Dis-placing the Prison: Carceral Space, Disposable Life, and Urban Struggle in Neoliberal America

This dissertation contributes to the emerging field of carceral geography by demonstrating how carceral space produces and manages social disposability in late capitalist American life. In so doing, it posits that carceral space must be conceived as a complex geography, one that inscribes the production of racialized poverty, incarceration, and devalued life into its everyday socio-spatial relations. Carceral space encompasses the whole chain of relationships that make up the prison system: from the sites of criminalization, arrest and conviction to the landscapes of building construction; from edifices of captivity to the spaces deployed for the circulation and transfer of bodies. Carceral space also, I argue constitutes those social relations and geographic practices through which the stateâ s capacities of containment, displacement and dispossession are put to work for racial capitalism. The dissertation examines several illustrative carceral spaces at different points along the continuum of penal coercion in order to answer the question: How does carceral space help produce and manage social disposability? Using qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and textual analysis, my four case studies demonstrate that the production of disposability is an active process, spatialized in a range of places and forms that are politically mutable, highly contested, and differentially experienced. Throughout my case studies, geographies of spatial isolation and individuation function alongside the neoliberal logic of individual responsibility, to undermine black sociality and the forging of collective counter-power to racial capitalism and the carceral state. I argue that the racialized production of the â criminalâ provides powerful legitimizing cover for the making and social differentiation of surplus populations. The criminal is a paradigmatic category of disposability in capitalist liberal democracies precisely because the project of neoliberalism makes it so hard to divest from the economy of individualized responsibility and accountability. Finally, the dissertation points to some of the ways in which the capacities of the carceral state are being retrofitted for the current political-economic conjuncture, producing new spatial fixes for managing surplus life under the pretext of penal reform. I conclude that so long as the actual social relations for which the carceral state is put to work remain unchallenged, the spatial organization of racialized unfreedom and surplus life remain a pressing and pernicious threat.Ph.D