Giving toCritical Prison Studies in an Age of Mass Incarceration
While the forms, functions, and effects of carceral institutions have long and complex genealogies within Euro-American modernity, their exponential growth, intensification, and reach in the United States in the last thirty years is palpable and profound. With just over five percent of the world’s population, the United States currently cages nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Over two million people are currently incarcerated—an increase of some 700% since the 1970s. One in 100 adults, including 1 in 9 black men aged 20 to 34, is currently in prison, and over two-thirds of the prison population are people of color. On the inside, prisons are routinely accused of gross human rights violations—from massive overcrowding to indefinite periods of solitary confinement, from pervasive sexual violence to dreadfully inadequate medical care. On the outside, over seven million ex-imprisoned people, their family members, friends, or employers, are directly affected by a web of carceral institutions that impact access to housing, education, employment, and democratic participation.
The full range of humanities and social science disciplines is being brought to bear on the centrality of prisons today. The Critical Prison Studies Strategic Working Group will gather a diverse group of scholars to catalyze precisely such an inquiry at UC Berkeley. We intend to ask a variety of foundational questions: How do we understand the historical and juridical relationship between carcerality and conceptions of human being? How does carcerality inform concepts of time, place, and space? How does it shape liberal democracy’s formative distinctions (public/private, freedom/enslavement, liberty/security, citizen/alien, peace/war)? How do carceral regimes circulate across local, regional, national, and global sites and scales? What are the formal, affective, and aesthetic contours of representations of and knowledge about carceral life?
To address these and related questions, the Critical Prison Studies Strategic Working Group intends to draw from and speak to scholarship across the fields of law, critical theory, critical race studies, cultural geography, public health, literary studies, and history. While the Group’s participants will determine the particular trajectory of our readings, sample strands of inquiry include:
- The effects of the prison boom on the juridical contours of American national life.
- The processes and effects of carcerality on human being and on the differential valuations of human beings across axes of race, gender, and sexuality, charting their relation to historical and contemporary practices of enslavement and genocide.
- Intellectual and cultural histories of incarceration as narrated from inside, and the widespread growth of carcerality in popular culture.
- The centrality of a carceral regime to the political economies of local, state, and federal governments and the network of private industries that serve them.
- The articulation of domestic prisons to “homeland security,” both in the high-profile sites of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, and in the innumerable unregulated prisons that house those whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement have captured and held for purported immigration violations.
- The formal and informal relation of US carceral regimes to practices of incarceration in other regions, including, for instance, the former Soviet bloc, West Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Conveners
Keith P. Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and affiliated faculty with the Center for Race and Gender and the Program in Critical Theory. His work follows the spatial turn in transnational American Studies to consider sites and scales of racialization across cultural cartographies of nation, empire, and diaspora in the long 20th century.
Marcial Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of English. His research and teaching interests include Chicano/a literature, twentieth-century American ethnic literatures, theory of the novel, Marxist literary theory, and Mexican American migrant farm worker narratives and social movements.