Dennis Childs is Associate Professor of African American Literature and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, a work that deals with the connections between chattel slavery and prison slavery from the late nineteenth century through the prison industrial complex. As a scholar-activist, he has worked with various social justice organizations including the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, All of Us or None, and the Chicano Mexicano Prison Project. He is faculty advisor for Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI UCSD)–a student run prison abolitionist organization. He also serves as Community Advisory Board member for Critical Resistance, a national organization working toward the abolition of the prison industrial complex. In 2015, he was a member of the first ever prisoner solidarity delegation from the US to Palestine.
