Prisons and Floods in the United States Interrogating Notions of Social and Spatial Control
Prisons and Floods in the United States Interrogating Notions of Social and Spatial Control By Hannah Hauptman, Yale University On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped across the state dream of full social order, both inside and outside Southern Louisiana, rupturing New Orleans’ levees and of the prison. Strict protocols, concrete beds, steel-barred scouring a place for itself among the costliest and most poorly windows and pacing guards imply that this dream has, managed disasters in contemporary history. On that fateful in fact, been realized. Yet foods, amongst other natural August morning, an inmate at the Orleans Parish Prison disasters, provide an avenue for chaos to move through the recalled, “we awake to fnd water up to our knees and no seemingly indestructible barriers of the prison. Troughout security.”1 Te water would eventually rise to the inmates’ the twentieth century and into the twenty-frst, foods have necks. As another inmate recounted, “it was like we were left threatened or necessitated emergency evacuations of prisons, to die. No water, no air, no food.”2 As the wealthy and the free as well as the movement of inmates out of prisons to work fed the city, inmates in local prisons—whose impregnable on food protection and rescue. Only by examining both the walls held frm while the once-impregnable levees crumbled— theoretical parallels and the historical convergences between were left locked in their cells. Hurricane Katrina brutally these two systems of control can we uncover their surprisingly illustrated the confict between the apparent order of prisons intimate relationship. Recovered narratives from fooded and the chaos of foods, revealing the diferentiated value of prisons, wherein the uncontrollable met the impenetrable, life placed on incarcerated individuals and troubling notions thus provide a historical nexus for the critical deconstruction of maximum security or absolute protection.
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