Epistemic Activism and the Politics of Credibility: Testimonial Injustice Inside/Outside a North Carolina Jail José Medina and Matt S. Whitt Chapter for Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Theorists Investigate Case Studies, edited by Heidi Grasswick and Nancy McHugh. (New York: SUNY Press). Forthcoming. This is a draft. Please do not cite or share without permission from the authors. Introduction Over the last decade, the general public has become increasingly aware of the problems inherent in the United States’s rampant use of incarceration. Often called “mass incarceration,” the skyrocketing rate of punitive confinement has been analyzed across academic disciplines and the political spectrum. Nevertheless, carceral institutions remain largely invisible—spaces that are represented and imagined, but not known, to many Americans. Thus, carceral institutions present unique knowledge problems for the communities that they purportedly serve. These problems are simultaneously epistemic and political: correctional institutions are accountable to local publics that do not know—and may be actively discouraged from knowing—how they affect the individuals detained within them. In this paper we focus on one part of the carceral system, the jail: a facility primarily designed to house those who have not been convicted of a crime, and who are legally presumed innocent while awaiting trial. Beyond the general invisibility/inaudibility of carceral institutions, the jail involves a peculiarly paradoxical epistemic injustice. While the public is required to treat (most) jail detainees as legally innocent, it subjects them to the stigma of presumed criminality and treats them as guilty in an epistemic sense—as untrustworthy narrators of experience and knowledge. Thus, although detainee testimony could be a powerful source for public knowledge about the jail, the voices of detainees