gun-relinquishment law must be invoked to compel them to surrender their weapons.

Some states, including California and Washington, have strong relinquishment provisions. They require judges to mandate surrender, set compliance deadlines and authorize law enforcement to recover unrelinquished weapons. These laws are associated with reductions in intimate partner homicide.

But other states give judges discretion. A 2025 review of civil protection order cases in South Carolina found that courts issued a firearm-protection order in only 32% of eligible cases in 2019. In North Carolina, a 2024 study examining state enforcement laws found that despite 93% of cases meeting the conditions for gun relinquishment, the policy was enforced in only 37% of cases.

As a result, researchers have found, firearms are discussed in fewer than 1 in 4 protective-order hearings nationwide, and courts order abusers to surrender their guns in 66% of applicable cases.

The result of unequal state policy enforcement is a prohibition that exists on paper and a gun that stays in the home.

The racial equity gap

The evidence is clear: When gun prohibition and relinquishment laws are fully enforced in abusive relationships, they can save lives.

Yet most states have gaps that limit how effective these policies are in practice. And that failure falls hardest on Black women.

Research shows that state firearm restriction laws with relinquishment provisions were associated with a 16% reduction in firearm intimate partner homicide for white victims. For Black victims, the reduction was not statistically significant.

This is especially concerning given that Black women experience the highest incidence of injury and death from intimate partner violence in the country.

The problem isn’t the laws themselves. It’s that the mechanisms of the law depend on a delivery system – courts, law enforcement, protective orders – that doesn’t work well for Black women.

After reporting domestic abuse, Black women are more likely to be incarcerated for defending themselves against their abuser, and they lose custody of their children more often once CPS becomes involved. A study examining preferences of intimate-partner violence survivors found that Black women report fear and distrust of police as a barrier to engaging with the legal system.

Because of these experiences, Black women understandably engage the criminal justice system less frequently. And laws protect only the people who can use them.

The media usually get Black femicide wrong

Another problem surrounding intimate partner homicide inflicts its harms after death.

When a woman is killed by her partner, media coverage often follows a familiar script: a name, a location, a grieving community. What it almost never includes is the word that I believe most accurately describes what happened: femicide.

Feminists in many countries, particularly in Latin America, have fought to enact femicide laws in response to pervasive violence against women. But the U.S. has no such laws and lags behind here.

Research has documented consistently that news coverage of intimate partner homicide depicts it as episodic rather than systemic, treating each killing as an isolated event rather than part of a preventable pattern.

When the victim is a Black woman, the issues compound.

Coverage of Black women’s deaths is less frequent, less sustained and less likely to generate the kind of public outrage that drives policy change. The focus in these stories, when they do run, tends to fall on the relationship or the victim’s personal history rather than on the systems that failed her.

This matters because media framing helps to determine what the public believes is fixable.

When journalists cover intimate partner homicide as a private tragedy, it becomes politically inert. When they contextualize it as the result of an unenforced gun law or a legal loophole, it becomes a policy failure – and policy failures have a policy remedy.

I believe the U.S. needs comprehensive standards for firearm restrictions in domestic violence cases, more robust enforcement and targeted efforts ensuring these protections reach all communities equitably.

For Black women, delay or failure may be the difference between life and death.

This story was produced in collaboration with Rewire News Group, an independent, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering reproductive health.

Sativa Banks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Tennessee set out to execute Tony Carruthers on May 21, 2026, but he lived to tell about it.

Carruthers, who was sentenced to death for a 1994 triple murder, survived his date with death when the execution team members could find only one suitable vein in which to secure an IV, but not, as USA Today reports, the “backup line, which is required under the state’s lethal injection protocol.”

After the failed attempt, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee gave Carruthers a one-year reprieve, a decision the governor did not explain.

What happened to Carruthers is a reminder that things frequently go wrong in executions, even if in almost all cases the problem is resolved and the execution is completed.

Indeed, in the past 80 years, only eight other men have had experiences like Carruthers’ and survived execution attempts.

Four of those execution “survivors” were killed by a second execution attempt, while others escaped that fate. Three others died on death row; one of them after the state agreed not to try to execute him a second time, and one of them is still alive and awaiting his fate.

Having studied capital punishment for decades, I know the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” has shaped constitutional discussions around failed executions. But so far, courts have not stood in the way when state governments have wanted to try to execute the same man again.

Not just a lethal injection problem

Carruthers survived a lethal injection attempt, but execution failures have not been confined to that method. A look at the history of hanging reveals several instances in which it failed.

In 1833, for example, a hanging in Pennsylvania failed to kill Charles Getter, who had been sentenced to death for murdering his wife.

“The rope was placed around Getter’s neck. The hangman drew it up fast,” true crime author Amanda Howard notes. “Getter struggled and kicked, choking, before the rope broke, throwing him to the ground.” However, Getter did not die.

The executioner sent someone to look for a stronger rope. This time, the rope did not break and Getter met “the fate of a murderer.”

In 1894, Will Purvis’ hanging also failed when the noose loosened. Instead of dying from a broken neck, Purvis survived, suffering only rope burns on his neck.

Unlike Getter, Purvis returned to prison contending that he was innocent. His lawyers unsuccessfully tried to get the courts to prevent a second execution attempt. Purvis remained behind bars until 1898, when Mississippi’s governor pardoned him. Purvis is the only execution survivor ever to receive such grace.

In the late 19th century, the electric chair replaced hanging as the country’s primary execution method, but it did not prevent failed executions. At least once in the 20th century, the electric chair also failed to kill.

In the spring of 1946, the state of Louisiana tried to use it in the execution of Willie Francis, a 16-year-old Black youth who had been convicted of murdering a local sheriff. At the time, the electric chair was said to be the most humane execution method.

But what Francis experienced hardly seemed humane. When the electric current reached him, “He started going into convulsions.” The executioner “flipped the switch again,” but Francis was not killed.

Later, like Purvis, Francis turned to the courts to try to stave off another execution attempt. The decision in his case would set the precedent for how judges would deal with other execution survivors.

An accident?

In January 1947, months after Francis survived the electrocution, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Louisiana permission to try again. The justices split, with five giving Louisiana the green light and four dissenting.

Justice Stanley Reed’s majority opinion emphasized that what had happened to Francis was accidental and that, without malicious intent, there was no violation of the Eighth Amendment. As he put it, “The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the prompt consummation of the sentence cannot, it seems to us, add an element of cruelty to its subsequent execution.”

In his view, “The cruelty against which the constitution protects a convicted man is cruelty ‘inherent’ in the method of punishment, not the ‘necessary suffering’ involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely.”

Justice Harold Burton spoke for the dissenting judges. As he put it: “The intent of the executioner cannot lessen the torture or excuse the result.” A second execution would offend the “fundamental instincts of civilized man.”

Francis was put to death almost a year to the day after his first execution failed.

It would be several decades until another person survived an execution. But the pace of failed executions has only picked up since the start of the 21st century.

21st century execution survivors

From 2009 until May 2026, six people survived failed lethal injection attempts. Romell Broom became the first 21st-century execution survivor when in 2009 the state of Ohio gave up after trying for two hours to find a usable vein in which to secure an IV line.

In his case, the Ohio Supreme Court, relying on the Francis precedent, decided that “The insertion of IV lines is merely a preparatory step to the execution.” In its view, Broom’s punishment had not really begun. Therefore, a second execution would not violate the prohibition on double jeopardy or on the imposition of cruel punishment.

But before Ohio could again attempt to execute Broom, he died on death row in December 2020 after contracting COVID-19. Another 21st-century execution survivor, Alva Campbell, also died on death row.

In 2018, Doyle Hamm reached an agreement with the state of Alabama stating that he would not be subject to a second execution after executioners couldn’t access a vein during an attempted lethal injection. Hamm died from cancer in 2021.

However, Alabama succeeded in executing two other execution survivors, Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith, both in 2024. In both cases, they had survived failed lethal injections.

And Thomas Creech is, like Carruthers, still alive after lethal injection failure, this time in Idaho. It’s not clear if and when Idaho will try again to put him to death. If it does, the state will use the firing squad, which will become its primary execution method on July 1, 2026.

Carruthers’ fate

As Carruthers awaits his fate in Tennessee, defense lawyers in the state have asked Gov. Lee to halt all executions pending a thorough review of its protocol.

And as the Death Penalty Information Center reports, “attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office filed a new federal lawsuit … to prevent Tennessee from attempting to execute Mr. Carruthers a second time.”

That suit builds on litigation filed in March 2025 alleging that the administration of lethal injection in Tennessee inflicts cruel and unusual punishment.

Only time will tell if the judges who hear those cases will be persuaded by what Justice Burton wrote in the Francis case: “Although the failure of the first attempt, in the present case was unintended, the reapplication of the electric current will be intentional … The present case demonstrates that, today, two separate applications are sufficiently ‘cruel and unusual’ to be prohibited.”

When the state, Burton explained, seeks to execute someone, it has a duty “to make sure that there (is) no failure.”

Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When researchers founded Anthropic in 2021, they said the race to build powerful AI was moving too recklessly. They inserted detailed safety measures into their products and marketed their commitment to safety as the corporate quality that distinguished them from competitors – notably OpenAI, the rival company they had left. In March 2026 that reputation was tested when the Trump administration declared that Anthropic was a supply chain risk.

The company had refused to remove built-in safeguards that prohibited domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons from products it had supplied to the Pentagon. President Donald Trump ordered the federal government to stop using Anthropic and its large language model, Claude, labeling the company a national security risk. Within hours, OpenAI made a deal to be the Pentagon’s supplier instead.

Despite Anthropic’s apparent stand, during its clash with Trump the company quietly scrapped the binding principles in its main safety policy. Several weeks earlier, Anthropic’s head of safeguards research had resigned, warning that “the world is in peril.” And a week after the Pentagon officially banned Claude, the U.S. military was still using the technology to select and target sites to bomb in Iran.

As a philosopher studying the rule of law and democracy, I’ve found that authoritarian governance of technology often does not involve direct censorship. Instead it delegitimizes the intended protections, poisoning any external regulation and even voluntary self-regulation that deviates from the regime’s goals or values.

The Trump administration, which follows the authoritarian playbook, has argued that AI safety standards and user restrictions are ideological impositions rather than sound engineering decisions. The “Preventing Woke AI” executive order of July 23, 2025, didn’t change what companies are allowed to do with their products. By by attaching the “woke” label to basic ethics protections, the administration made those protections politically costly to maintain.

The Brennan Center, a legal policy and advocacy organization, has documented how AI ethics is being redefined through contract negotiations. In these cases, the government weaponizes terms such as “biased” to disqualify companies that maintain civil rights protections from competing for federal contracts.

The prisoner’s dilemma

A single U.S. Defense Department AI contract can be worth billions of dollars. It can also provide access to data no private company could otherwise have and unlock further government work. Companies that maintain the ethics guardrails risk ceding ground to competitors that don’t.

When OpenAI moved in to take the Pentagon work, CEO Sam Altman told his board of directors the move looked “opportunistic and sloppy.” But he said the company took it anyway, because admitting that an action looks bad is different from being willing to fall behind.

This situation reflects the classic prisoner’s dilemma. If Anthropic maintains safety provisions and OpenAI strips them away, OpenAI gets the contracts and the future advantage. If both companies maintain the provisions, digital protections might survive. But because neither company can be certain the other will hold the line – and because being left behind is not a good option – the rational choice is to discard safety measures.

These circumstances differ from a standard market race to the bottom in one key respect: The trap of having to strip away guardrails isn’t an accident of competition; it’s being maintained by the government through incentives.

Palantir didn’t wait to be caught in this trap. The data analytics company was founded by Peter Thiel and run by Alex Karp, who spent years denouncing “woke” Silicon Valley. Palantir built its business model around government surveillance and military data infrastructure. While Palantir has said it is committed to privacy and civil liberties, critics contend that the company is dismantling those protections. The company’s stock has surged under the Trump administration, its contracts have expanded, and it now has a front-row seat where AI policy is being written. Palantir solved the prisoner’s dilemma by defecting first.

It’s important to note that the dissolution of safety teams across the industry, such as OpenAI’s Superalignment team and Microsoft’s ethics unit, isn’t the result of anyone deciding to abandon safety. What I see in analyzing the different companies’ actions is a pattern: an accumulation of collective, incremental compromises that quietly reorient the definition of safety away from the public and toward the state. The resulting harm and risks fall on everyone whose lives are shaped by AI systems.

Redefining safety to serve the government

Across government contracts and policy documents, I have also observed that the original definition of AI-related safety has shifted from protecting the public toward making systems controllable for the state. The “anti-woke” framing accelerates this shift: Once ethics requirements are characterized as ideological rather than technical, removing them can be framed not as a safety reduction but as a correction.

This shift does not require bad faith from the companies. Safety teams are still doing rigorous work. The companies are not lying when they describe their safety commitments. Those commitments are now simply oriented toward the government rather than the public.

The case for stronger AI regulation assumes that a government constrains commercial entities on behalf of the public. But blacklisting a company for maintaining civil rights protections, and then banning the military deployment of its AI hours later, shows that the federal government in this instance enables the harm that regulation is meant to prevent.

Expanding regulatory authority over AI companies does not necessarily protect citizens. Safety regulations – intended to constrain corporate power – in authoritarian regimes become tools to coerce compliance.

Michael Gregory does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?

The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.

Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”

Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates – tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders – whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.

Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.

“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”

How does he define the working class? “Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.”

The theory is all the same: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it – Democrats can do it again.

I’m a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase. “Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it.

Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s – not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did.

Working-class identity

Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies has asked respondents whether they think of themselves as members of the working class. This article uses my analysis of that data.

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years, 38% in 2024.

Working-class identity is something more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world.

There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Working-class voters have never been a predominantly Democratic group – not even at the height of the New Deal coalition. Based on the American National Election Studies self-report measure, the working-class share of the Democratic coalition peaked around 56% in 1960 and has fallen more or less continuously since, sitting at just about 30% today.

Meanwhile, the share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for half a century: A majority did so in 1958, but not since.

Working-class voters have not become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 – the first time in the survey’s history – did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins.

The data shows a working class that is politically homeless: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party.

Economic abandonment

So what drove them out?

A segment of the progressive left has a ready answer: Democrats abandoned working-class voters economically – on trade, wages and industrial policy. Working-class voters responded rationally. Fix the economics and the coalition comes back.

Trade is where the argument is strongest. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.

By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while a majority – 54% – of working-class voters continued to do so.

Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix.

What fairness requires

In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would mean fewer social problems. A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should worry more about equality.

In 1986, half of mainstream Democrats and a slightly smaller percentage of working-class voters agreed with the idea that Black Americans don’t succeed because they don’t try hard enough. By 2024, Democratic agreement had collapsed to 13%. Working-class voters declined too, but to 32%.

The gap that opened between them is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It is a story about the Democratic Party’s rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility.

Working-class voters, who historically have understood their own lives through a framework of hard work and earned reward, did not shift so dramatically.

Alignment becomes division

On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a 25-point gap emerged.

On whether religion is an important part of their life: a near-zero gap through the early 1990s, but 17 points by 2024. On abortion, a 3-point gap in 1980 became 30 points in 2024. Regarding whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 – around 8% support – but by 2020 Democrats were at 48%, working-class voters at 24%.

But even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust the institution being asked to deliver it – a distrust decades in the making.

How the ‘system’ plays

In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money. By 2024 that gap reached 27 points – not because working-class voters lurched toward anti-government extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change.

Working-class voters are 17 points more likely than Democrats to say people like them have no say in what government does. In 2024, 88% of working-class voters and 75% of Democrats said government is run by a few big interests. Both groups agree the system is captured.

Yet the Democratic policy response, invariably, is to expand the system.

On support for expanding government – from healthcare to jobs to environmental programs – Democrats and working-class voters have diverged dramatically since the 1980s. By 2024, there were approval gaps of between 20 and 30 points on providing government health insurance, environmental spending and a guaranteed jobs program.

On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.

Not all class war

Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them. Democrats, over the same period, have grown more comfortable with the institutions working-class voters have increasingly less faith in.

This distrust is the accumulated residue of specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government’s watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved the banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators missed entirely.

To be fair, this is precisely what the new crop of reform candidates say they want to fix. The argument that the right candidate can move the needle is not crazy. Candidate quality matters. Personal trust can substitute for institutional trust, at least at the margins.

But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.

Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying.

Nicholas Jacobs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

During a Washington Nationals baseball game on May 17, 2026, three people unfurled a large banner from the upper deck of Nationals Park displaying a link to a white nationalist website.

The website, warning of the replacement of whites by people of color, called for the deportation of 100 million people from the United States.

The disturbing incident reflects the broader ascendance of the “great replacement theory,” the xenophobic conspiracy theory asserting that shadowy elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to replace native-born white Americans with immigrants of color.

Prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, have echoed ideas associated with the great replacement theory. And conservative media outlets, such as Fox News, have disseminated them to millions of viewers.

But are the xenophobic ideas recently expressed at Nationals Park limited to a small number of extremists, or are they also endorsed by the broader public? If the latter, how do political and media elites contribute to their spread?

To answer these questions, our team has conducted several nationally representative surveys that ask Americans about their support for key tenets of the great replacement theory.

New immigrants as a threat

We consistently found that a substantial minority of Americans agree with the sentiment that new immigrants threaten the political, cultural and economic power of white Americans. In our latest poll of 1,000 Americans fielded in March 2026, 36% agreed with the statement: “Native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants.”

A notable number of Americans – 26% – also believed political elites are trying to “replace” the existing white population, agreeing with the statement: “There are people who secretly work to make sure immigrants will eventually replace real Americans.”

Support for these beliefs is concentrated most heavily among white Americans, Republicans, conservatives and self-identifying members of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Indeed, more than 3 in 4 members of the MAGA movement and close to 6 in 10 Republicans agreed with the statement: “Immigrants invade and colonize the United States.”

But what explains this spread of the great replacement theory?

In our newly published, peer-reviewed study, we used nationally representative panel survey data that tracked over 500 white Americans over time to attempt to answer this question.

We found that white Americans who identified as Republican, who are conservatives and who have negative views of people from other racial backgrounds are all more likely to express support for key tenets of the great replacement theory. Moreover, we uncovered clear evidence that white Americans who watch Fox News are also more likely to agree with the conspiracy theory.

Given the popularity of Fox News, we believe this latter point deserved further investigation. As detailed in our paper, while 39% of all white Americans agree that immigrants invade and colonize the U.S., 61% of white Americans who watch Fox News agree with this view. Even when taking into account partisan identification, ideology, racial attitudes and demographic characteristics, Fox News viewership remains significantly associated with more support for the great replacement theory.

Additionally, because we tracked white Americans over time, we could observe changes in their support for the conspiracy theory in response to variations in their viewership of Fox News. Simply put, the more Fox News programming that a white American watches, the more likely they are to adopt the conspiracy theory.

Links to political violence

Our research builds on decades of work showing that public opinion is strongly influenced by media consumption. Recent scholarship, in particular, highlights the influence of Fox News on public opinion. It shows how exposure to Fox News leads Americans to express more conservative attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration policies and criminal justice issues.

Given the attention that Fox News hosts, elected officials and pundits dedicate to the great replacement theory, our results suggest that this coverage has indeed influenced the views of white Americans. The great replacement theory is no longer purely on the fringes of society.

In our view, this is troubling, not only because the conspiracy theory treats immigration as an existential issue — where the stakes are framed as the very preservation of one’s self and country — but also because the theory is also linked to numerous instances of political violence directed at people of color and religious minorities.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, the nation will no doubt continue to grapple with the topic of immigration, race and what it means to be an American.

While there’s plenty of room for disagreement over immigration policy, conspiracy theories make it much harder to find common ground or craft political compromises. What we’ve found is that when prominent media embrace conspiracy theorizing, increased public endorsement of conspiracies will follow.

Jesse Rhodes receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and Demos.

Tatishe Nteta receives funding from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Adam Eichen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

George Washington knew his forces could not win the American Revolutionary War without some measure of sea power. “It follows then as certain as that night succeeds the day,” he later wrote in a letter, “that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive, and with it everything honorable and glorious.”

The problem was that the American commander did not have a navy.

As a professor of early American history, I have taught courses on the American Revolution for more than 20 years and have written two books on its maritime dimensions. Washington’s solution wouldn’t come from a French shipyard or a congressional committee. It would come from a group of angry, out-of-work New England fishermen.

Supplying the army from the sea

In 1775, American ground forces managed to lay siege to the British army in Boston, but Washington needed provisions and military stores to sustain pressure on this key commercial hub. Looking out across the Atlantic Ocean, he noticed supply ships arriving in droves from Great Britain – unescorted – to supply the British army in Boston with guns and ammunition.

Unbeknownst to them, the British had already handed the American commander the ships and mariners he needed to capture those resources.

The Sons of Liberty, a network of political activists, had angered the British government by resisting taxes and commercial regulations – from the 1765 Stamp Act, which taxed printed documents, to the 1773 Tea Act, which controlled what tea leaves made their way into North American cupboards.

To punish rebels for their treason, Parliament passed the Restraining Act of 1775, banning New Englanders from fishing on the Atlantic Ocean. Overnight, thousands of skilled mariners – men who spent their lives wrestling 100-pound cod out of the freezing, storm-tossed North Atlantic – were out of a job. They weren’t just unemployed; they were furious. These fishermen left their work tools and ships behind, picked up weapons and joined the siege of Boston alongside American farmers.

Ashley Bowen, who lived and worked in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the principal fishing port in America at the time, recorded in his journal on May 22, 1775, “the fishermen are enlisting quite quick.”

A letter from a French diplomat to the foreign minister in Paris confirmed the news a couple of weeks later: “4,800 sailors seeing they were going to be deprived of their fishing rights, deserted their ships and joined their compatriots under arms.”

Creating the first navy

Washington, commissioned by Congress as commander in chief of all American armed forces in June 1775, saw an opportunity. He didn’t wait for Congress to build new frigates. Instead, he reached out to John Glover, a fish merchant from Marblehead and a commissioned officer under his command.

Washington’s plan was simple: Take the sturdy, salt-stained schooners used for fishing and turn them into armed, seagoing predators.

The first of these was Glover’s own fishing vessel and trade ship, Hannah. She wasn’t a formidable man-of-war but a 78-ton workhorse that spent summers at the Grand Banks and winters hauling rum and sugar from the Caribbean. Washington armed the trade ship with a few cannons, manned her with fishermen and sent her out to hijack British supply ships to help his army win the siege of Boston.

Just two days after the Hannah was underway, her crew captured the Unity, a sloop loaded with naval stores and lumber, supplies sorely needed by British forces in Boston.

Between August and October 1775, Washington outfitted a fleet of schooners at Congress’ expense to intercept British supply ships off the coast of New England. These vessels and crews, whose wages were paid by the American government, constituted what many historians consider America’s first navy. Washington reminded each captain that they sailed “at the Continental Expense.” These orders from Washington and the payments made by Congress made these ships official American warships, operating under the authority of what would become the federal government.

These recruits didn’t need nautical training; they were seasoned seafarers who had battled rough waters and gale force winds. On Oct. 13, 1775, George Washington wrote to his brother, John Augustine Washington, that the fishermen were “soldiers … who have been bred to the sea.”

In 1776, Washington informed the governor of Connecticut, who had asked to draft seamen from Washington’s regiments for his own naval expedition, that he could not spare any. “I must depend chiefly upon them for a successful opposition to the Enemy,” Washington explained.

Keeping the Revolution alive

This fleet of converted fishing boats punched above its weight: In the early years of the war they captured 55 British vessels. One such prize, the Nancy, was transporting 2,000 muskets, 30 tons of musket balls and a massive 15-inch brass mortar – supplies the American army desperately needed for the war effort.

Because the British navy was spread too thin, with too few warships available to police the Atlantic coastline, the armed fishing vessels were able to disrupt supply lines and keep the Revolution alive through its infancy. By the time the British realized the threat, the damage was done.

On Feb. 26, 1776, just a few months after Washington launched his fleet, British Admiral Molyneux Shuldham wrote in a report to his superiors that his forces in Boston were low on everything from naval supplies to weapons. What little they could find had to be purchased “at the most extravagant prices.”

The British government had not assigned military convoys to trans-Atlantic shipments at the start of the conflict in 1775. Now, Shuldham recommended arming the supply ships themselves, since valuable stores were being intercepted by rebels in small vessels, “however attentive our Officers to their Duty.”

He concluded the report with an ominous note, explaining that he simply did not have the resources to do everything that was being asked of him – support the army, blockade rebel ports and protect British ships bound for Boston: “I must beg leave to observe to you the very few Ships I am provided with to enable Me to Co-operate with the Army, Cruize off the Ports of the Rebels to prevent their receiving Supplies, or protect those destined to this place from falling into their hands.”

Christopher Magra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As U.S. cities prepare to host the FIFA World Cup, familiar warnings about human trafficking “spikes” at major sporting events have reemerged.

Media outlets point to elevated risks, advocacy groups roll out awareness campaigns, and city authorities and law enforcement ramp up anti-trafficking efforts.

This is all well intentioned. But as experts in human trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children, we believe the talk of an increased risk might be misplaced. Two decades of empirical research across events such as the Super Bowl, Olympic Games and prior World Cups show no consistent evidence that human trafficking increases because of large sporting events. Further, framing trafficking as episodic and event-based can be counterproductive.

The ‘flashlight effect’

The belief that major sporting events produce spikes in human trafficking has circulated for more than two decades, gaining international prominence around the 2004 Olympic Games and reappearing consistently during subsequent FIFA World Cup tournaments, Olympic Games and Super Bowls.

The narrative persists largely because it appears intuitively plausible: Large influxes of tourists, temporary workers, nightlife activity and commercial spending are assumed to increase demand for commercial sex generally and also exploitative labor.

While these events do temporarily increase tourism and commercial sex markets, trafficking itself is not event-driven.

Studies examining arrest records, hotline calls and social service engagement during major events find fluctuations consistent with increased visibility and reporting, but not necessarily increased victimization.

Research shows that while some major sporting events correspond with increases in online commercial sex advertisements, those increases are not unique to the event and are comparable to other large conventions, holiday weekends or tourism-driven gatherings. For example, a National Institute of Justice-supported study analyzing escort advertisements during large public events concluded that Super Bowls “did not stand out” relative to other events in terms of changes in the commercial sex market.

Similarly, anti-trafficking organizations within the United States such at the Polaris Project and Anti-Trafficking Review
have noted that increases in calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline during major sporting events likely reflect intensified publicity campaigns and greater hotline visibility rather than confirmed increases in trafficking itself.

Scholars have described this phenomenon as a “flashlight effect,” in which increased media attention, specialized law enforcement operations and public awareness efforts generate more reports, arrests and detections because more people are actively looking for trafficking indicators – not necessarily because more exploitation is occurring.

In other words, heightened awareness campaigns may produce detection effects rather than there actually being more incidents. Conflating the two leads to misinterpretation of trends and misallocation of resources.

The human trafficking myths

The narrative that people face an increased risk of becoming the victims of trafficking at big sporting events is based on a number of myths and misconceptions. One is that traffickers will travel to host cities to abduct or exploit unknown victims.

In reality, most trafficking – both sex and labor – involves recruitment through existing relationships: intimate partners, family members, acquaintances or trusted community ties. Grooming, coercion and economic dependence unfold over time, often long before any event occurs. Event-focused enforcement strategies therefore risk targeting the wrong mechanisms of exploitation while neglecting root problems.

Another common myth is that trafficking tied to these events primarily involves the sex trafficking of women and girls by organized criminal networks. This framing obscures the prevalence of labor trafficking and the diverse nature of victims. Evidence from several national datasets shows that labor trafficking occurs across industries likely to scale up during major events such as hospitality, construction, food service and cleaning services.

However, labor trafficking often gets overlooked. Moreover, victims can include men, boys, LGBTQ+ people and U.S. citizens – many of whom do not fit the sensationalized narrative that dominates event-related discourse.

These myths are not benign. Rather, they have measurable consequences. First, they distort policy by shifting resources toward short-term, high-visibility enforcement – through law enforcement stings, raids and temporary task forces. This comes at the expense of more sustained investment in trauma-informed care and programs that address root causes, such as housing stability.

Second, they contribute to victim misidentification. Individuals who do not resemble the “typical victim” portrayed in media – such as those with convicted of violent crime, substance use or complex trauma histories – may be overlooked or even criminalized.

In addition, these myth-driven campaigns can inadvertently increase surveillance and policing of marginalized communities, including immigrants, sex workers and unhoused individuals, without improving safety or access to services.

Limiting the field

While it could be argued that any increased attention to human trafficking is welcomed, there is a downside: Treating the problem as episodic and event-based can obscure the developmental and cumulative nature of trafficking.

Trafficking is closely linked to adverse childhood experiences, poly-victimization – that is, being exposed to multiple different forms of victimization across one’s lifespan – and structural inequities.

Focusing on high-profile events like the World Cup limits the ability of communities fighting human trafficking to build longitudinal, prevention-oriented strategies that intervene early and across child welfare, education, healthcare and housing systems.

To bolster prevention, we believe public attention and resources must move from panic to precision. That means aligning interventions with evidence. It also means investing in cross-sector identification and referral systems, expanding labor trafficking detection, supporting survivor-led services and addressing the structural conditions that create vulnerability at all times – not just every four years.

Kathleen Murray Preble has received funding in the past and/or currently from the Missouri Foundation for Health (MFFH), the Missouri Collaborative Against Human Trafficking (MCAHT), and DOJ Bureau of Justice Assistance. The opinions expressed in this article represent those of the author and do not reflect the views of the DOJ, MFFH, the MCAHT, UTA, or the University of Texas System.

Jennifer E. O’Brien has received funding from the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Justice. She is affiliated with The University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work.

The opinions expressed in this article represent those of the author and do not reflect the views of The CDC, NIH, NIJ, The University of Texas at Arlington, or the University of Texas System.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

A rapid series of administrative, staffing and policy changes the Social Security Administration underwent early on in the second Trump administration are making it much harder to get disability benefits that millions of Americans rely on to make ends meet.

The agency cut more than 7,100 jobs – more than 13% of its workforce and its largest staffing cut ever. It closed six of its 10 regional offices, moved more services online and expanded the use of automated and artificial intelligence systems on its public phone lines.

Some rules changed and changed back again. For instance, Social Security officials announced in March 2025 that people would no longer be able to apply for benefits on the phone, only to reverse course a month later.

We’re social work professors at California State University, Sacramento, Binghamton University in New York and the University of Wisconsin-Madison who study these programs. And we have each independently found that even before 2025, it was hard to get disability benefits.

Now, we’ve found that the process has become even harder.

Missing metrics

In June 2025, the agency removed key customer service metrics, such as phone wait times and disability claim processing times, from its website. This data had provided the public with critical transparency about the agency’s performance.

Lacking insight into the impacts of the many changes underway, we launched a project to study how they were affecting access to disability benefits. We interviewed benefits representatives – lawyers, social workers and other kinds of advocates who help applicants and beneficiaries navigate Social Security systems.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 52 advocates at 32 nonprofits, such as legal aid agencies and disability organizations. These organizations collectively assist over 8,000 people every year.

We’re referring to these advocates by pseudonyms to maintain their privacy. Many insisted that neither they nor their employers be identified due to fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

We published our findings in collaboration with two national disability advocacy organizations, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and the American Association of People with Disabilities, in March 2026. We took the step of publishing with these organizations before submitting our work to academic journals because we wanted to share these findings with the public as soon as possible.

16 million people get these benefits

The Social Security Administration is a federal agency that runs some of the country’s biggest social safety net programs, including benefits for more than 60 million retired workers, as well as survivor benefits for the spouses of workers who have died and their children who are under 18.

In addition, the agency administers two kinds of disability benefits to a total of 16 million people.

Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, is a public assistance program for low-income older adults and people with disabilities under age 65. In 2026, it provides a maximum of US$994 per month for any one person getting benefits.

Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI, provides a limited pension for those who have worked long enough to qualify and now have disabilities that prevent them from working any longer. Payments vary based on one’s past wages, but the monthly average in 2026 is about $1,634.

To receive either kind of benefits, Americans must meet the Social Security Administration’s strict definition of disability, which considers health status, past education and employment and age to determine if a physical or mental disability makes someone unable to work.

There are no time limits on how long you can receive SSI benefits. But children and adults under age 65 are subject to periodic assessments of their eligibility and must adhere to the program’s rigid rules. For example, they can’t have more than $2,000 in assets at any time while receiving benefits, must submit their pay stubs for any earned income monthly, and must report any changes in their living situation, marital status or bank accounts.

Encountering long wait times and chatbots

The Trump administration made no formal changes to eligibility criteria for SSI or SSDI, despite considering proposals that could have narrowed eligibility rules and potentially excluded millions who qualify for these benefits today or reduced the size of benefits payments for many people with disabilities.

But when the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research center, analyzed state-level data from the first half of 2025, it found that 7% fewer claims for disability benefits were submitted to the Social Security Administration than during the same period a year earlier.

We got more insight into these changes during our interviews.

We heard that with fewer employees, the agency had fewer people available to answer phone calls, contributing to long waits. Customer service protocols also changed so that phone calls to the Social Security Administration were routed to field offices the callers hadn’t dialed, where staff couldn’t help them.

Other benefits representatives encountered AI chatbots that did not answer their questions, or found that staffers with specialized knowledge had been reassigned to perform other tasks.

“I just have so many cases that are stuck in purgatory because they don’t have enough workers to work them,” said Jane, a paralegal we interviewed in Social Security’s Kansas City region. “They don’t have enough workers to answer the phone to tell me what’s happening to them.”

Field office frustrations

Another source of friction emerged around visits to Social Security Administration field offices.

The agency has more than 1,200 field offices across the nation where people can seek services. Shortly before Trump took office in 2025, the agency began moving from walk-in services to requiring appointments. But the Social Security Administration had promised in 2024 that it would “not turn people away” if they couldn’t or didn’t want to make an appointment.

And yet benefits representatives told us in 2025 that many field offices did require appointments, and turned people away if they arrived without them.

This was especially frustrating because it was hard to make those appointments over the phone anymore, said Freddie, a benefits representative in the Denver region. “Now, we can’t reach anybody at Social Security,” she told us. “We can’t get through to make an appointment.”

As of May 2026, 10 offices in nine states are either open on an appointment-only basis or closed to the public until further notice.

Obstacles online and in person

The Social Security Administration’s push to conduct business online assumed that everyone could easily use digital platforms. But that’s simply not true for many of the most vulnerable low-income people with disabilities who have or are applying for SSI and SSDI benefits.

As Michael, an attorney in the Atlanta region, explained, it’s not reasonable to assume that “someone who’s in their 20s, but unhoused” or “someone in their 70s and having issues with memory loss” can handle an online application process.

Another challenge is the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, which has now extended to people who are authorized to live in the United States. Many immigrants who get disability benefits, or who support their relatives with SSI and SSDI benefits, are no longer sure it’s safe for them to visit Social Security offices.

Those fears were reinforced in February 2026, as reports emerged that some Social Security workers had been told to share appointment data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Several benefits specialists told us they no longer know how to advise such clients about the potential risks of interacting with the Social Security Administration, including whether it was safe to visit field offices or whether the agency might share their information with immigration authorities.

Dying while waiting

Staff cuts meant that the problem-solvers who advocates had once turned to had left, taking years of expertise with them. The agency’s remaining staff members were harder to reach than ever. Some were less familiar with the intricacies of the Social Security Administration’s policies and procedures than their senior colleagues who had left.

As disability benefits have become harder to obtain, many people are suffering. We heard multiple accounts of terminally ill clients dying before receiving benefits for which they were eligible.

For example, Anne, an attorney in the agency’s Philadelphia region, described the case of a homeless, seriously ill client who couldn’t move forward because Social Security Administration staff told her that they couldn’t locate paperwork she had submitted three years earlier.

“This woman is dying,” Anne said. “All you have to do is push a little button to get this moving, and you’re telling me you can’t.”

Miranda, an attorney in the Philadelphia region, explained that in the past, she advocated for clients over complex legal issues. During the second Trump administration, that’s changed.

Now, her clients may find that they need an attorney simply “to make sure something gets off someone’s desk and then faxed into the system.”

Faxing, rarely necessary for most everyday business transactions, is commonly used during the disability benefits application process.

“It is taking more of my time to do the same amount of work, which then means we’re not able to take as many cases” said Megan, a paralegal in the Boston region.

Suggesting possible improvements

Our report includes recommendations for improving how the Social Security Administration responds to applications for disability benefits.

In our view, the agency should employ enough people to handle all applications and appeals in a timely and accurate manner while protecting the data privacy and accessibility for all applicants – including those from immigrant families.

We also believe that the agency’s leaders would be wise to listen seriously to feedback from professional benefits representatives who help people with disabilities apply for SSI and SSDI benefits, such as those we interviewed, and their clients.

Katie Savin is the Ford Fellow in Disability Policy Research at the National Academy of Social Insurance and a Benefits Futures Innovator at the Benefits Futures Studio, a project from the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and the National Academy of Social Insurance. They have received prior funding from the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium, funded by the Social Security Administration.

Callie Freitag receives funding from the Disability Economic Policy Consortium via The Roosevelt Institute and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Matthew Borus previously received funding from the Social Security Administration through the Analyzing Relationships between Disability, Rehabilitation, and Work (ARDRAW) small grant program.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Throughout time, maps have been useful tools for those in power to stake their claim over territories and markets. Politicians start nationwide redistricting battles to ensure partisan control, weakening the power of voters. The Trump administration’s geopolitical posturing over Greenland builds on a long history of imperialism aided by maps. And in ancient Rome, the Peutinger map depicted vast ideas of empire by placing Rome at the center of the world.

But maps can also tell hidden stories about politics and power that help people reclaim access to their own spaces and futures. These include counter maps – that is, maps that rework existing assumptions – to expand on the dominant narratives about a place to include viewpoints that were previously excluded.

As an urban and architectural designer, mapper and spatial politics researcher, I’ve seen how maps shape urban spaces and the stories told about them. I’ve also seen how maps have the power to question these stories, opening up other meanings a place can have that are shared by everyday residents and workers.

More than just digital wayfinding aids, maps are strategic tools of world-building. Maps show how certain ideas and boundaries that people may think are fixed can be rendered flexible. Anyone can make a map, and because maps are instruments of spatial storytelling, the possibilities they reveal about places are actually endless.

Who makes the maps?

Geographer Mark Monmonier famously described how to lie with maps. He pointed out that mapmakers who have power, like governments and companies, use selective editing to advance specific goals or disseminate a brand.

The Shell Oil road maps of the 1950s are a useful example of maps as marketing. With a large logo on the front and the Shell north star compass on the inside, these maps were provided free in gas stations across the country. They advertised the brand while facilitating auto travel by delineating roads and major features, including mileage charts on the backs so motorists could plan gas stops. The maps omitted competing transit systems like bus routes.

Public agencies and public-private partnerships also advance agendas via maps. The Home Ownership Loan Corporation redlined maps of the 1930s show even more directly how the government and real estate industry used maps to exclude certain communities. These maps were made for almost every major American city, and the zones they marked as risky for lenders coincided with neighborhoods where African Americans lived, thus taking them out of the home ownership market.

One can look today to gerrymandering efforts in states like Texas and Florida to see how maps are used to control who has access to the levers of democracy. These redistricting cases were done outside of a typical census year in order to win more congressional seats in the 2026 elections.

Remapping the ‘behind the scenes’

If maps are used to systematically shut minority neighborhoods out of property markets, then remapping these systems can reveal how the strings of government and private industry are pulled to exclude these neighborhoods, and whom this exclusion benefits.

In my book “Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA,” I remap this American city to show what happens behind the scenes in regional and municipal planning, revealing why such stark conditions of inequality persist there.

The suburb of Ferguson, in North St. Louis County, Missouri, made it into the national spotlight in 2014 after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed Black teenager. The community response to this injustice helped to spur the Black Lives Matter movement.

With the maps in this book, I layered in new stories to unpack the strained political and economic context underlying Ferguson. For example, historian Walter Johnson points out that there are several major Fortune 500 companies located just blocks from where Brown was killed. While those companies receive heavy tax subsidies and public development incentives for their physical growth, the rest of the municipality’s spending for necessities like public schools and sidewalks remains underfunded. By highlighting these facets of the landscape, maps can show who actually controls the imaginations of urban planners and politicians.

Remapping helps policymakers become more aware of biases within the data they use for mainstream neighborhood assessments and municipal map-making. Maps showing seemingly objective crime data, for example, often reinforce ideas of risk in minority neighborhoods. But when property crime in North St. Louis County, where a majority of Black residents live, is overlaid with the white-collar mortgage fraud crimes of 2008 – a dataset not readily available in typical municipal catalogs – it becomes evident how this area was targeted by subprime mortgage lenders. Broadening how people evaluate data and its sources can shift attention to the underlying forces shaping the statistics.

Remapping can also combine layers of seemingly unrelated information to discover new links between spatial details. For example, why is voter turnout so low in the ward where Brown was killed? A map of racial demographics combined with polling locations reveals there is not only no polling place in the majority African American ward, but also physical barriers – including an elevated rail line and stream corridor – that prevent residents from easily accessing City Hall and other polling places.

Maps for the people

As those in power continue to politicize maps, the practice of remapping can serve the broader public by making those systems of power more visible to everyone.

Counter maps have inspired activists to edit previously omitted information back into mainstream accounts. Mapmaker Andrew Middleton introduced me to one example: a petrofuturist view of the Shell Oil maps. These counter maps show the roads documented in the Shell Oil maps underwater based on projected sea level rise due to climate change – which is caused predominantly by the burning of fossil fuels produced by companies including Shell.

Maps are scaled geographical projections, ensuring legibility and usefulness. They are understood by people of all ages. They communicate graphically across languages, and they’re portable. When maps and counter maps uncover and layer the otherwise unseen relationships that shape a place, they assert new forms of collective memory, offering more meaningful versions of public authority.

Patty Heyda does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Colorado voters passed Amendment A, a ballot measure touted as an end to slavery in state prisons in 2018. The amendment eliminated the penal exception clause, which allowed the state to use forced labor in addition to incarceration as a punishment for crime.

Colorado was the first of eight states to repeal its penal exception clause. Advocates for the policy change hoped it would prevent forced labor for little pay. Colorado pays incarcerated workers between US$0.33 and $1.61 per hour for maintenance jobs such as cooking, cleaning and groundskeeping.

Nationally, the elimination of state penal exception clauses has had little impact on incarcerated workers. Lawsuits in Colorado and Alabama have alleged that forced labor continues despite the policy change.

My research examines prison conditions and programming, including work programs. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on state and federal prison industries, which sell goods produced by incarcerated workers to government agencies.

Colorado lawsuit alleges abuse

In 2022, the plaintiffs who brought a class action lawsuit, Mortis v. Polis, alleged that the Colorado Department of Corrections violated the amended state constitution by punishing incarcerated people who refused mandatory work programs. The punishments included solitary confinement and use of force.

Incarcerated people also reported the loss of good time and earned time credit, which are two sentence reduction incentives based on participating in work programs. Additionally, they reported loss of privileges like phone calls and family visits.

During the trial, David Lisac, deputy director of the Colorado Department of Corrections prison operations, testified. He said the department had neither changed its policies in response to the amendment nor attempted to ascertain whether the department was in compliance with the amendment.

In February 2026, the court ruled that the department and Gov. Jared Polis violated the state constitution by forcing people to work. The ruling specified that use of force and isolation for failure to work were unconstitutional. On the other hand, the court dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims that withholding privileges or credits constituted involuntary servitude.

Whether the decision will have an impact on work conditions in Colorado prisons remains to be seen.

History of the penal exception clause

When the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery passed in 1865, the penal exception clause allowed for slavery only as punishment for a crime. Along with Jim Crow laws that criminalized Blackness, the loophole allowed for the legal re-enslavement of Black Americans to financially benefit the state. The penal exception clause also allowed prisons to continue to operate as they had prior to the 13th Amendment. Historically, prisons in Colorado and across the U.S. used the labor of incarcerated workers and paid them little to nothing.

This included the establishment of state penal farms on former slave plantations and widespread convict leasing of incarcerated workers’ labor to private companies. Chain gangs to build railroads were also established during this time.

The Colorado Constitution, drafted and approved a decade later in 1876, included a provision that mirrored the 13th Amendment. Article II, Section 26, Colorado’s penal exception clause, stated: “Slavery prohibited. There shall never be in this state either slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

Opposition to forced labor in prison took many forms. Those include the Attica uprising in 1971, attempts to unionize incarcerated workers and prison labor strikes.

Colorado’s penal exception clause was eliminated in 2018. Following Colorado, legislation and ballot measures were introduced in many states and at the federal level.

Incarcerated people need work

Colorado and states across the country use incarcerated workers to do almost all the jobs of running the prison. Paying prevailing wages would significantly increase operating expenses. A cost-benefit analysis of paying incarcerated workers full wages for their work, by Edgeworth Economics, an economic consultancy firm, estimated the increase of expenses to fall between $8.5 billion to $14.5 billion nationwide.

Incarcerated people use earnings from their work to purchase food and hygiene products from the commissary. In addition, many derive meaning and purpose from work, which is important for mental health.

Refusing to work can also lead to harsh consequences. The Colorado lawsuit plaintiffs alleged that they experienced solitary confinement, isolation in their cells, loss of phone calls and visits, and loss of good time and earned time credits for failure to work. Solitary confinement harms mental health, and phone calls and visits are essential for family connectedness. Good time and earned time credits accrued through work can speed up release and are an important motivator to work, regardless of working conditions.

Simultaneously, incarcerated people risk retaliation for speaking out about prison conditions. For example, the incarcerated men who started the Free Alabama Movement to end forced labor in 2013, and featured in the popular 2025 documentary film “The Alabama Solution,” were later transferred to solitary confinement.

Incarcerated workers rarely considered employees

Some prison labor is recognized as employment and paid the minimum wage – in theory. Nationally, private-sector Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program and work release employers are required to pay the prevailing minimum wage to their incarcerated employees. However, states always take deductions for room and board, transportation, victims services, court fees and the like. In some cases, up to 80% of an incarcerated person’s wages are deducted. That means take-home pay often remains low.

But 97.4% of incarcerated workers labor for government entities directly and are paid less than a dollar an hour.

They also lack protections. They are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which provides minimum wage rights and provisions for overtime pay. Nor are they covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces worker’s compensation and rights to safe working conditions. If an incarcerated worker is injured on the job, they are entitled to medical care, like anyone else in prison, but they have no right to financial compensation or sick days.

Adapting the private-sector pay structure for all work in prison could result in fair wages – that’s if deductions are revised to be fair as well. Researchers estimate that paying fair wages to incarcerated workers could produce up to $20.3 billion annually in income to them directly, and benefits to families, crime victims and the economy through child support payments, restitution payments and taxes. Furthermore, fair wages would allow people to support themselves during incarceration and save for when they are released, which could have a meaningful impact on well-being during and after incarceration.

Reforms, such as adjusting pay structures or removing the penal exception clause, may improve working conditions for incarcerated people. But researchers have asserted that prison labor will always be inherently coercive. Incarcerated workers have limited options to earn money and work toward an earlier release date, which undoubtedly influences their choice to work.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Julia Bowling does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation