The political rubric and analytical category of "immigrant detention" has become both a critically necessary and theoretically troubling discursive terrain. On the one hand, the racist criminalization and domestic pursuit of Black and Brown migrant—or assumptive migrant and/or "undocumented"—bodies is a classical technology of the U.S. white supremacist state. A situated historical examination of how this racist statecraft articulates particularly and peculiarly to our political moment is clearly crucial to understanding, effectively resisting, and radically opposing/abolishing the specific edifices of U.S. state violence in their most common institutional terms: Homeland Security, border policing, wars on (immigrant) gangs, and "illegal immigrant" control. On the other hand, the rubric of immigrant detention seems to run the risk of becoming a fetishized political category that is organically linked to the vexed rhetorics of an alleged "post-9/11" era. This discursive structure suggests, and sometimes explicitly asserts, the emergence of multiple "new" forms of racist state violence in the context of a U.S. "War on Terror," and often relies on an exceptionalist, ahistorical narration of anti-immigrant civil and state violence in order to distinguish immigrant criminalization/detention from other, more politically normalized forms of institutionalized dehumanization.[1]

Here, I attempt to offer a theoretical framing of the U.S. carceral-punitive state that departs from narrowing and particularizing discussions of (allegedly) exceptional and "new" productions of racist criminalization and policing, by focusing on the political and historical animus of the U.S. prison regime. That is, I am concerned not with an inventory of "what the racist state is doing" in this historical moment, but rather with an analysis of how it is able to do what it does, and thus a focal attention to the historical conditions of possibility for the current institutional formations of migrant criminalization and immigrant detention.

The U.S. prison is a global statecraft, an arrangement and mobilization of violence that is, from its very inception, already unhinged from the delimiting "domestic" (or "national") sites to which it is presumptively tethered. This essay proceeds by examining the political rubrics of race, gender, and immigration through the analytic of the U.S. prison regime's globality. This meditation suggests a genealogy and theory of the U.S. prison regime that resonates the institutional and historical continuities between 1) the ongoing technologies of white supremacy organic to the U.S. racial[2]/racist state[3]; and 2) the array of global (or extra-domestic) technologies of violence that form the conditions of possibility for social formations and hegemonies integral to the contemporary moment of U.S. global dominance. How, then, does "gender" work within the arrangements of bodily subjection and subjective disarticulation institutionalized by the prison regime? How does the prison work on "gender," as a lived body of experience located in the space and time of imprisonment and carceral state violence? What, in turn, is particularly new or unique about "immigration" as an institutional extension of the U.S. prison regime's protocols and territories? Does immigrant criminalization and imprisonment constitute something qualitatively different in the social logic and racial technologies of imprisonment?

The recent renaissance of critical political, scholarly, and activist discourses confronting the unprecedented scale and growth of the U.S. policing and criminal justice apparatuses has enabled a range of progressive and radical praxis that demonstrates possibility for authentic social transformation. Mitigating this vista of political potential, however, is an insistent theoretical delimitation that overwhelmingly frames such critical discourses as problems of the American local, domestic, and/or national—as if the localities and domesticities of the United States are not already and complexly enmeshed in the societal ensembles and state produced violences of "the global." This is to suggest, at the outset, that the arrangement of juridically coded bodily violence that is coordinated and institutionalized by the U.S. prison regime generates a logic of (anti)social formation that fundamentally exceeds the national geography within which it is nominally situated. These layered, intersectional technologies of imprisonment (across scales of individualizing and mass-based techniques of bodily immobilization) have thus come to form the premises of a global formation that is fundamental to the very intelligibility of "America"—as an ideological and cultural gravity of identity and identification, multiply formed signifier of material and spatial dominion/occupation, and, perhaps most importantly, as a racially gendered mobilization of militarized policing and juridical force.

In what follows, my primary theoretical concern is with the location and operation of the U.S. prison regime within the material and cultural production of American globality, by which I mean the process and modality of state power that works and mobilizes in ways distinct from (though largely in concert with) American "globalization" and neoliberalism. Globality, conceptualized as an ongoing reconfiguration, imagination, and institutional prototyping of dominance, is animated by a genealogy of racial and civilizational confrontation, which posits the compulsory historical progression of global white supremacy: in excess of nationalist/imperialist ambition, capitalist expansion and hegemony, and righteous war, globality is a coercive articulation of the nature and institutionality of "good" power itself, the production of a geography of biopolitical dominance that is not sufficiently covered by common scholarly or activist cartographies of American empire.

In this sense, American globality speaks to the contemporary production of U.S. state and state-sanctioned technologies of human and ecological domination—most frequently formed through overlapping and symbiotic institutional practices of profound bodily violence, including genocidal and protogenocidal warmaking, racist and white supremacist institutionalized violence, and mass-scaled imprisonment—while analytically emphasizing the capacity of these forms of domination to be discretely mobilized, institutionally indexed, and materially invoked across political geographies, including by governments and states that are formally autonomous of the United States. This formation of dominance is composed by the U.S. state's conceptualizations and articulations of its own power (here, through the regime of the prison), as well as by the immediate usefulness and essential accessibility of these conceptualizations and articulations of power to—and frequently, their overbearing structural and political influence on—other state formations and local hegemonies (e.g., the U.S. prison regime as a "universal" blueprinting of how "good" states ought to work). American globality is simultaneously 1) a vernacular of institutional power; 2) an active and accessible iteration of violent human domination as the cohering of sociality (and civil society) writ large; and 3) a grammar of pragmatic immediacy (in fact, urgency) that orders and influences statecraft across various sites of jurisdiction and influence. It is in the sense that American globality forms a lexicon (the principles governing the organization of a vocabulary) of U.S. statecraft in its disciplined and distended global productions.

I am suggesting that the lived surfaces, institutional productions, coercive practices, and global statecraft of carceral violence compose a crucial theoretical and pragmatic problem for opponents of U.S. global hegemony as well as progressive, abolitionist, feminist, and antiracist critics of the putatively localized U.S. prison industrial complex. More polemically, I am positing that conventional symptomatic treatments of "violence in prison" as episodes of institutional excess, "bad policy," bungled protocol, unconstitutionality, or illegality—vis-à-vis a critical focusing on specific imprisonment policies (e.g. immigration detention policy) and/or particularized case studies of state organized and state sanctioned brutality, torture, and abuse (e.g. episodes of sexual violence in women's and men's prisons)—only scratch the surface of a more substantial and comprehensive conceptualization of carceral violence.

On the one hand, this means that we must consider the complex formation of "the state" through the dynamics of its public intellectual, popular cultural, and knowledge producing apparatuses—how is "The Prison" a modality (and not just a reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment, particularly as it crystallizes multiple abstractions and (juridical) metaphors of state power and legitimated violence at a rather discrete (though still often metaphorized and abstracted) institutional site? On the other hand, we must also ask what it would mean to theoretically center a complex conception of carceral violence—at the dynamic and uneven intersections of neoliberal globalization, white supremacist patriarchy, and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the essential white supremacist violence of American nationalism's reactionary "restorative tendencies"[4]—as the animating force of U.S. globality in its various forms.

The White Supremacist State: Race, Gender, Carceral Genealogy

While numerous scholars, activists, and public intellectuals have taken on the urgent work of addressing the social devastation and institutional monstrosities of the domestic and international "prison industrial complex," the American regime of imprisonment cannot be adequately conceptualized through the absorption of empirical institutional data, compilations of imprisoned people's legal testimonies, or even rigorous comparative examination across other carceral geographies and historical moments. While such forms of information gathering, advocacy, and scholarly analysis are certainly indispensable to the larger project of a critical counter-prison and prison abolitionist praxis, I am suggesting that they frequently fail to either illuminate or inspire a pragmatic (or activist) theoretical attention to the structuring logics of the U.S. prison regime at the constitutive intersection of violence and incarceration. We need, in other words, a theory of carceral violence that comprehends it as a complex production rather than utilitarian application of power and racially gendered bodily domination, and which attempts to comprehend carceral violence in its specificity as both spectacle and routine, and across the intensities of its production on the bodies and subjectivities of people in prison.

White supremacist social, economic, and cultural formations organic to the United States—from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide, to contemporary productions of neoliberalism and (domestic/undeclared) warfare—constitute the ongoing emergence of American technologies of human incarceration and punishment, although theoretical explanations of this entanglement vary widely. For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized "human" difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of people's collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce).[5] As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is both based on, and constantly resurfacing, notions of the white (European and Euro-American) "human" vis-à-vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation (rather than an extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American globality and constitute the common sense organic to its ordering. Here, I am less concerned with the broad question of how the U.S. prison apparatus marks an extension of this national racial genealogy, than I am with the specific concern of how the prison regime has come to constitute a qualitative carceral formation that globalizes U.S. white supremacy as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized "human" difference.

The globalization of white supremacy is fundamentally shaped by the mobilization of the U.S. prison, in historically unprecedented ways, as both a material arrangement of strategically localized bodily domination (the localities of what Julia Sudbury has called the "global prison industrial complex") and as a specific formation of violence that produces the U.S. prison regime as a modality of power relations. It is the technology of coercion crystallized in the institutionality of the U.S. prison (across its local variations) that expresses the constitutive logic of the current U.S. dominance in movements of hegemonic globalization. Perhaps most importantly, this is not a "coercion" that manifests uniformly (or even relatively evenly) across bodies, localities, and historical moments: it is, rather, a technology of carceral violence that draws from the essential historical components of white supremacy as a "substructure" (following Frantz Fanon's appropriation and deforming of the Marxist lexicon) of U.S. national formation, civil society building, and globality.

While I am theoretically privileging the practices of power and domination that coagulate around the axes of "race" in this discussion, I proceed with the understanding (which I will further elaborate below) that U.S. white supremacy is historically overdetermined by hegemonic patriarchies and state-sanctioned racist misogynies, and is currently in the midst of a somewhat dramatic and theatrical symbiosis with the "ludic multiculturalism"[6] of dominant state and corporate bodies (yielding authentically "multiculturalist" productions of white supremacy). As scholars such as Angela Y. Davis, Julia Sudbury, Andrea Smith, Beth Richie, Cassandra Shaylor, and numerous others have indicated,[7] the intersecting axes of gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence precipitating in the ongoing emergence of the U.S. prison regime exceed narrow masculinist definitions of white supremacy as a power relation shared primarily, if not exclusively, between (heterosexual) men and rigidly between empowered "white" subjects and presumptively disempowered subjects "of color."

Here, it is crucial to recognize the methodological distinction between 1) addressing gender as a relatively coherent category of analysis, empirical description, and social scientific/ethnographic focus that examines, for example, the heretofore understudied and undertheorized problems of women's imprisonment, regimes of queer criminalization, and transsexual bodily punishment in prison, and 2) conceptualizing the analytic of gender as a durable and multivalent carceral technology of state violence, both a changing rubric through which state violence articulates onto putatively gendered bodies, and, simultaneously, a modality of bodily punishment that actively constructs, disarticulates, and periodically collapses gender as a coherent conceptual apparatus. A brief juxtaposition clarifies the latter position, to which my overarching argument is largely tethered.

Tracing the organic institutional and juridical antecedent of the 20th and 21st century prison to the institution of racial chattel slavery encompasses a particular moment of deracination that refigures the social logic of gender in a specific moment of ownership and exchange. By way of historical example, Hortense Spillers suggests that the coercive reconstruction and bodily expropriation of Africans as chattel in the era of racial slavery both reifies and collapses the putative gendering of captives. Echoing the genealogical origins of the post-emancipation prison regime as it has distended the logics of U.S. slavery (through and beyond the juridical recodification of "involuntary servitude" as the state's carceral prerogative under the Thirteenth Amendment), Spillers writes that under the conditions of enslavement, "one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into account as quantities."[8] Here, Spillers is neither denying the unique forms of gendered bodily violence characteristic of white supremacist slavery, nor is she reducing the concept of racial chattel to a vulgar notion of "dehumanization." Rather, she is delineating the primacy of a racial analytic in considering the animus of gendered white supremacist (state) violence as a constituting institutional, technological, and affective structure of U.S. slavery. In this sense, the institutionalized vulnerability of the enslaved person to regimes of bodily disintegration that periodically differentiated boys/girls, women/men, mothers/fathers, etc. is not to be conflated with a differential subjection to the condition of slavery.

William Pinar, on the other hand, considers a different overdetermination in his examination of white supremacy and racial violence in the U.S., arguing that the performativity of white supremacist bodily violence is indelibly marked by its (erotic) attention to gender. Further disrupting the logic of categorical opposition in tacitly heteronormative criminological analyses of gender in prison, Pinar writes:

Lynching and prison rape disclose the conflation of gender and race in the white male mind. These two events, key imprinting events we cannot set aside as bizarre and exceptional, require us to reconceptualize how we understand "race" in America. What must be concluded from the intolerable facts of these phenomena is that, to a considerable extent, the gender of racial politics and violence in America is queer. (1128)

Within the institutional logic of the prison regime, Spillers' notion of gender deracination under slavery and Pinar's insistence on the queerly gendered animus of white supremacist bodily coercion are, in the time and location of the prison regime, neither contradictory nor incommensurate. Rather, the deracination constituting the prisoner's subjection to the logic of chattel (civically and legally dead "property of the state") and the gender violence producing the figurative and material bodies of white supremacy are mutually constitutive. Read together, Pinar and Spillers illuminate how the statecraft of carceral violence simultaneously 1) produces (and thus relies upon) "gender" as a particularization of the bodies subjected to different and frequently overlapping regimes of disarticulation and disintegration, and 2) overdetermines putative gender "difference" with a logic of depersonalization and fungibility. This symbiotic vacillation between the technology of gender-disrupting racial subjection to the logics of civil death and fungibility, and the primacy of gender in the inscription of a violent racial carcerality, forms the architecture of U.S. carceral globality.

The reflections of Persephani Brooks, a survivor of California women's jails who joined the abolitionist Time for Change Foundation[9] upon her release, further illustrate the nuances of this carceral symbiosis:

At West Valley [Jail, in San Bernardino County, California], there's no respect at all. I was pregnant and [the guards] were trying to cuff my feet and cuff my hands around my waist while I was pregnant, and handcuff me to people. They had me strip-searched, which was not cool. I can't bend over to touch my toes when I'm 7 months pregnant. They are disrespectful and they talk to you any kind of way. If you want to write a grievance on them, the whole unit [of jail inmates] is going to get punished. There's always one guard that makes you feel like you're this big. You're already emotionally torn as a mother in jail. There was no respect at all from some of the guards there....

I wouldn't wish jail on nobody; I would wish death on you before I would wish jail. Jail is like a constant punishment. The cells are small and if you're locked down all day, you'd go crazy. I learned that if you've done a crime and you got caught, your rights are gone. You don't have any say so and if it's raining outside, they'll say "No it's not. It's sunny and bright." I don't think that it's fair that someone should have so much control over your life.[10]

In fact, currently imprisoned people as well as numerous survivors of state captivity have consistently reflected on the meaning of racial, gender, and sexual violence when it is generated from a condition of state-formed legitimacy and institutional ascendancy. The 2004 publication of prison abolitionist organization Justice Now's, "The We That Sets Us Free," a cross-textual compilation of music, interviews, and spoken word, includes multiple critiques of the misogynist white supremacist state that insist on a feminist redefinition of sexist and patriarchal violence that analytically centers the routinized gender violence of the prison regime. Simultaneously, the critical articulations of many voices on "The We That Sets Us Free" rearticulate and transform parochial definitions of the racist state, displacing the stubborn androcentrist politic that envisions the prototypical (or even universalized) body of the imprisoned to be that of the racially pathologized male. More than a simple supplementation of conventional antiracist discourse, the trajectory of this critique points towards a qualitative transformation of analytical method: by substantiating the specificity and complexity of carceral violence, and closely illustrating the multiplicity of institutionalized forms this violence takes on once constituted by the differentiating and hierarchical axes of race, gender, sexuality, age, and mental health (etc.), we begin to understand that the U.S. prison regime is a formation of state power that requires multiple and intersecting theorizations. In one of the CD's most lucid examinations of racist gender violence, an imprisoned woman activist contends:

It's very important for people to recognize that prisons are a form of violence against women. In my seven years in prison, I've seen many, many women suffer from extreme medical neglect in here, and I've watched several women die. Sexual harassment and abuse of women is constant, and it is important for people to think about the fact that this is violence perpetrated by the employees of the state. Women who have mental health issues are warehoused here, instead of being helped in the community. So when people think about violence against women, I believe that they need to expand their definition to think about women who are survivors of violence at the hands of the state.[11]

This critical meditation focuses on a logic of carceral violence that is not reducible to a singular (or "ideal type") articulation or modality of the white supremacist state, but rather is premised on the capacity of the state to dynamically, strategically, and opportunistically reform and shift its techniques of bodily coercion—even as certain racially pathologized bodies remain the abiding "control" group for policing and normalized state violence within a hegemonic white supremacist social formation.

The conceptual schematic that I am suggesting emerges from precisely this flexible and intersectional conception of carceral violence in its structuring, white supremacist modality. While this brief essay does not offer an adequate treatment of the particular, if not singular structures of violence generated in the imprisonment of specific gender/sexual/racial subjectivities, it does seek to generate a framework that brings an end to the treatment of carceral violence as symptomatic of some deeper corruption in the prison's institutionality. Rather, in analytically centering this violence as the core historical logic of the global U.S. prison regime, I am offering a concise contextualization and theoretical tracing of the prison's constituting presence in American globality. As such, political narrations of particular iterations of criminalization and imprisonment that allege the onset of a qualitatively new or different prison (or for that matter racial, gender, state) regime altogether require acute critical attention. It is to this tendency that I now turn, in order to facilitate a final transition toward a working genealogy of the U.S. prison regime's globality.

Racism and Removal: Displacing the Exceptionality of Immigrant "Invisibility"

The recent tide of "Immigrant Rights" activism across the United States has generated a peculiar political trajectory in concert with the alleged novelties of the "post-9/11" historical moment. Increased attention to the nuances of the Federal prison system in relation to the immigrant detention apparatus—which incorporates a fluctuating articulation between criminal justice institutionalities, from U.S. attorneys to the labyrinthine substrata of Homeland Security—has yielded a periodic (though no less troublesome) political insistence that 1) the objective sociopolitical crisis refracted in U.S. imprisonment strategies has substantially changed in form, and is significantly anchored to 2) a qualitative shift in the logic of the U.S. prison regime itself. Put succinctly, matter-of-fact proclamations that the incarceration of immigrants constitutes the most rapidly expanding appendage of the American prison industrial complex[12] are often invoked to suggest that conventional (read: non-immigrant focused) approaches to social justice activism and progressive critique fail to address the governing specificities of this particular focal point of U.S. policing and criminalization. By way of example, the 2004 report by the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective (CFFSC, an organization of which the author is an active member), "Resisting Homeland Security: Organizing Against Unjust Removal of U.S. Filipinos," contends:

The increasing detention and removal of U.S. Filipinos remain invisible to many. The rising number of U.S. Filipinos detained and removed is directly tied to the shift in the U.S. government after the events of September 11, 2001. It is also tied to the legacy of U.S. imperialism.[emphasis added][13]

While ""Resisting Homeland Security" is an extraordinary document, consisting of both a breathtaking historical account of Filipino criminalization and deportation under U.S. colonial/imperial/neocolonial formations and a clear analysis of the devastating, immediate and collateral violence enacted in the operation of the Homeland Security state, it reproduces a vexing political and analytical problem that seems to confound, misdirect, and/or confuse existing forms of praxis that seek viable opposition to U.S. state violence generally, and its carceral formation particularly: that is, the claim so frequently forwarded through implication and overt statement that accelerated immigrant detention in fact constitutes a conjunctural "shift" in the logic of U.S. state violence.

This claim, I contend, remains both undertheorized and overstated, such that repetition of particular empirical data and selective anecdotal narrative (e.g. the paradigmatic positioning of the counter-deportation struggle of the Cuevas family in the "Resisting Homeland Security" account) posits the current statecraft of immigrant detention as an exceptionality and historical novelty. This myopic analytical approach displaces—and pragmatically obstructs—the difficult praxis of conceptualizing immigrant detention within the organic logic of the totality of U.S. carceral state violence. In this sense, the self-evident claim that imprisoned immigrants (Filipino and otherwise) languish in a condition of exceptional "invisibility" fails to account for the structuring logic of invisibility, civil death, and racially formed social death that has constituted the U.S. prison regime in its most recent (post-1970s) as well as its longer historical renditions.

Thus, the CFFSC report is undermined by the absence of a substantive attempt to link Filipino deportation and immigrant imprisonment with either a critical analytical framing of the U.S. prison industrial complex across its contemporary racial and national geographies (including across the geographies of "citizen," "non-citizen," and "undocumented" bodies), or (perhaps more importantly) an adequate theoretical examination of the Homeland Security state as a derivative articulation of a durably racist and white supremacist U.S. state, which is constituted by logics of racism, racial terror, and institutionalized racial dehumanization precedent to the 2001 enactment of the USA Patriot Act or the 2002 Homeland Security Act. In fact, "Resisting Homeland Security" echoes the undertheorized position of many progressive critics of immigrant criminalization/detention practices by correlating recent changes in juridical rubrics with the onset of "new" modalities and logics of racism/racialization altogether:

The recent substantive changes under this [immigrant] "removal" rubric signal a distinct mode of societal regulation and governance, indicating new logics and practices of homeland security racism.[emphasis added][14]

[Immigrant] removal, is a manifestation of a new racialized institutional logic and practice, homeland security racism, which is substantively different pre-9/11 racial logics and practices. Homeland security racism does not simply operate from the logic that "outsiders," are to be feared, but aims to consolidate politically and economically the empire's reign locally and globally. While immigrant laws and their enforcement remain a primary venue for racism in general, homeland security racism—as articulated through a wide range of ever-changing homeland security laws—has become an expression of imperialism directed inward against its own citizens and residents.[emphasis added][15]

While it is certain that the empirical particularities of which bodies and putative "racial," "national," and/or "religious" subjectivities are subjected to enhanced scrutiny, punishment, and policing can shift radically in given historical moments, such empirical shifts do not necessarily equate to a transformation in the structuring logics or institutional technologies of racist state violence and white supremacist statecraft.

The last dozen years have yielded an almost astronomical growth in the operating capacity, jurisdictional expansion, and institutional geography of U.S. immigration prisons, and recent years have brought increased attention to the U.S. government's carceral investments in both secret/CIA proctored detention sites and U.S. military prisons in places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. By extension, the modalities in which racially pathologized brown bodies encounter the racist state through border militarization,[16] "anti-terrorism," and "anti-gang" policing (etc.) significantly articulate through the institutional spaces and surveillance/punishment technologies of the U.S. global carceral formation. While these institutional formations can and must be contextualized within the historical specificities of the current moment of global U.S. statecraft and its symbiotic projects of (extra-domestic) nation-building and white supremacist institutionality, my specific concerns here run across a pair of overlapping conceptual and analytical questions: 1) What does the regime—the strategic organization and deployment of carceral-punitive technologies—encompassing immigrant detention prisons, secret prisons, and U.S. military prisons tell us of the genealogy and institutional movements of the U.S. prison generally? 2) If these "new" prisons are neither anomalies nor qualitatively novel state fabrications, how are they connected organically to a genealogy of U.S. state violence and terror across different geographies, from the domestic and local, to the "exotic" and global?

It is worth briefly placing the data regarding the last two decades of immigrant imprisonment (and the rapidly accelerating growth therein) within the context of the U.S. prison industrial complex writ large. In so doing, the critical praxis of addressing immigrant detention might more adequately resist the impulse to analytically amputate this particular modality and geography of imprisonment from the overarching and socially constitutive historical technologies of racist and white supremacist U.S. state violence, policing, and imprisonment.

According to the U.S. government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics, "between 1985 and 2000 the number of immigration offenders under sentence in a Federal prison increased from 1,593 to 13,676."[17] On the other hand, the number of people imprisoned in the U.S. grew from 800,000 in 1985[18] to over 2.2 million in 2005.[19] I offer these figures to illustrate what may seem an obvious point, but one which bears repeating in the wake of repeated (and technically accurate) claims that immigrant detention prisons are the most rapidly increasing facet of the U.S. carceral formation: while the almost tenfold increase in the number of immigrants held in Federal detention centers is a remarkable one, this carceral body count constitutes a minute portion of the policing-imprisonment-punishment nexus, and to suggest that it ought to be treated as politically distinct from the living apocalypse of the larger U.S. prison industrial complex is to work within a structure of willful ignorance at best, and political bad faith at worst.

The U.S. prison, as a regime of dominance and strategic violence, institutes technologies of power that exceed the prison's formal designation as a place governed by the constraints of the criminal-juridical. Thus, we might consider imprisonment as a practice of social ordering and geopolitical power, and not as a self-evident or foreclosed jurisprudential practice: in this context, the "post-9/11" formation of the Homeland Security State, the 2004 spectacle of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and accelerated immigrant criminalization/detention can be understood as particular significations of a regime of dominance that is neither (only) local nor (erratically) exceptional, but is at once mobilized, proliferating, and global.

I have argued elsewhere[20] for a conception of the U.S. prison not as a self-contained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material prototype of organized punishment and (social, civil, and biological) death. Thus, to understand the U.S. prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel through which American globality generates its particular (local) practices of legitimated violence and bodily immobilization. To invoke and critically revise Negri and Hardt's formulation in the widely read text Empire,[21] the focal question becomes: How does the right of the U.S.-as-global police to kill, detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally recoded?

The structure of presumption—and therefore relative political silence—enmeshing the prison's centrality to the logic of American globality is precisely evidence of the fundamental power of the U.S. prison regime within the larger schema of American hegemony. In this sense, the U.S. prison regime is ultimately really not an "institution," in the contained sense of a discrete and juridically delimited domain; rather, it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor of institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of human immobilization address (while never fully resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The U.S. prison regime defines a global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various localities. What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the self-contained means of American globality?

It is precisely because the U.S. prison regime composes an acute formation of racist and white supremacist state violence that its very institutionality encompasses the capacity for mobilization of an epochal (and internally dynamic) white supremacist global logic. It is within this composition of the "global"—as it is indelibly marked by the genealogies of "local" U.S. racial formation and racist statecraft—that the particular institutional extremities of the prison regime (e.g. accelerated immigrant criminalization and detention, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay military prisons, CIA secret prisons) can be more delicately resituated and critically addressed.

An elaboration on the genealogy of the U.S. prison regime, from its post-emancipation institutional origins to its contemporary globality, is necessary here. I initiate the final section of this essay with two points of departure, in the hope of fostering a conceptualization of the U.S. prison regime that speaks to the productive entanglement of two structural logics: 1) white supremacy as a historical modality of social (dis)organization; and 2) the capacity of allegedly "local" or "domestic" U.S. social formations to circulate, militarize, and mobilize across global geographies.

Conclusion: the Idiom of Abolition

The prison regime is the organic descendant of durable and gender-specific mobilizations of anti-black geopolitical and socioeconomic containment—what Massey and Denton have called an authentic "American Apartheid"[22]—and programmatic state terror vis-à-vis domestic police ground wars (alternately named in state popular cultural productions as "wars" on crime, drugs, and terror), which can themselves be conceptualized as apparatuses of civil elimination that approximate and rearticulate slavery's fundamental "idiom of power": social death. Orlando Patterson's comparative archaeology of slavery's originating vernaculars of social order, natal alienation, and property dominion (in which he visits upon the slave orders of Rome, Greece, China, and medieval Europe, as well as the "racial" enactments of slavery in the Americas) suggests "two ways in which social death was represented and culturally 'explained,' depending on the dominant early mode of recruiting slaves." Marking the schematic relation between "intrusive" and "extrusive" modalities, Patterson's conception of slaveholding societies' ideological ordering facilitates an excavation of the global present that re-centers (racial) slavery as constitutive to the social genetics of Western civilization in the post-conquest period:

In the intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside—the "domestic enemy," as he was known in medieval Tuscany. He did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture. He stood, on the one hand, as a living affront to the local gods, an intruder in the sacred space....

In sharp contrast with the intrusive conception of death was the extrusive representation. Here the dominant image of the slave was that of an insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behavior. The destitute were included in this group, for while they perhaps had committed no overt crime their failure to survive on their own was taken as a sign of innate incompetence and divine disfavor.[23]

To critically theorize the structuring racial vernaculars of American national formation and contemporary globality suggests a particular elaboration of Patterson's schema: the historical formation of white supremacist state and state-sanctioned violence inscribes the centrality of (anti-black) social death as the fundamental historical idiom of power defining the convergence and mutual constitution between "racial" regimes and "carceral" regimes.

By invoking Patterson's well-known theorization of slavery's unique production of societal and interpersonal domination, I do not mean to posit a simplistic metaphorical or vulgar comparative depiction that vaguely metaphorizes the historical and institutional symbiosis between the U.S. prison and slave plantation. Rather, I am invoking a conception of the prison regime as a particular "formation of violence,"[24] which in turn anchors the contemporary articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of coercion and hegemony. Feldman writes:

The growing autonomy of violence as a self-legitimating sphere of social discourse and transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to totalize society. Violence itself both reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as something to be made.[25]

The contemporary American carceral apparatus, as a material artifact and technological blueprinting of global dominance, derives its significance as a fathomable and culturally accessible production of power from the institutionalized collapsing of state violence into the multiple "incomplete projects" of U.S. social formation in its local and global habitats. In this sense, the specificity and irreducibility of the U.S. prison regime as a formation of racial and white supremacist violence, and its centrality to the viability of the United States as both a national and global hegemony, is only partially signified by its institutional massiveness. While I will refrain here from rehashing the typical statistical abstractions and evidentiary laundry lists of empirical data that indicate and affirm the essential racialization—and racism—of the American criminal justice apparatus (heeding Angela Y. Davis' contention that "unmediated use of such statistical evidence ... can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrial complex"[26]), I would additionally argue that such statistical litanies do not always sufficiently reflect the constitutive logics of power and dominance that the U.S. prison regime simultaneously prototypes, institutionalizes, and mobilizes in our global moment. Hence, I am insisting on the theoretical importance—if not outright primacy—of radical genealogy over conventional criminological methodology.

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]