Book Review: Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, by Banu Bargu

As Bargu notes, my central claims in Punishment and Inclusion are, first, that criminal disenfranchisement polices internal boundaries within the political body of the United States, and, second, that it does so in support of white supremacy as a political system. My focus on voting rights is ultimately in service of moving beyond electoral politics and the norms of inclusion that are managed through the franchise. As I write in the closing pages of the book, this analysis has led me to prison abolition and political solidarity with those who are most subjected to the social and civil death of incarceration. Bargu is quite right to note, however, that it is only in these last pages that such resistance appears