Please join us for a special CJS event featuring a conversation with author Hadar Aviram on her new book co-authored with Chad Goerzen FESTER: Carceral Permeability and California's COVID-19 Correctional Disaster (University of California Press, 2024). 

The mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in California’s prisons stands out as the state’s worst-ever medical catastrophe in a carceral setting. In Fester, socio-legal scholar Hadar Aviram and data scientist Chad Goerzen offer a cultural history of this correctional disaster through first-person accounts, courtroom observations, policy documents, and years of carefully collected quantitative data. Bearing witness to the immense suffering wrought on people behind bars through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance, Fester explains how carceral cruelty also threatens the health and well-being of all Californians. Crafted as a dialogue with the story of Exodus and the Passover Haggadah, Fester stands as a monument to the brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, along with activists, doctors, journalists, and lawyers, who fought to shed light on one of the darkest times in the Golden State’s correctional system.