“I Would Wish Death on You…”
Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime

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” ¹—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. ²

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,” ³ 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. ⁴

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” ⁵), 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.

1. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.[↑]
2. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, 39-41.[↑]
3. See Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.[↑]
4. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 5. [↑]
5. Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003, 92.[↑]