Carcerality and Freedom
Carcerality and Freedom
By Judy Luo
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”—FANNIE LOU HAMER
At a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, a group of women decide that they want to celebrate Easter this year. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, each person sets aside a bit of their commissary money to buy snacks to donate to the “Easter egg hunt.” They tear, color, and hide Post-its. The women spend the afternoon scouring the block for these “eggs,” and afterwards, they collectively share the potato chips, chocolate, and candy that everyone has gathered over the past month. This whole affair would normally invite severe disciplinary consequences, but the correctional officers on duty have chosen to turn a blind eye today.
* * *
The prison sits at the nexus of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. The prison reveals a buried connection between state violence and interpersonal violence. The prison illuminates carcerality, which I have defined as punishment, discipline, control, and surveillance, as a structuring feature of society. Although carcerality is not exclusive to the state—other individuals and institutions with power can also use and enact carceral logic—it is predominantly perpetuated by it because of its tremendous power. Over the past few years, I have situated myself in the field of carceral studies, beginning with the prison as my lens and ending with an inquiry into freedom. The main lessons and questions I have acquired through classes, organizing, and friendships are how carcerality flourishes beyond carceral spaces, how criminalization functions as a political and economic weapon of the state, the myth of liberal freedom, and the liberatory work of abolition. As I continue down this path, my comrades upstate remind me that freedom flowers bloom everywhere, even in the walls of our cages.
CARCERALITY BEYOND CARCERAL SPACES
In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of a Prison, Michel Foucault asserts that carcerality is not only endemic to prisons, jails, and concentration camps, but also to “the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital” (199). Foucault argues that disciplinary power relies on binary categorizations such as “mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; abnormal/normal” (199). Those who are deemed to be on the “abnormal” side of the binary are subject to disciplinary control and punishment: “[t]he constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected… the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms… which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him” (199). In other words, Foucault believes there to be a whole system of surveillance, control, and punishment dedicated to the endless pursuit of refining what constitutes normality through identifying abnormality and correcting it. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault posits that these “disciplinary mechanisms” have origins in the barracks from the seventeenth century, where a host of punitive and disciplinary technologies were dedicated to ensuring the efficiency of soldiers (242). From exercise drills to routine inspections, these mechanisms were used to extract the maximum amount of output from individual bodies. In modernity, the barracks have become factories, offices, and homes. The search for and imposition of “normality” cannot be divorced from productivity.
The social welfare system in the United States is a model example of Foucault’s observation. The prevalence of carcerality in the U.S. welfare system has a long history, as demonstrated by Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. In particular, poorhouses of the 19th century, then known as workhouses, had the simultaneous and contradictory aims of administering relief to the poor, reforming their character, and deterring them from a future life of poverty. In order to receive support, individuals had to accept conditions of forced labor, which was often repetitive and aimless work intended to be punitive, e.g., moving large rocks back and forth and chopping wood. In Municipal Lodging Houses (large-scale poorhouses), inmates were required to take a supervised hot bath every night, a humiliating process mandating a “liberal use of carbolic soap” and “nightly disinfection of a wearing-apparel” (97). Poorhouse inmates were considered unproductive and/or subversive, and hence abnormal. Katz’s historical narrative of punitive measures in the U.S. welfare system designed to correct this abnormality exemplifies Foucault’s theory of disciplinary mechanisms. Crucially, Katz argues, the carceral logic of the poorhouse—namely, the sorting of the “worthy” from the “unworthy” poor and punishment of the latter—has survived and persists in the modern welfare state.
Today, carceral logic is embedded into most of, if not all of, society. This is true even of the sectors that are supposedly focused on care, like child services and schools. From the policing of Black mothers by social workers to juvenile suspensions in schools, a pervasive carceral culture means that punishment, whose violent and traumatizing character must be emphasized, are highly acceptable and valued approaches to how the state governs people, and in turn, how we treat each other.
CRIMINALIZED PEOPLE, NOT CRIMINALS
The definition and enforcement of crimes in the U.S. are less about what is immoral and more about what is inimical to capitalist order and white supremacy. Border enforcement, which claims to be non-carceral, reveals a key function of criminalization as a political and economic weapon of the state.
Juliet Stumpf proposes in her germinal article “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power” that membership theory, “which limits individual rights and privileges to the members of social contract between the government and the people, is at work in the convergence of criminal and immigration law”—a phenomenon she calls crimmigration (59-60). Luis Barrios and David Brotherton’s ethnography of the deportation of criminalized Dominican nationals from the U.S., Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile, powerfully animates the punitive elements of immigration enforcement experienced by its targets. Criminalized Dominican deportees—which comprise the majority of Dominican nationals deported from the U.S.—face immense mental and physical trauma first from criminal incarceration, then post-sentence immigration detention, and then exile by deportation. Beyond those traumas, many deported people then face myriad challenges of bearing a stigmatized identity upon their return. Again, carceral logic is at work outside of explicitly carceral spaces: under regimes of immigration enforcement—which the government insists is merely a civil affair, where the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a lawyer and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process do not apply—those deemed deserving are awarded documents, while those who are deemed undeserving are criminalized and punished with incarceration and exile.
Stumpf’s work on crimmigration sheds light on how the state uses criminalization as a sorting mechanism to determine who is included and excluded. However, this categorization is not a simplistic binary of citizen versus non-citizen as it first appears. Alessandro de Giorgi expounds on this in “Immigration Control, Post-Fordism, and Less Eligibility.” By drawing on the idea of the “political economy of punishment,” which conceives the human body as an exploitable resource rather than merely a site of ritual punishment, De Giorgi argues that border enforcement not only excludes but also importantly includes people, on varying conditions, effectively creating sources of precarious and exploitable labor. In other words, although the spectacle of immigration enforcement is focused on deportation and “removal of aliens,” less obvious is its inclusive function. Immigration enforcement not only detains and deports, but also disciplines through maintaining conditions of “detainability” and “deportability.” In Foucault’s interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon—an architectural design where an opaque guard tower stands in the center of a circle of cells—surveillance and discipline is diffused amongst its subjects, effectively creating a system of self-regulation. Accordingly, the spectacle of deportations and immigration raids functions as the central tower: in constant fear of one’s potential exile, an undocumented person living in the U.S. often must accept work in the most exploitative sectors of the economy to survive.
With this key understanding that the border is flexible in regards to the circulation and management of labor and capital, Daniel Gonzalez calls attention to the logistical function of borders in “Logistical Borderlands: Latinx Migrant Labor in the Information Age” from the online magazine Society and Space. He writes, “Reconceptualizing the border as a logistical infrastructure… denaturalizes assumptions that the border is merely a technology of social exclusion…. [H]ighlighting the logistical and infrastructural dimensions of borders uncovers the violent and complex inclusionary practices required for transnational racial capitalism.” The phenomenon of criminalized and deported Dominicans working in call centers that Barrios and Brotherton describe suggests that the border not only manages the flow of labor and capital into the U.S., but also to its myriad locations of outsourced labor. The “finality” of deportation is a mere performance of U.S. sovereignty, concealing the dependency of American corporations on underpaid foreign labor. Border formation and criminalization persist after Dominican deportees return, fostering conditions of precarity that severely limit their work options. As a result, they often end up performing labor where their proximity to American culture is an asset, evident in the sector of outsourced call centers. Therefore, the deported Dominican call center worker discloses the ways in which criminalization works in tandem with immigration enforcement to perform a logistical function in the management of labor and capital not only within the nation-state, but also beyond it.
Crimmigration reveals the underlying carceral logic at work in border enforcement and, crucially, how criminalization is a political and economic weapon of the state. The caged Black man and deported “criminal” alien assure the white citizen of his own innocence and freedom, and both prison walls and borders ensure that certain populations have no choice but to perform underpaid and/or undesirable labor—work that is necessary for Americans’ material comforts. Indeed, this is the catch-22 of carceral logic: one’s freedom is always dependent on someone else’s unfreedom.
THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM
Our dominant conception of freedom is derived from liberal thought—a tradition whose founding fathers simultaneously waxed eloquent about freedom and rights and condoned violent imperialism in colonies. Georg W.F. Hegel’s story of the lord and bondsman in The Phenomenology of Spirit suggests that this dissonance is not simply due to blissful ignorance. According to Hegel, the lord’s experience of freedom (and domination) is completely contingent upon the bondsman. Not only does he depend on the bondsman for constant recognition, he is entirely reliant on the bondman’s labor to create his sense of freedom. Hegel’s narrative reveals that the support of mass violence by liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and John Locke was not an innocent theoretical inconsistency, but rather, part and parcel of this carceral logic of freedom through subjugation. For example, the conditions of freedom experienced in Britain during Mill’s lifespan were made possible by exploitation of resources, land, and labor through the colonization of India and beyond. If Hegel is right that true freedom cannot be attained through subjugating others, then we must look beyond the liberal tradition for a more adequate understanding of freedom.
John Locke, one of the fathers of liberalism, wrote in his Second Treatise of Government that a free person (in civil society) is at “liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own” (51). That is, in the classical liberal conception of freedom, to be free is to be a propertied man who is a sovereign agent: wholly independent, in control of one’s action insofar as one’s willful intention determines the meaning of the act, i.e., one’s actions reflect one’s rational choice, not the will of others or random chance.
In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism, Sharon Krause, following the thinking of Hannah Arendt, contests the idea that one individual can be sovereign. She believes that agency has two components: 1) action and 2) social uptake of the action, i.e., how others interpret and respond to our actions. Agency cannot be possessed by an individual, because it is a “socially distributed phenomenon” (4). No individual has total ownership or guarantee over the effectiveness of their action. A simple example of this is verbal communication. One can have an intended meaning when they say something, but there is no guarantee that the listener understands that intended meaning. Therefore, we are non-sovereign to the extent that our actions and their meaning are entirely subject to others’ will and interpretation.
Nick Montgomery and carla bergman write about another dimension of non-sovereignty in the chapter “Friendship is a Root of Freedom” of Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times: “Freedom was once inseparable from interdependence, close ties, and kinship: I am free because of others I can depend on.” Montgomery and bergman’s emphasis on interdependence is distinct from Locke’s definition, which conceives the free individual as a wholly independent individual—namely, a man who is in charge of his own affairs and property. The Lockean conception erases what is required to produce conditions of freedom in the first place. For example, the image of the sovereign and independent man entirely conceals the people in his life that his very existence depends on, such as his mother, who raised him, or his partner, who takes care of him at home. Marxist feminists call this work reproductive labor, or the domestic and care labor (often performed by women of color) required to sustain workers in the formal economy. In addition, as discussed briefly in the previous section, the identity of the United States as a stand-alone bastion of freedom erases the violence that this country’s “freedom” rests upon, such as settler-colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, all which have yielded vital sources of labor for the nation-state’s development. Therefore, our inescapable interconnectedness unsettles the idea that freedom means unfettered independence, because the latter simply does not exist.
Locke also posits that security, or being free from violence, is key to freedom (51). This conception of safety as something that, as scholar Priya Kandaswamy describes, “is the property of an individual rather than something that is collectively made,” already presupposes the necessity of carceral institutions for “protection,” e.g., police and prisons, just as other types of ownership require violent enforcement. Carcerality functions to consolidate sovereignty and control in the name of individual ownership of safety. Simply put, according to carceral logic, one’s right to security is also the sovereign right to singlehandedly seek punitive measures to control another. Contrary to this position, Montgomery and bergman acknowledge that harm is inevitable among humans, but they also argue that people can still find freedom in the presence of harm. In their view, freedom takes root in the open-ended capacity and potential to make, break, and transform relationships. Therefore, freedom is not a fixed state of being, defined by one’s relative liberty and security against a caged person as per carceral logic; instead, it is defined by one’s capacity to be a creative actor in the world and in one’s relationships.
Our non-sovereignty does not mean that we are not free—on the contrary, it is precisely the recognition of our non-sovereignty that forms the basis for envisioning a new freedom apart from one that is circumscribed by carceral logic and false notions of sovereignty. In a conversation between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt titled “No One is Sovereign in Love,” Berlant asserts that love is one of the only situations where people want to change, a process “without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality.” In a sense, “entering into relationality” is a relinquishing of the aspiration to control another as a sovereign subject. This requires us to part ways with the false allure of security backed by carcerality and move towards safety that is created through vital relationships. In this sense, freedom is the active creation and shaping of the world around us and the relationships in our lives, alongside the keen awareness of our inherent embeddedness and mutual reliance. Only by understanding the possibility of the coexistence of freedom and non-sovereignty can we grapple with the messiness and unpredictability that characterize human existence, rather than resort to the prison as a catchall.
“ABOLITION IS A POSITIVE PROJECT.”
Andrea Smith, a cofounder of the national activist organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and a prison abolitionist organizer, emphasizes in an interview that abolition is a “positive rather than a negative project.” That is, the work of abolition is fundamentally imaginative and generative, centered around building a world free of carcerality, not just tearing down prisons. In her book Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang writes “Imagination is excess, is that which could never be contained by the prison, that which will always exceed it.” Wang encourages us to escape the realism of the present that imprisons the envisioning of change. Abolition is a creative exercise in both the dreaming of a new world and building it. In other words, one cannot be abolitionist without doing abolition.
The heart of abolition resides in the critical relationships emerging out of organizing work that prefigure a world without prisons. I’ve spent the last two years organizing with members of Survived and Punished for the freedom of criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, making friendships with people inside, and building mutual aid networks across prison walls. However, since carcerality is a dominant structuring feature of society, the scope of work that falls under “doing abolition” is expansive. One does not have to be working directly in the prison abolition movement to do abolition: the movement requires people working on all social justice issues to be committed to building a world free of carcerality. For example, I spent a semester working in the office of New York State Assemblymember Ron Kim, who is primarily committed to recognizing the central role of care work, which is severely undervalued and even unvalued, in the economy. An explicit advocate for decarceral policies, Kim saw his own economic justice agenda as a means to shift public policy away from punishment and austerity. Another form of doing abolition is practicing accountability, defined by anti-violence activist Shannon Perez-Darby as the taking of “responsibility for your choices and the consequences of those choices.” It is a core component of transformative justice—a framework of justice rooted in abolitionist values. In her blog entry titled “How To Give A Good Apology Part 1: The Four Parts of Accountability,” Mia Mingus—a prominent transformative justice practitioner and disability justice organizer—describes accountability as four key practices: self-reflection, apologizing, repair, and behavior change. Exercising accountability is a way of reclaiming the ability to address interpersonal harm without the police, a skill robbed of the people because of the proliferation of carcerality. Therefore, abolition can occur in myriad forms, both grand and quotidian, and can be practiced by any one who is committed to abolishing carcerality.
In many ways, abolition is more than a movement or a theory—it is a way of life. It is rigorous in that it demands a vigilant attentiveness and empathy for our own and others’ wellbeing. It is artistic in that it calls on us to be dreamers and builders of an unimaginable world. It is spiritual in that it requires an unyielding faith in the transformative potential of humans. Contrary to the deathmaking ways of carcerality, abolition is a resounding affirmation of life and the unequivocal assertion that all, not some, deserve to be free.
Judy Luo is a student and prison abolitionist. As the Assistant Editor at Gaudy Boy, she is devoted to amplifying Asian literary voices that open radical political possibilities. Judy resides in New York City, where she is finishing her concentration in carceral studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
List of Works
*=globalizing perspective
º=historicizing perspective
Premodern and Early Modern:
1. ºAeschylus. The Oresteian Trilogy. (458 BCE). Translated by Phillip Vellacott. New York: Penguin Classics, 1956.
2. ºDe Vitoria, Francisco. “On the American Indians.” (1539). In Vitoria: Political Writings, edited by Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance, 231-292. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
3. ºDeclaration of the Rights of Man. National Assembly of France, August 26, 1789. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp.
4. ºGrotius, Hugo. Mare Liberum. (1609). Translated by Jeroen Vervliet. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2009.
5. ºHobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (1651). New York: Penguin Books, 1981.
6. ºKant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. (1785). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
7. ºLocke, John. The Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. (1689). New York: Dover Publications, 2002.
Modern Humanities:
8. ºKatz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: BasicBooks, 1986.
9. THE MYTH OF INDIVIDUAL SOVEREIGNTY:
a. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1995.
b. ºHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Lordship and Bondage.” In Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller, 111-119. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
c. Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Lived Underground.” In Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
10. CREATING COLLECTIVE SOVEREIGNTY:
a. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. We, the Sovereign. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
b. ºDewey, John. “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.” In Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey, edited by Douglas Simpson and Sam Stack, 249-253. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
11. FREEDOM AS ILLEGIBILITY:
a. Moten, Fred. “Knowledge of Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 8, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 269-310.
b. *Torres, Gerald and Kathryn Milun. “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case.” Duke Law Journal 1990 (1990): 625-659.
Modern Social or Natural Sciences:
12. *Yeh, Emily. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
13. CRIMINALIZING MOVEMENT:
a. *Brotherton, David and Luis Barrios. Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
b. Stumpf, Juliet. “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power.” In Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Reader, edited by Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda, 59-76. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014.
14. NON-SOVEREIGN FREEDOM:
a. Kandaswamy, Priya. “Centering Prison Abolition in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” The Scholar & Feminist Online 13, no. 2 (spring 2016). https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/priya-kandaswamy-centering-prison-abolition-in-womens-gender-and-sexuality-studies/0/#.
b. Kelz, Rosine. The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on Moral Philosophy and Political Agency. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
c. Krause, Sharon. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
d. Montgomery, Nick and carla bergman. “Friendship is a Root of Freedom.” Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, December 11, 2017. https://joyfulmilitancy.com/2017/12/11/friendship-as-a-root-of-freedom/
e. “No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt.” By Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin. No More Pot Lucks 18 (November/December 2011) http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/no-one-is-sovereign-in-love-a-conversation-between-lauren-berlant-and-michael-hardt/.
15. BORDERS AND PRISONS AS LOGISTICAL INFRASTRUCTURES:
a. De Genova, Nicholas. “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013): 1180-1198.
b. De Giorgi, Alessandro. “Immigration Control, Post-Fordism, and Less Eligibility.” Punishment and Society 12, no. 2 (2010): 147-167.
c. Gonzalez, Daniel. “Logistical Borderlands: Latinx Migrant Labor in the Information Age.” Society and Space, April 12, 2019. https:// societyandspace.org/2019/04/12/12970/.
Carcerality Studies
16. GENEALOGY OF STATE CARCERALITY:
a. ºFoucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
b. ºFoucault, Michel. “17 March 1976.” In “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, edited by Mauro Bertani, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana, 239-263. New York: Picador, 2003.
17. CARCERALITY BEYOND CARCERAL SPACES:
a. Story, Brett, dir. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. 2016.
b. ºOrleck, Annelise. Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.
18. THE CARCERAL EMPIRE:
a. *Black, Stephanie, dir. Life and Debt. 2001.
b. Schrader, Stuart. “Policing Empire.” Jacobin, September 5, 2014. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/policing-empire/.
19. ABOLISHING CARCERALITY, CREATING FREEDOM:
a. Kaba, Mariame, and John Duda. “Towards the Horizon of Abolition: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba.” The Next System Project, November 9, 2017. https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba.
b. Kivel, Paul. "Social Service or Social Change?" In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 129-149. Boston: South End Press, 2007.
c. Mingus, Mia. “Dreaming Accountability.” Leaving Evidence Blog, entry posted May 5, 2019. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/dreaming-accountability-dreaming-a-returning-to-ourselves-and-each-other/.
d. Mingus, Mia. “How To Give A Good Apology Part 1: The Four Parts of Accountability.” Leaving Evidence Blog, entry posted December 18, 2019. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/12/18/how-to-give-a-good-apology-part-1-the-four-parts-of-accountability/.
e. Mingus, Mia. “Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet.” Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, June 2016. https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/.
f. Perez-Darby, Shannon and Kiyomi Fujikawa. “What is Accountability?”
