Carceral Capitalism
Scholar, poet, and activist Jackie Wang is giving the Closing Address on the future of prison abolition at the 2020 Singapore Literature Festival in NYC. RSVP to hear her in conversation with journalist and activist Kirsten Tan on Saturday, October 3, 2020, 9.30-10.30 pm EDT. Check out the festival program here.
Below is an excerpt from Wang’s Introduction to her vital collection of essays Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press, 2018).
Sunbelt Penology
Much of my thinking about juvenile sentencing emerged from having to navigate the legal quagmire of my brother’s case in Florida. As someone who was formed in the crucible of Florida, I now see that Florida embodies the nexus between neoconservative policy, social disinvestment, and prison expansion. Florida is at the forefront of what Alex Lichtenstein calls “Sunbelt penology”: a penal ideology that emerged in the South but has become paradigmatic across the nation. He labels the region that most vigorously adopted this penal model “Flocatex” after Florida, California, and Texas (“the three largest carceral systems in the nation”): “In the half century since the passage of the LEAA [Law Enforcement Assistance Administration], by nearly any measure—total numbers of prisoners, expenditures on corrections, employment of personnel, privatization of prisons, and new prison construction—the states of Florida, California, and Texas (what I will call Flocatex) have set the pace for mass incarceration nationally.” [1]
The dual processes of social disinvestment and prison expansion were palpable during the years I spent in Florida (from birth until I was twenty-two). While residing there, I attended public schools and a public liberal arts college, New College of Florida. In national surveys the Florida public school system consistently ranks in the bottom 25 percent on measures such as graduation rates, teacher pay, test scores, education spending, and so forth. When the education budget was cut under Jeb Bush, I have a vivid memory of my middle school teacher announcing that there were not enough textbooks for every student, that we would have to leave our textbooks in our desks so they could be shared with students throughout the day (making it impossible to study at home). My classes were overcrowded, many of them held in “portables,” which are essentially mobile home–style classrooms that were unsafe, given Florida’s vulnerability when it comes to hurricanes. Like many other states across the country, Florida’s fiscal policies favored investment in prisons rather than in education and social programs. As Lichtenstein notes, “Since 1995 Florida has opened eleven major new correctional facilities, six of them run by private corporations.” [2] Annually the state spends about $2.3 billion on corrections, and about 16 percent of state employment is in corrections. [3] A 2016 brief from the U.S. Department of Education notes a similar trend across the country: “Over the past three decades, state and local government expenditures on prisons and jails have increased about three times as fast as spending on elementary and secondary education. At the postsecondary level, the contrast is even starker: from 1989–90 to 2012–13, state and local spending on corrections rose by 89 percent while state and local appropriations for higher education remained flat.” [4]
Before I was able to disentangle the political, economic, cultural, and racial forces that were shaping my context, I could feel their effects. Florida’s postsecondary education fiscal policies were such that the public college I attended as an undergraduate was chronically at risk of going bankrupt. I was halfway through my bachelor’s degree when the 2008 financial crisis hit, and Sarasota was one of the cities hit particularly hard by the collapse of the housing market. Many of the students I knew who were living off campus, including myself, were living in rooms rented in houses that were underwater—houses that were overvalued and purchased with mortgage loans that eventually became unpayable. Our landlords had stopped paying their mortgages, and foreclosure notices were delivered directly to our doors. During the crash I was also working at the front desk of the cheapest motels in Sarasota: the Seabreeze Inn and the Super 8 (at the time, a room at the Seabreeze Inn cost $26 a night). Many of the people who came to the motels were transitioning from living in suburban houses to homelessness. The people who rented rooms shared stories of their fall from grace: “I used to have a nice home and a great job,” they’d say. “Then … I lost everything.” But what was it, exactly, that caused the foundation of their lives to collapse beneath them? My high school best friend’s mom, who was a real estate agent, would always boast about how much she was raking in selling so many half-million dollar suburban homes. Now she was out of a job too. I was twenty during the financial crash, and I barely understood what was happening around me, but these experiences left a deep impression on me. Because Florida had been hit so badly by the collapse of the housing market, as soon as I graduated, New College of Florida was on the brink of bankruptcy owing to state budget cuts. Scholarship funding provided by the state (such as the Bright Futures Scholarship, which most NCF students depended on) was scaled back, and some of my friends who graduated after me were forced to pay the state thousands of dollars when the state decided to change the rules about how its scholarship funding would be calculated. Now the school is again facing a budget crisis under Governor Rick Scott, who has chosen to allocate funding to universities and colleges based on how many students they placed in STEM jobs in the state of Florida (NCF is a graduate feeder school, so this metric of “success” hardly applies).
Even though I did not have a deep structural understanding of the conditions of my life at the time, the experiences of having a brother in prison, going through the meat grinder of Florida public schools, and witnessing the financial crash as a motel worker, enabled me to acquire an observational understanding of the interplay between the debt economy, neoconservative fiscal policy, mass incarceration, neoliberal market deregulation, and social disinvestment.
The Debt Economy
Because I attended an in-state public school, worked, and received a scholarship and need-based Pell Grant, I am one of the lucky few students who was able to graduate without student debt. Even so, it has been impossible to escape the debt economy. When I was working at a grocery store for $5 and change an hour during high school, I would sometimes chat with the baggers about their life plans. One of the boys who attended my high school asked me if I had plans to go to college. I said that although two of my friends tried to coax me into attending Sarah Lawrence College, I ultimately decided to go to New College of Florida because I did not want to be financially fettered after college. He asked me if I would take out student loans. I said that I didn’t think it was necessary because I received a full scholarship, a need-based Pell Grant, and was eligible for work-study. He replied that I had to take out student loans, because “everyone takes out student loans.” Here we were: naive teenagers working a minimum wage job in Holiday, Florida, ready to sign our lives and our futures away because we had been told that it’s mandatory that we go into debt. My best friend, who got me the grocery store job—a Puerto Rican queer goth girl who worked exhaustive hours to buy a green Mustang sports car—was already buried in mountains of debt before she even entered her twenties. Just as disheartening, I watched some of my little brother’s friends go into debt trying to get degrees from sham, nonaccredited for-profit schools that later went bankrupt when Barack Obama tried to regulate the industry by barring such schools from receiving federal loans (schools such as ITT Technical Institute also aggressively advertised at my public high school).
At present, consumer credit has essentially become compulsory. In the last decade or so alone, I have observed a marked intensification of the intrusion of credit into our consumer lives. During our many daily economic transactions we are constantly barraged by opportunities to open a line of credit: Buying something online using PayPal? Why not buy it on credit? Need a pair of jeans? Why not open a Gap credit card and save 10 percent on your purchase? Opening a bank account? Why not get “overdraft protection” (which is actually a line of credit)? Need to exchange currency because you’re traveling? Why not sign up for a traveler’s credit card? Whenever I have a flight layover at an airport, I cannot walk from one gate to the next without being chased by people who want me to sign up for a credit card. Nowadays you don’t even need to consent to opening a credit card in order for it to be opened on your behalf, as the Wells Fargo sham account scandal revealed.
When I politely decline an opportunity to open a line of credit, I am often given a moralizing speech about the necessity of building my credit lest I be barred from ever being able to get a loan for a car, a mortgage, or even rent an apartment. Why the hell is a sales quota model being applied to banking? What are they selling you? These financial institutions are selling you indebtedness itself, because borrowed money begets money in the form of interest. That is why the largest student loan collection agency, Navient Corporation, deliberately lost students’ payments (as revealed in a recent class-action lawsuit): missed payments ensured that students’ debt would balloon, thus keeping borrowers trapped in a cycle of debt. Thus, as growth in the “real” economy remains low, in our perverted debt economy, falsely categorizing borrowers as delinquent has become a financial opportunity in itself.
There is a kernel of truth in the speech given by the aggressive credit pusher who warns that to do many things in our society, you need to build your credit. Nowadays, credit scores have a number of often invisible effects on our lives. Credit scores (and even more dubious “e-scores” determined by private data mining companies) are often used for hiring purposes because employers believe that credit scores are a reliable way to index a person’s level of responsibility. Yet considering that medical debt is the most common cause of bankruptcy in the United States and that there are racialized structural barriers to accessing nonpredatory forms of credit, it is outrageous to use credit scores as a way to measure someone’s personal character and make moralistic judgments about them. You could have a terrible credit score simply by being an uninsured black or brown person (without accumulated wealth) who gets into a bicycle accident. In short, using credit scores to punish poor people exacerbates already-existing socioeconomic inequalities.
Although the debt economy has expanded to buttress high levels of consumption amidst stagnant wages and the high-level unemployment that coincided with the financial recession that followed the 2008 crash, the hold that debt has over our lives is not merely numerical. It functions as a disciplinary apparatus as we internalize the ideology that naturalizes indebtedness. As I hope my anecdotes illustrate, we are, from an early age, socialized into a form of financial citizenship that compels us to accept indebtedness as inevitable and to constantly engage in self-disciplinary acts that authorize and extend the debt economy—whether it’s pursuing a job as a corporate lawyer instead of a public defendant in order to pay off student loans or telling your peers they are irresponsible for not building their credit.
Prison Technology
Thus far I have offered some personal observations about discourse, law, and political economy, and how contemporary racism operates through these various forms of power. But a contemporary analysis of prisons, police, and racial domination would be incomplete without an analysis of technology and algorithmic power. The pace of change, especially when it comes to communication technology, is dizzying. In 2004, when my brother was locked up at age seventeen, he did not have an email address, almost never used the internet and—of course—did not have a smartphone, as they had not yet appeared. I did not even have a cell phone until I was a college undergraduate. I remember my brother once asking me in a letter from prison if it cost money to send emails. His question made me painfully aware that technologically speaking, we are living in two different worlds, moving through life at vastly different speeds, with different life rhythms. This sentiment is probably familiar to anyone who has a family member, friend, or lover serving a lengthy prison sentence, for they too have probably had the heartbreaking experience of being questioned by the confined person about the minutia of how the world works and what it is like on the outside. Ashley C. Ford became aware of the technological distance between prisoners and free people when her father was released from prison. She writes:
Stores were a lot for him. He didn’t understand why everyone walked around looking down at their phones. He couldn’t fathom what could be happening on the phone that kept them so entranced. I tried to explain that there were often other people to talk to or look at on phones. Sometimes those people were far away, or people they didn’t even know. There were mostly no long-distance fees; there were photos and videos—basically the whole world could be on these screens. He thought about that for a minute and said, “But there are people all around right here. A lot of people we don’t know. Why not just look at them?” I didn’t have an answer to that. [5]
Furthermore, having a family member in prison not only gives me a depressing way to index how quickly the world is changing, it also makes me cognizant of how technology has transformed prison and police practices. At the county jail where my brother was housed while awaiting a resentencing hearing, he could use Jail Mail (essentially a paid email service) to communicate. Instead of sending stamps enclosed in a letter, I was able to deposit money in his account so he could write to me and others. While the introduction of this particular communication technology into this jail enables more immediate communication between inmates and people on the outside, other innovations in prisoner communication technology have simultaneously widened and collapsed the distance between prisoners and the outside world. In addition to Jail Mail, this jail has also introduced HomeWAV, a prisoner video chat system akin to Skype (albeit with extremely high usage fees). However, the introduction of HomeWAV has been accompanied by the phasing out of in-person no-contact visits. When I asked my mom how she feels about switching to digital visitations, she said, “I like it. I can show R. the dogs.” True, my brother can now get a glimpse of the interior of our living spaces and meet the dachshunds my mom got after our family dogs died. Contraband cell phones (sometimes smuggled in by prison guards) are circulating more and more inside prisons, allowing inmates to engage in a range of activities from taking selfies to organizing national strikes.
However, what would happen if contact visits were completely phased out and supplanted by digital visits? Are all social relations undergoing a similar transformation? As the introduction of digital communication services enables some cash-strapped states to scale back or phase out visitation hours, the prospect of prisoners no longer having any embodied contact with people on the outside worries me. Although I always dreaded the experience of waiting to be processed by the corrections administration only to be able to talk to my brother from behind a piece of glass, the phenomenological experience of entering a space of absolute non-freedom and social abjection makes the existence of prisons that much more real (rather than a fantasy elsewhere)—it even makes the task of abolishing prisons more morally urgent (and deeply felt).
Notes
1. Alex Lichtenstein, “Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration,” 115–16.
2. Ibid., 119.
3. Ibid.
4. “State and Local Expenditures on Corrections and Education,” U.S. Department of Education, Policy and Program Studies Service, July, 2016, https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/other/ expenditures-corrections-education/brief.pdf
5. Ashley C. Ford, “My Father Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out,” Refinery, May 1, 2017.
The above excerpt from Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang (Semiotext(e), 2018) is reprinted by permission from publisher and author.
Jackie Wang is a scholar, poet, multimedia artist and Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. In addition to her scholarship, her creative work includes the forthcoming poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021) and the experimental essay collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotexte, 2021).