In 2018, Professor Barry Godfrey (Department of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology) and Dr Steven Soper from the University of Georgia, Liverpool’s long-standing US partner, carried out a pilot study of historical data from Georgia State Penitentiary, finding large-scale longitudinal racial patterns of imprisonment.
By 2023, the pilot study had given rise to a multi-disciplinary community of researchers, historians, criminologists, sociologists, geographers, digital humanities experts, museum curators and managers, both early career and more experienced, who were creating and engaging in debates across the Atlantic.
In 2024, the British Academy funded an ambitious and inclusive public history project, led by Dr Katherine Roscoe from Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, to digitise the Georgia State Penitentiary records to create a platform for interdisciplinary debate on the ethical dissemination of digitised prison data and, second, to create a public website which makes data on former inmates freely available.
From 2026, this will allow schoolchildren, undergraduates, descendants of formerly enslaved people, and academics, to access data which was never originally meant to be revealed to the public but which is an important part of individual, family, and collective, histories.
Working together with Dr Mary Booth (Department of History) and the University’s Centre for the Study of International Slavery, the connections between the abolition of enslavement in the US and the subsequent growth of African-American imprisonment have been explored in seminar series involving academics from Liverpool, Cambridge, Alabama, Georgia, and Vanderbilt as well as in a documentary, ‘Criminal History’, filmed during the 2024 US election. The film was launched at FACT in Liverpool in front of a large audience drawn from the local community, museum managers, and academics, and will be shown in Alabama and Georgia in 2025/26.
The documentary film was first screened at FACT on Wood Street, Liverpool
Find out more
- View Professor Barry Godfrey's University of Liverpool staff profile page
- View Dr Steven Soper's University of Georgia staff profile page
- Visit the Centre for the Study of International Slavery website