Brittany Friedman

• American Fellowship, Faculty Postdoctoral Research Leave, American Association of University Women, 2023-2024

Tenure Track Appointments

• Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California, 05/01/2026 –
• Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California, 07/01/2021 – 04/30/2026
• Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 01/01/2019 – 06/30/2021

Visiting and Temporary Appointments

• Visiting Scholar , University of Pompeu Fabra, 06/2025 – 07/2025
• Visiting Scholar, Oxford University, 06/2023 – 08/2023

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Brittany Friedman is an award winning sociologist and expert on politics, cover-ups, and the dark side of institutions. She is the winner of the 2026 Distinguished Early Career Award from the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section (SREM) of the American Sociological Association, which recognizes exceptional achievement and scholarly contribution to the sociology of race and ethnicity. Dr. Friedman is a 2025-2026 Policy Outreach Fellow of the American Sociological Association. She holds an appointment with the American Bar Foundation as an Affiliated Scholar and previously as a 2021-2023 Access to Justice Scholar. She is a 2023-2024 American Fellow of the American Association of University Women.

Her first book, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, is listed in Sociology, African American Studies, and the special series, “Justice, Power, & Politics,” home to a long list of award winning scholarly monographs. Her book draws on over a decade of research to advance the novel concepts of “carceral apartheid,” “racist intent,” and “truth-telling as method,” building from her one-of-a-kind dataset to trace the relationship between violence and race in the United States, drawing from the case of political organizing among incarcerated people and the subsequent rise of organizations endemic to prisons such as the Black Guerilla Family and Aryan Brotherhood. Carceral Apartheid is co-winner of the 2026 Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award from the Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association, and awarded a finalist distinction for the 2025 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and honorable mention for the 2026 Theory Prize for Best Book from the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association.

Her article “Civil Lawfare” (w/ Drs. April D. Fernandes & Gabriela Kirk-Werner), published in Social Problems, received honorable mention for the 2026 Kimberlé Crenshaw Outstanding Article Award from SSSP’s Division on Critical Race and Ethnic Study.

Dr. Friedman is Co-founder and Creative Director of the Captive Money Lab and Co-PI (w/ Drs. April D. Fernandes and Gabriela Kirk-Werner) of a cross-national comparative study of inmate reimbursement practices, also known as “pay-to-stay.” Their website was designed by Hyperobjekt and is currently undergoing an expansion from 2025-2026 to accommodate recent findings from their national survey of prison pay-to-stay. Their project expands the study of monetary sanctions to include empirical analyses of the historical and contemporary evolution of pay-to-stay practices, debt, and inequality. They have submitted written testimony at the state (Connecticut General Assembly Judiciary Committee) and federal (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary & Federal Bureau of Prisons) levels, summarizing their peer-reviewed research findings for lawmakers. 

Dr. Friedman’s research has been supported by external funding from Arnold Ventures, American Bar Foundation, JPB Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women, the American Society of Criminology, and university funding from several institutions.

Research Specialties

Punishment, Social Control, Cover-ups, Politics & Law, Institutional Violence & Economic Predation, Racism & Black Diaspora Studies, Black Feminism, Historical Sociology, Qualitative & Archival Methods, Hidden Populations

• (Fall 2021) GESM 130. Seminar in Social Analysis – Money, Punishment and Inequality, TTh, 11:00am – 12:20pm, WPH 101
• (Spring 2022) SOCI 655. Seminar in Race Relations, T, 11:00am – 01:50pm
• (Spring 2023) GESM 130. Seminar in Social Analysis – Money, Punishment, Inequality, TTh, 11:00am – 12:20pm, GFS113
• (Spring 2023) SOCI 499. Special Topics – Prisons and Prisoners, TTh, 02:00pm – 03:20pm
• (Spring 2026) GESM 130. Seminar in Social Analysis – Money, Punishment, and Inequality, TTh, 11:00am – 12:20pm

Book

• Friedman, B. (2025). Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Book Chapters

• Friedman, B., Fernandes, A. D., Kirk-Werner, G. (2025). Economies of Violence: Pay-to-Stay, Rent Seeking, and the Value of Incarcerated Bodies. Consuming Bodies: Body Commodification and Embodiment in Late Capitalist Societies Routledge Press: New York.
• *Friedman, B., Walker, M. L. (2023). Creating Intuitively: The Art and Flow of Intuitive Social Science. Disciplinary Futures. (Eds.) Pawan Dhingra and Nadia Kim. New York: New York University Press. *Authorship Alphabetical.
• *Friedman, B., Hitchens, B. (2021). Theorizing Embodied Carcerality: A Black Feminist Sociology of Punishment. Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis. (Eds.) Zakiya Luna and Whitney Pirtle. New York: Routledge Press. *Authorship Alphabetical.

Book Review

• Friedman, B. (2023). Review of Jessica Simes’s Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Incarceration. American Journal of Sociology.
• Friedman, B. (2021). Review of Matthew Clair’s Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. Theoretical Criminology. pp. 687-689.
• Friedman, B. (2021). Reckoning with Carceral Technologies Through Abolition- Review of Garrett Felber’s Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Journal of Civil and Human Rights. pp. 103-105.
• Friedman, B. (2017). Review of Dan Berger’s Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Punishment & Society. pp. 258-260.

Journal Article

• *Fernandes, A. D., *Friedman, B., Kirk-Werner, G. (2026). Civil Lawfare. Social Problems. Vol. 73 (2), pp. 444-464. *Equal Authorship.
• *Friedman, B., *Brunson, A. L., *Marsh, K. (2025). Not Like Us—Black Women Scholars, Strategic Flourishing, and Breaking Free from the Burden of Institutional Transformation. Humanity & Society. Vol. *Equal Authorship (https://doi.org/10.1177/01605976251392581)
• *Friedman, B., *Brunson, A. L., *Marsh, K. (2025). Black Women Scholars in Bloom. Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships.
• Kirk-Werner, G., Fernandes, A. D., Friedman, B. (2024). Pay-to-Stay as Stategraft. Wisconsin Law Review.
• Friedman, B., Kirk-Werner, G., Fernandes, A. D. (2024). Reforming the Shadow Carceral State. Theoretical Criminology. Vol. 28 (4), pp. 437-458.
• Fernandes, A. D., Friedman, B., Kirk, G. (2022). The ‘Damaged’ State v. the ‘Willful’ Nonpayer: Pay-to-Stay and the Social Construction of Damage, Harm, and Moral Responsibility in a Rent-Seeking Society. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. Vol. 8 (1), pp. 82-105.
• *Friedman, B., Harris, A., Huebner, B., Martin, K., Pettit, B., Shannon, S., Sykes, B. (2022). What is Wrong with Monetary Sanctions? Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. Vol. 8 (1), pp. 221-243. *Authorship Alphabetical.
• Friedman, B. (2022). White Unity and Prisoner-Officer Alliances. Contexts. Vol. 21 (3), pp. 28-33.
• Friedman, B. (2021). Unveiling the Necrocapitalist Dimensions of the Shadow Carceral State: On Pay-to-Stay to Recoup the Cost of Incarceration. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Vol. 37 (1), pp. 66-87.
• Friedman, B., Fernandes, A. D., Kirk, G. (2021). ‘Like if you Get a Hotel Bill’: Consumer Logic, Pay-to-Stay and the Production of Incarceration as a Public Commodity. Sociological Forum. Vol. 36 (3), pp. 735-757.
• Friedman, B. (2021). Toward a Critical Race Theory of Prison Order in the Wake of Covid-19 and Its Afterlives: When Disaster Collides with Institutional Death by Design. Sociological Perspectives. Vol. 64 (5), pp. 689-705.
• Kirk, G., Fernandes, A. D., Friedman, B. (2020). Who Pays for the Welfare State? Austerity Politics and the Origin of Pay-to-Stay Fees as Revenue Generation. Sociological Perspectives. Vol. 63 (6), pp. 921-938.
• Friedman, B. (2020). Carceral Immobility and Financial Capture: A Framework for the Consequences of Racial Capitalism Penology and Monetary Sanctions. UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review. Vol. 4 (1), pp. 177-184.
• Friedman, B., Pattillo, M. (2019). Statutory Inequality: The Logics of Monetary Sanctions in State Law. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. Vol. 5 (1), pp. 174-196.

• Co-Winner, Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award, American Sociological Association Section on Human Rights, Spring 2026
• Finalist, C. Wright Mills Book Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Spring 2026
• Honorable Mention, Kimberlé Crenshaw Outstanding Article Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems Division on Critical Race & Ethnic Study, Spring 2026
• Honorable Mention, Theory Prize for Best Book, American Sociological Association Theory Section, Spring 2026
• Winner, Distinguished Early Career Award, American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities (SREM), Spring 2026
• USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Recognition for scholarship, teaching, and service., Fall 2024