Dis-Placing the Prison

Dis-placing the Prison: Carceral Space, Disposable Life, and Urban Struggle in Neoliberal America by Brett Story A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography and Program in Planning University of Toronto © Copyright by Brett Story 2015 Dis-placing the Prison: Carceral Space, Disposable Life, and Urban Struggle in Neoliberal America Brett Story Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography and Program in Planning University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation contributes to the emerging field of carceral geography by demonstrating how carceral space produces and manages social disposability in late capitalist American life. In so doing, it posits that carceral space must be conceived as a complex geography, one that inscribes the production of racialized poverty, incarceration, and devalued life into its everyday socio-spatial relations. Carceral space encompasses the whole chain of relationships that make up the prison system: from the sites of criminalization, arrest and conviction to the landscapes of building construction; from edifices of captivity to the spaces deployed for the circulation and transfer of bodies. Carceral space also, I argue constitutes those social relations and geographic practices through which the state’s capacities of containment, displacement and dispossession are put to work for racial capitalism. The dissertation examines several illustrative carceral spaces at different points along the continuum of penal coercion in order to answer the question: How does carceral space help ii produce and manage social disposability? Using qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and textual analysis, my four case studies demonstrate that the production of disposability is an active process, spatialized in a range of places and forms that are politically mutable, highly contested, and differentially experienced. Throughout my case studies, geographies of spatial isolation and individuation function alongside the neoliberal logic of individual responsibility, to undermine black sociality and the forging of collective counter-power to racial capitalism and the carceral state. I argue that the racialized production of the ‘criminal’ provides powerful legitimizing cover for the making and social differentiation of surplus populations. The criminal is a paradigmatic category of disposability in capitalist liberal democracies precisely because the project of neoliberalism makes it so hard to divest from the economy of individualized responsibility and accountability. Finally, the dissertation points to some of the ways in which the capacities of the carceral state are being retrofitted for the current political- economic conjuncture, producing new spatial fixes for managing surplus life under the pretext of penal reform. I conclude that so long as the actual social relations for which the carceral state is put to work remain unchallenged, the spatial organization of racialized unfreedom and surplus life remain a pressing and pernicious threat. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation is dedicated to the many people in prisons, sent home from prisons, or on their way to visit prisons who gave their time to speak with me and whose struggle inside inspires me to struggle outside. I want especially to acknowledge my friend James Perez, who has spent over two decades in solitary confinement at the supermax penitentiaries in Pelican Bay and Corcoran in California. I take heed of his strength every day. I want to thank my mother, Jane Story, king of the shit-disturbers, who is always quick to remind me that “problematic” is not a noun and who put the first book into my greedy little hands. Jacob Mitchell believed I could do this from the start and always listened while I tried to work things out. Thank you also to too many dear friends to name, but especially to my friend John Hodgins, the smartest human being I know. He long ago assured me that hating rich people can, in fact, be a starting point for struggle, and for that and more I have endless thanks. I owe an enormous intellectual debt of gratitude to the late Neil Smith. In first discovering his writing I found a weapon against my rotten landlord. Little did I realize that it would so fully inform my thinking to this day. Neil’s big brain and commitment to an anti-capitalist politics were matched in size only by his capacity for generosity and kindness, and I feel enormously privileged to have called him my friend. In the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto I have met some of the most wonderful colleagues and friends, including the incomparably brilliant Shiri Pasternak and the absurdly talented Alexis Mitchell. Thanks especially to my reading group companions, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working through many dense texts, while also taking care to gossip and snack well: Katie Mazer, Patrick Vitale, Laura Pitkanen, Prasad Khanolkar, Caitlin Henry, Martin Danyluk, Martine August, and Kanishka Goonewardena. Sue Ruddick, Scott Prudham, Phil Goodman, Matt Farish, Judy Han, Victor Lorentz, James Nugent, Lisa Freeman, Lia Frederiksen and David Seitz at the iv University of Toronto have read drafts, showed up at talks to ask hard questions, and proven themselves to be fabulous colleagues along this journey. Thank you to my graduate committee, Matt Farish, Kanishka Goonewardena, Emily Gilbert, Phil Goodman, and Deb Cowen, and to my external examiners Michelle Brown and Eric Cazdyn, for their careful reading and generous support. Thank you also to Ruth Wilson Gilmore who, knowingly, has been kind enough to write me many a funding letter but also, perhaps unknowingly, demonstrates for me a model of all that politically engaged scholarship can and should be. This work has also benefited enormously from the friendship and feedback of Judah Schept, Jack Norton, Lisa Guenther, Sarah Armstrong, Micol Seigel, Annie Spencer, Pascal Emmer and Jenna Lloyd, and many others from whom I continue to learn so much about abolitionist scholarship and practice. I actually can’t imagine completing this dissertation without my sweetheart James Cairns. In the magic of our meeting he promised me that he would bring me morning coffee and read my things; he has done all that and so much more. He has been my dearest companion and most politically incisive interlocutor through all the blues and all the better times. I want, finally, to thank my supervisor Deb Cowen. Any attempt to express how much her support has meant throughout this process will fall short. Suffice it to say that I have never met a better teacher: rigorous and encouraging, politically uncompromising in action as well as ideas, and generous beyond all measure. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................... II ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................................. IV LIST OF IMAGES .................................................................................................................................... VIIII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE OF SURPLUS LIFE ............................................................ 1 WHAT IS THE WORK THAT PRISONS DO? THE SPATIAL TURN IN CRITICAL PRISON STUDIES .................... 10 MAKING THE PRISON VISIBLE: NOTES ON METHOD, FILM AND FIELDWORK ................................................ 16 CHAPTER OVERVIEW ................................................................................................................................................. 24 CHAPTER 2 THE PRISON INSIDE: A GENEALOGY OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS COUNTER- RESISTANCE ............................................................................................................................................... 30 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS TECHNIQUE OF SPATIAL VIOLENCE .................................................................... 34 SOLITARY CONFINEMENT’S THREE ‘WAVES’ ........................................................................................................ 37 ISOLATION AS TACTIC OF ANTI-SOCIALITY ........................................................................................................... 49 USP MARION, BLACK MUSLIMS, AND THE BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION EXPERIMENTS ................................. 54 ATTICA AND THE PRISON REBELLION YEARS ....................................................................................................... 61 USP MARION AND THE BIRTH OF THE SUPERMAX .............................................................................................. 67 THE SPECTRE OF CRISIS AND SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS SPATIAL FIX ........................................................ 70 SOCIALITY AND POLITICAL BEING AT THE SITE OF CAPTIVITY .......................................................................... 73 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................................ 77 CHAPTER 3 THE PRISON OUTSIDE: THE NEOLIBERAL LIFE OF THE ‘MILLION DOLLAR BLOCK’ ......... 80 THE MILLION DOLLAR BLOCK AND JUSTICE REINVESTMENT ........................................................................... 83 NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS OF THE MILLION DOLLAR BLOCK ...........................................................................

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