What Do We Mean When We Use the Word “Carceral?”
A frequent, and often well justified, criticism of radical-left political discourse is that it is obtusely academic, and subsequently completely inaccessible. Especially in the areas of queer theory, marxist dialectics, and critical prison studies, the language used by radicals can sound completely foreign, as this parody video confirms.
In the interest of demystifying some of the most important concepts of the contemporary abolitionist movement, the following is a simple, brief primer to carceral state theory.
Carcerality refers, broadly, to the concept and presence of imprisonment. Imprisonment, in turn, can be understood as the systematic punishment and capture of individuals designated “guilty.”
The word is used in an academic context, most often in abolitionist literature, to characterize government policy or philosophical ideas that embrace the prison as a model for social control.
Someone who is incarcerated has been forcibly confined to the walls of a prison.
In the prison, individuals are stripped of two of their basic rights: freedom of mobility and freedom of agency. Incarceration demands control of an individual’s movement and actions, confining them to a specific location and restricting who they can interact with and what they can do.
The carceral system extends beyond the walls of the prison, encompassing a broad range of tactics of control, including parole, offender registries, house arrest, voter disenfranchisement, and cash bail. Of course, the carceral system relies on the police and courts, agents of the carceral state, to determine and enforce its punishments.
But we can also see carceral logics utilized in many other aspects of our society, from preemptive surveillance in public spaces to employer drug tests and background checks.
Carceral Logic refers to the impulse to resort to the practice of imprisonment in a social context. Many individuals in America, and around the globe, have unconsciously internalized carceral logics, thanks to the tactics of imprisonment and surveillance utilized by virtually every modern government. Early in their adolescence, most children have already internalized the concept of the “bad guy” — an irredeemably evil character who must be punished and captured.
Many are aware of the school-to-prison pipeline, but our public schools also employ more subtle carceral logics, punishing student misconduct with detention or suspension and maintaining personalized records of student offenses.
Even interpersonally, we often resort to normalized, seemingly benign carceral logics. Parents may respond to a child’s misbehavior by grounding them, or sometimes by using physical violence.
Once we have an understanding of the carceral, we begin to see its influence all over. Homeless shelters. Factory Jobs. Zoos. The prison’s presence can be found anywhere.
Carceral Feminism, according to abolitionist writer Victoria Law, is an approach to feminism ”that sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women.”
Carceral feminists rely on the criminal justice system to protect women from sexual, domestic, or discriminatory violence, but choose to ignore the reality that police and prisons are themselves purveyors of violence against women. They also ignore the ways that police have historically marginalized and harmed the most vulnerable women, while using concerns about the safety of wealthy white women to justify false or excessive punishment of Black and Brown men.
Carceral feminism does not offer a solution to the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and rape culture. It does not offer a substantial critique of the culture and economic conditions that enable violence against women. Instead, it dysfunctionally attempts to punish offenders individually, and creates an environment where women are afraid to report assault.
“Yes, the carceral state encompasses the formal institutions and operations and economies of the criminal justice system proper, but it also encompasses logics, ideologies, practices, and structures, that invest in tangible and sometimes intangible ways in punitive orientations to difference, to poverty, to struggles to social justice and to the crossers of constructed borders of all kinds.”
~ Dr. Ruby C. Tapia, University of Michigan English and Women’s Studies
We can identify carcerality as a dominant, defining presence in modern America. Historically, we can directly connect carceral logics to the native American genocide, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, imperialist expansion, and capitalist exploitation.
The politics of virtually every elected official in the United States align with carceral ideology. To reject carcerality is to reject the very foundation of the criminal justice system in America. To reject carcerality is to reject the institutions (police, military, and courts) that maintain the social order and legitimacy of American government.
Without carcerality there is no racial police brutality, no war on drugs, and no school-to-prison pipeline. Without carcerality there is no surveillance of Muslim Americans, no displacement of indigenous peoples, and no deportations. Without carcerality there is no military, no police, and no prisons.
Without carcerality there is no America.
Prison abolitionists reject carcerality’s logics and dominance. Abolitionists identify mass incarceration and carceral technologies as modern evolutions of racialized slavery. They reject the prison entirely, calling for its total abolition, and work to create a new presence in its absence.
Conceptualizing abolition as a presence, not an absence, is key to understanding the work prison abolitionists do. Burning down the prison is meaningless if the people know nothing other than how to rebuild it.
Most abolitionists advocate for the practice of transformative justice. In short, transformative justice is an approach to individual justice that emphasizes healing, safety, and community accountability. Transformative justice acknowledges collective oppression as the root cause of individualized acts of violence. It seeks to end the conditions that produce violence, rather than attempt to absolve violence with violence, as the carceral state does.
Further Reading:
Story by Lex Moulton. Opinions expressed here are only that of the original author.
