About

Brittany Friedman is an award-winning sociologist and expert on politics, cover-ups, and the dark side of institutions. She holds an academic appointment as an Associate Professor of Sociology at USC Dornsife. Her research focuses on punishment, social control, institutional violence, economic predation, racism, Black diaspora studies, Black feminism, and historical sociology, utilizing qualitative and archival methods to study hidden populations. Friedman is a Policy Outreach Fellow of the American Sociological Association for 2025-2026 and holds affiliations with the American Bar Foundation, where she is an Affiliated Scholar, and the USC Black Studies Center, among others. Her first book, 'Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons,' is recognized in sociology, African American studies, and the 'Justice, Power, & Politics' series, and was a finalist for the 2025 C. Wright Mills Book Award. She is also the co-founder and creative director of the Captive Money Lab and a co-PI of a cross-national study on inmate reimbursement practices, known as 'pay-to-stay.' Her research has been supported by various external funders, including Arnold Ventures, the National Science Foundation, and the American Society of Criminology. Friedman has contributed to policy discussions through testimony at state and federal levels and has taught courses related to money, punishment, and inequality at USC.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Finance
• Criminology
• Economics
• Business
• Social Science
• Law and economics
• Market economy
• Monetary economics
• Public economics
• Actuarial science
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Civil Lawfare

  Social Problems · 2025-01-17

  article

  ABSTRACT To offset rising mass incarceration expenses, states adopted strategies to increase revenue, including charging incarcerated individuals pay-to-stay fees, a per diem room and board charge for the cost of their incarceration. In several states, the collection of these fees is done through civil lawsuits where defendants are alleged to be unlawful consumers of state goods and resources resulting from their incarceration. We draw on the case of pay-to-stay collection in Illinois using 102 civil lawsuits, focusing particularly on the state’s attempts to collect from the most vulnerable of incarcerated individuals, those with disabilities, to develop the theoretical concept of “civil lawfare.” We argue that civil lawfare describes how the state and legal actors weaponize the strictures and procedure of civil law to leverage an assault against vulnerable, disenfranchised populations facing institutional barriers accessing legal resources. We detail the challenges faced by incarcerated individuals with disabilities in navigating this system and how legal actors wage war to facilitate perpetual indebtedness to the state. We position civil lawfare as an understudied legacy of the twentieth century wars on poverty, drugs, and crime which facilitated the decimation and destruction of predominantly Black communities through deploying racialized sentencing laws, targeted policing, and exponential incarceration rates.

  PublisherDOI

• Not Like Us—Black Women Scholars, Strategic Flourishing, and Breaking Free from the Burden of Institutional Transformation

  Humanity & Society · 2025-11-29

  article1st author

  This paper presents a critical dialogue between Black women scholars that examines how they navigate and resist institutional expectations while creating new pathways for survival and flourishing in academia. Drawing from in-depth conversations with Drs. Brittany Friedman and Kris Marsh, we explore how Black women scholars are actively rejecting the false burden of institutional transformation while developing innovative strategies for personal and collective well-being. The dialogue reveals several interconnected themes: the reframing of rest and self-care as forms of resistance, the creation of support networks that extend beyond institutional boundaries, and the importance of embracing multi-dimensional identities that transcend academic roles. Particularly significant is the emergence of innovative forms of activism that prioritize Black women’s right to “exist, have dreams, have love, joy, and passions” rather than sacrificing personal well-being for institutional change. Through their candid exchanges about mental health, mentorship, and mutual protection, the scholars demonstrate how Black women in academia are creating alternative models of intellectual engagement that honor their full humanity while advancing collective liberation. This work contributes to broader conversations about racial justice in higher education by documenting concrete strategies for survival and resistance while challenging traditional narratives about institutional transformation.

  PublisherDOI

• Economies of Violence

  2024-11-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The United States was built through economies of violence endemic to colonialism. Market exchanges dependent on physical and financial extraction without consent are our nation’s White supremacist, patriarchal legacy. As such, there is a longstanding practice in the United States of applying social labels of deviance to justify the capture of human beings and the commodification of their bodies, from Indigenous removal, chattel slavery, debt peonage, and convict leasing, to prison labor and “pay-to-stay” incarceration. In pay-to-stay programs, cities, counties, and states charge incarcerated individuals for the cost of their incarceration. This chapter draws from a novel data set of documents related to pay-to-stay programs in the state of Illinois. It delves deeply into one incarcerated individual’s case to illustrate the far-reaching consequences of pay-to-stay. The authors argue that pay-to-stay programs exemplify the ways captive bodies belonging to incarcerated individuals are especially vulnerable to forced commodification. Furthermore, they demonstrate that pay-to-stay practices are intimately tied to racialized dispossession and economies of violence.

  PublisherDOI

• Reforming the shadow carceral state

  Theoretical Criminology · 2024-11-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the repeal of prison pay-to-stay policies in the United States. We process-trace reform efforts in Illinois drawing from novel data retrieved through multiple FOIA requests to state agencies and public records searches. Our analysis reveals how lawmakers who advocated for reforming the shadow carceral state in 2016 and 2019 through repealing prison pay-to-stay repurposed penal logics they had once used punitively in the 1980s and 1990s to enact the same policy—such as protecting taxpayers, fiscal efficiency, and rehabilitation. Our findings advance existing research by suggesting that penal logics are open to interpretation depending on the socioeconomic and historical moment. These contextual factors are also crucial to determining how lawmakers and institutions re-interpret long held penal logics when reforming the shadow carceral state. We argue the ways in which lawmakers strategically operationalize penal logics exemplifies their cultural durability as a resonant means to a political end.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to special issue on dismantling the shadow carceral state

  Theoretical Criminology · 2024-11-01 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• 15. Creating Intuitively: The Art and Flow of Intuitive Social Science

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-06-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment</i>

  American Journal of Sociology · 2023-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Is Wrong with Monetary Sanctions? Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research

  CrimRxiv · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The “Damaged” State vs. 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 · 2022 · 25 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Business

  which were implemented in the state of Illinois in 1981 through the Prisoner Reimbursement Act, The "Damaged" State vs. the "Willful" Nonpayer: Pay-to-Stay and the Social Construction of Damage, Harm, and Moral Responsibility in a Rent-Seeking Society a Pr il d. fer na ndes , Br it ta n y fr iedm a n , a nd ga Br iel a k ir k

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Is Wrong with Monetary Sanctions? Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 31 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law and economics

  Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states. These differences allow for the identification of features of law, policy, and practice that differentially shape access to justice and equality before the law. Common practices undermine individuals' rights and fuel inequality in the effects of unpaid monetary sanctions. These observations lead us to offer a number of specific recommendations to improve the administration of justice, mitigate some of the most harmful effects of monetary sanctions, and advance future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• April D. Fernandes

  North Carolina State University

  6 shared

• Gabriela Kirk

  Syracuse University

  6 shared

• Bryan L. Sykes

  1 shared

• Becky Pettit

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• colleagues

  1 shared

• Sydney Webster

  1 shared

• Beth M. Huebner

  Arizona State University

  1 shared

• Michael L. Walker

  Australian National University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2025-2026 Policy Outreach Fellow of the American Sociologica…
• Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation
• 2021-2022 Access to Justice Scholar at the American Bar Foun…
• 2023-2024 American Fellow of the American Association of Uni…
• Finalist for the 2025 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the So…