Much has been made of Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis paper. Since her brother Craig Robinson has now given his thoughts on the campaign, one might be curious of what his own Princeton senior thesis reveals.

The title of Craig Malcolm Robinson’s senior thesis is “The Nature of Informal Social Structures Within a Prison”. It was completed at Princeton in 1983.

Here is his acknowledgements perhaps revealing his advisor which for some reason is not available at the online site:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Professor Howard Taylor for his time and guidance. I would also like to thank Professor Robert Scott for the idea, and Professor Marvin Bressler for divine inspiration. Finally I would like to thank the people of the Forum project, my friends and family who put up with my being uncharacteristically tense.

Here are some excerpts:

Trenton State Prison houses inmates mostly from the Trenton and Newark areas. This partially accounts for the racial make-up of the population. Racism, as I will show later, is accounted for as a result of the number of inmates who make up the majority of prisoners.

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In addition to the wall itself, the heavily armed tower guards make for a significant deterrent. Plus the fact that once on the outside an inmate becomes a wanted target for any promotion seeking police officer.

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Chapter V
Notes On Racism in Prison

When one begins to examine the highly unequal numbers of blacks in prison, one cannot begin with the prison itself. In order to understand the significant effect of racism one must examine the whole criminal justice system from arrest to ajudication to incarceration. It is no secret that Black males have and still do account for the majority of men incarcerated in the United States…

In order to understand the disproportion one must realize that, “…if the percentage of Black males in prison had been as low as the proportion of white men, the number of Black men in jail would have been 25,000!” These numbers should be inflated to attain an accurate picture of 1983. These figures only reinforce the notion of institutional racism throughout the criminal justice system.

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It was clear after completing the interviews that racism within the prison community is as one ex-guard put it, “…just as the whites, in normal societal situations, they have ‘control’ because they make up the majority.” As a result of being the majority instead of the minority Blacks do to whites on the inside what has been done to them on the outside.

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This may be one positive result of institutional racism within the prison (many prominent black leaders originated from prison; Malcolm X, George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, just to name a few).