At In Our Names Network, we believe that research should serve liberation — not punishment.
Our Researcher Training Slide Deck was created to help community researchers, educators, and organizers build a shared understanding of how carceral systems show up in our daily lives and work.
This resource explores three essential questions:
- What does it mean when we describe something as carceral?
- How does criminalization extend beyond prisons and police into schools, hospitals, welfare systems, and everyday policies?
- And how does the prison industrial complex (PIC) connect profit, politics, and punishment in ways that keep communities trapped in cycles of surveillance and control?
Inside the slides, you’ll find powerful visuals and frameworks that make these systems visible, including:
- A web illustrating how social services, child welfare, and healthcare are entangled with carceral control
- An octopus diagram mapping the “tentacles” of criminalization through racism, capitalism, colonialism, and gender oppression
- A breakdown of the prison industrial complex — showing how ideology, profit, and policy intersect to sustain harm
We designed this deck for community researchers, educators, students, and organizers who are documenting harm or developing abolitionist approaches to research. It’s a learning tool meant to spark dialogue, reflection, and collaboration across movements.
Our goal is simple: to ensure that when we study systems of violence, we don’t reproduce them. Instead, we learn, teach, and build in ways that move us closer to collective care and freedom.
