AFRC2130 - Carceral Crisis: The Question of Abolition

The total number of incarcerated peoples in the United States is currently around 2.1 million people, held across various carceral sites – jails, immigration detention centers, and state and federal prisons. If we include all human beings under the direct control of the criminal justice system in the tally, not just the actively incarcerated but those on probation or parole as well, that number swells to approximately eight-million adults, or one person in thirty-seven (Wacquant, 2009). The United States, in both absolute terms and as a percent of its population, is the most aggressive incarcerator of its own citizens in the world. If those under supervision of the criminal justice system were counted as a city population, it would be the second most populous in the country just behind New York City. Currently, one of every six Black men in the United States has been or is currently locked up, and one in three is destined to be at some point in their life. One in six Latinx men will similarly find themselves locked down throughout their life-course. Forty-percent of Black males from the nation’s “hyperghettos” (Wacquant) between the ages of 18 and 35 years-old are under some form of carceral control, and police and prisons are often the primary contact between young Black men and the state.
It was within this context that in the summer of 2020, the nation witnessed the extra-legal police executions of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Subsequent civil disobedience actions rocked the country from coast to coast with calls to “defund the police” and “end mass incarceration.” As a result, the notion of police/prison abolition has entered mainstream political discourse to a remarkable degree not witnessed in generations. And its appearance has spawned strident debate across the political spectrum about the viability of police and/or prison abolition, its potential societal effect(s) and/or abolition’s very necessity or even its desirability.
The aims of this seminar are twofold. First, we will engage a set of interdisciplinary texts (Sociological, Philosophical, Black Studies, Geographical, Autobiographical, Ethnographic etc.) to develop a broad understanding of that complex set of forces that have transformed the United States into the most rapacious incarcerator of its own citizens of any nation in the global state system. Said straightforwardly, we want to explore the questions: why do we have such a large prison system in the United States and how did it come to be? What work does the prison do on behalf of civil society and why does it deleteriously impact communities of color most profoundly?
Secondly, this seminar will work to develop a broad familiarity with abolitionist discourse not only with regards to the questions raised above, but also to develop an understanding of abolitionist perspectives/orientations on what we can, should or even must do about prisons, policing and carcerality – “mass” incarceration - more broadly. In order to realize these contextualizations, this seminar is organized across three larger themes each thinking about “mass” incarceration from a differing vantage - whether external and/or internal to the prison itself:
1. An examination of the political, social, economic and historical forces that have built contemporary carcerality in both ideology and in material fact,
2. A familiarization with abolitionist perspectives on “what must be done” to challenge racialized “mass” incarceration as well as abolitionists’ critique of mainstream political proposals on police and/or prison reform, and
3. An analysis of the carceral interior through the politicized writings of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated abolitionist thinkers as well as those scholars who take the culture/institutions internal to the prison as proper site for abolitionist intervention.