Dylan Rodríguez, "'I Would Wish Death on You...' Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime" (page 9 of 9)

The emergence of the American prison industrial complex since the 1970s has generally been addressed by academic scholars, progressive activists, and imprisoned intellectuals as a problem situated entirely within the domestic social formation of the U.S. Yet, even the concise definition of the prison industrial complex penned in 2001 by U.S. political prisoner[27] Linda Evans (released in 2001) and activist Eve Goldberg foreshadows a praxis that reaches beyond the geographies of the U.S. national form: "Like the military/industrial complex, the prison industrial complex is an interweaving of private business and government interests. Its twofold purpose is profit and social control. Its public rationale is the fight against crime."[28] Working against the parochialism of conventional criminological approaches to conceptualizing the U.S. prison, Evans and Goldberg are defining an organic connection between the institutional architecture of the prison industrial complex and the globally generative forces of neoliberalism and globalization. For them, the socioeconomic transformations of neoliberal U.S. capital, alongside contemporary elaborations of the U.S. racist state in the post-Civil Rights moment, simultaneously a) fabricate populations vulnerable to criminalization (black, brown, poor, and generically redundant to the contemporary economic organization of the U.S.), b) withdraw or make obsolete state social services for people most in need of resources necessary to social and biological reproduction, c) militarize and juridically empower the policing and criminal justice apparatuses in unprecedented ways, and d) generate a dynamic statecraft, public discourse, and popular culture of policing and imprisonment that organize a grammar of social necessity and ideological consent around the emergence and expansion of the prison industrial complex.[29] As the U.S. prison, jail, INS/Homeland Security detainee, extraterritorial military prison, and incarcerated youth population approaches and surpasses the 2.5 million mark (as of this writing), the quantitative evidence refracts the prison's qualitative transformation into a fundamental organ of state reproduction and civic ordering.[30]

The globality of the U.S. prison regime thus places a peculiar political onus upon people who are committed to struggle for human liberation and freedom in the face of such overwhelming structures of dominance. In fact, a moment of radical political possibility might open through dense, locally situated, and consistently theorized articulations of the kinship of captivity that is shared by increasing numbers of people across the world who are variably touched by (and for that matter implicated in) the movements of American globality and its synthesis of mass-based human immobilization and acute bodily punishment. Further, a critical focal attention on and engagement with the mounting movement for social transformation through the abolition of the American prison, policing, and criminal justice systems—a struggle that has accumulated momentum and influence since the late-1990s—might similarly echo the legacies of the late-19th century U.S. abolitionist movement whose most revolutionary dreams—the decisive overthrow of slavery, white supremacy, U.S. apartheid, and normalized state terror—are still unfulfilled. It is ultimately this radical accountability to the living history of American globality and its unequalled capacity for violence that calls forward the most imaginative and daring praxis.

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Tram Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities After 9/11. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Nguyen's investigative, critical journalism offers an important intervention on a generalized vacuum of public, first-person accounts of recent anti-immigrant statecraft. Nonetheless, the book ultimately reifies the "post-9/11" moment by failing to substantively situate the narratives—or analysis of them—within a longer historical conceptualization of the white supremacist, criminalizing state. The broader critique offered in the second half of this essay addresses this tendency as a problem of both political practice and scholarly-activist framing. [Return to text]

2. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. [Return to text]

3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994. [Return to text]

4. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater," in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Routledge, 1993, 26. [Return to text]

5. For a fuller discussion of this historical definition of white supremacy, see Dylan Rodríguez, "Introduction: American Apocalypse," in Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [Return to text]

6. E. San Juan, Jr., "One Hundred Years of Producing and Reproducing the 'Filipino,'" in Amerasia Journal, 24:2 (1998), 21. [Return to text]

7. While there is a rapidly growing scholarly, journalistic, and grassroots literature addressing the intersections of white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, state violence, and imprisonment, the following texts have been particularly useful in the development of this essay: Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. Beth Richie, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. New York: Routledge, 1996. Julia Sudbury, "Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex," Feminist Review, 80:1 (July 2005), 162-179. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005. Julia Sudbury, Ed., Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge, 2005. Angela Y. Davis and Cassandra Shaylor, "Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond," Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2:1 (Spring 2001), 1-25. And Cassandra Shaylor, "'It's Like Living in a Black Hole': Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex," New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement, Vol. 24 (1998), 385-416. [Return to text]

8. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 215. The essay first appeared in Diacritics, 17:2 (Summer 1987). [Return to text]

9. Led by Kim Carter, an abolitionist activist and leader of the All of Us or None movement, Time for Change is widely recognized for its politically educational and personally transformative re-entry programs for women recently released from jail and prison. See the Time for Change mission statement and program description. [Return to text]

10. Interview with Persephani Brooks, San Bernardino, CA, July 12, 2007. Interview conducted by students of Ethnic Studies research seminar, under supervision of the author. [Return to text]

11. Track 5, "Prisons Are Violence Against Women," The We That Sets Us Free: Building a World Without Prisons (audio recording). Oakland, CA: Justice Now, 2004. [Return to text]

12. Editorial, "Gitmos Across America," The New York Times, 27 June, 2007, Section A, 22 ; Nina Bernstein, "New Scrutiny As Immigrants Die in Custody" The New York Times, 26 June 2007, Section A, 1; Diana Welch, "Immigrant Detention Blues," Austin Chronicle, 2 February 2007. [Return to text]

13. "Resisting Homeland Security: Organizing Against Unjust Removals of U.S. Filipinos", report by the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective, San Jose, CA, December 2004, 1. [Return to text]

14. "Resisting Homeland Security", 8. [Return to text]

15. Ibid., 10. [Return to text]

16. See generally Volume 28, Number 2 (2002) of Social Justice: a Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order, a special issue entitled "Gatekeeper's State: Immigration and Boundary Policing in an Era of Globalization." [Return to text]

17. John Scalia and Marika F. X. Litras, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Immigration Offenders in the Federal Criminal Justice System, 2000", Special Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, August 2002, NCJ 191745, 5. [Return to text]

18. Tracy Snell, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Correctional Populations in the United States, 1992." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, January 1995, NCJ-146413. [Return to text]

19. Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Prisoners in 2005." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, November 2006, NCJ 215092. [Return to text]

20. Dylan Rodríguez, "(Non)Scenes of Captivity: The Common Sense of Punishment and Death," Radical History Review, Issue 96 (2006), 9-32. [Return to text]

21. Negri and Hardt's conceptualize Empire as the "right of the police" as such: In order to take control of and dominate such a completely fluid situation, it is necessary to grant the intervening authority (1) the capacity to define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands of intervention; and (2) the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and the plurality of the arrangements in crisis. Here, therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really a right of the police. The formation of a new right is inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of social equilibrium: all this is proper to the activity of the police. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 16-17. [Return to text]

22. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. [Return to text]

23. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, 39-41. [Return to text]

24. See Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. [Return to text]

25. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 5. [Return to text]

26. Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003, 92. [Return to text]

27. For a general discussion of the conditions and context for the political imprisonment of progressive, radical, and revolutionary liberation activists in the late-20th century United States, see Owusu Yaki Yakubu, "Toward Collective Effort and Common Vision: The International and Domestic Contexts of the Struggles of Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War Held by the U.S.," Can't Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S. Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, 2002, 13. [Return to text]

28. Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg, The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy. San Francisco: AK Press Distribution, 1998, 5. [Return to text]

29. See generally Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York: Verso, 2000. Ted Gest, Crime & Politics: Big Government's Erratic Campaign for Law and Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. And Julia Sudbury, Ed., Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge, 2005. [Return to text]

30. The figure 2.5 million includes imprisoned populations that are almost always excluded from common carceral body counts. The most frequently quoted figures are from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. See, for example, Harrison and Karberg, "Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2003," U.S. Department of Justice, NCJ 203947, May 2004. According to the BJS, as of June 2003 there were 2,078,570 prisoners held in Federal or State prisons and local jails.

In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention writes in its 2002 annual report that there were 108,931 children incarcerated as of 1999 "OJJDP Annual Report 2002," NCJ 202038, 59). It is almost certain that the current population of imprisoned children exceeds this figure, especially since a growing number of youth under the age of 18 are being sent to adult jails and prisons (statistics on incarcerated populations typically have a 1-2 year lag, due to the time expended in collecting and calculating data). Finally, the Department of Homeland Security, which bureaucratically absorbed the older Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), reports that in 2002, there were 188,547 non-citizens held in INS prisons on an average day (memorandum from Acting Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin, "Major Management Challenges Facing the Department of Homeland Security," March 2003). [Return to text]

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