The Scholar
Sarah Haley was born in 1980. She earned her Ph.D. from Duke University and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies. Her work on punishment, gender, and racial formation won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.
Haley writes at the intersection of carceral studies and feminist theory. She insists that any account of punishment in America that ignores women is incomplete. The system bent its particular cruelties upon Black women – and those cruelties were central to how the regime justified itself.
Cruelty Designed
In No Mercy Here (2016), Haley reveals how the punishment system bent its particular cruelties upon Black women, forging the very idea of their criminality to justify a regime that no notion of mercy was permitted to soften. She documents chain gangs, penitentiary labor, sexual violence, and the medicalization of Black female bodies as deviant.
Her central argument is that Black women were not incidental victims of Jim Crow punishment. They were constitutive to it. The system needed to imagine Black women as hypersexual, unruly, and dangerous to justify the surveillance, imprisonment, and violence that sustained it. Without that image, the apparatus could not function.
The Bridge to the Archive
Haley restores lives the historical record preferred to erase. The Archive does not exist to document suffering alone, but it does not pretend that suffering did not happen. When the Law category traces how punishment replaced ownership, when Alexander documents mass incarceration’s caste architecture, when Davis asks whether prisons should exist at all – Haley names who was most targeted within those systems.
Her work is vital to Essay II’s chapters on convict leasing, ensuring that the women devoured by the system are counted alongside the men. But more than that, her work informs the entire Archive’s commitment to inclusive documentation. When the Archive insists that knowledge must serve the whole community, it must name who within that community was most vulnerable. Haley does that work with uncompromising rigor.
She also bridges scholarship and movement. Her research feeds into advocacy work on behalf of incarcerated women. The Archive follows that model: rigorous thinking rooted in lived truth, offered in service of the communities doing the work.