PRISONS AND SOCIAL DEATH

Loïc Wacquant article “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” gives a good historical/theoretical overview of the “peculiar” institutions that have operated to “define, confine, and control” black Americans in the United States.

The trajectory of these institutions might look something like this:
Chattel slavery > prisons (ancillary/transitional) > Jim Crow > the ghetto > the ghetto + the carceral apparatus

Chattel slavery and mass incarceration are “genealogically linked” institutions. I think it was Jared Sexton who said that he does not want to hear “crime” talked about in relation to prisons. I would also add that it’s impossible to talk about prisons without also talking about slavery and the symbolic function of these institutions (namely, the production of race).

All of these institutions perpetuate black social death. Imprisonment is a form of social death. Judith Butler’s essay, “Indefinite Detention” (which is about Guantanamo Bay and the dual operation of sovereign and governmental/diffuse forms of power) describes one way of conceptualizing of social death. She writes:

Finally, it seems important to recognize that one way of “managing” a population is to constitute them as the less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This is different from producing a subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle. The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death. “Managing” a population is thus not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences.

(For more on social death and race, see Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics and works by afro-pessimists such as Frank Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, and Jared Sexton. I also watched a video of Rebecka Rutledge Fisher presenting a paper on Du Bois that used Agamben’s concept of “bare life” to talk about blackness and social death.)

I want to quote Loïc Wacquant’s article at length because it specifically lays out the ways in which the careral system induces social death—though he calls this modern manifestation “civic death.” Prisons are civic death, but the afro-pessimists would say that blackness—initially shaped/produced by slavery—is also social death. Wacquant writes:

…the overgrown carceral system of the United States has become a major engine of symbolic production in its own right. It is not only the pre-eminent institution for signifying and enforcing blackness, much as slavery was during the first three centuries of US history. Just as bondage effected the ‘social death’ of imported African captives and their descendants on American soil, mass incarceration also induces the civic death of those it ensnares by extruding them from the social compact. Today’s inmates are thus the target of a threefold movement of exclusionary closure:

Prisoners are denied access to valued cultural capital: just as university credentials are becoming a prerequisite for employment in the (semi)protected sector of the labour market, inmates have been expelled from higher education by being made ineligible for Pell Grants, starting with drug offenders in 1988, continuing with convicts sentenced to death or lifelong imprisonment without the possibility of parole in 1992, and ending with all remaining state and federal prisoners in 1994. This expulsion was voted by Congress for the sole purpose of accentuating the symbolic divide between criminals and ‘law-abiding citizens’ in spite of overwhelming evidence that prison educational programmes drastically cut recividism as well as help to maintain carceral order.
Prisoners are systematically excluded from social redistribution and public aid in an age when work insecurity makes access to such programmes more vital than ever for those dwelling in the lower regions of social space. Laws deny welfare payments, veterans’ benefits and food stamps to anyone in detention for more than 60 days. The Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 further banishes most ex-convicts from Medicaid, public housing, Section 8 vouchers and related forms of assistance. In the spring of 1998, President Clinton denounced as intolerable ‘fraud and abuse’ perpetrated against ‘working families’ who ‘play by the rules’ the fact that some prisoners (or their households) continued to get public payments due to lax bureaucratic enforcement of these prohibitions. And he proudly launched ‘unprecedented federal, state, and local cooperation as well as new, innovative incentive programs’ using the latest ‘high-tech tools to weed out any inmate’ who still received benefits (see opposite), including the disbursement of bounties to counties who promptly turn in identifying information on their jail detainees to the Social Security administration.
Convicts are banned from political participation via ‘criminal disenfranchisement’ practised on a scale and with a vigour unimagined in any other country. All but four members of the Union deny the vote to mentally competent adults held in detention facilities; 39 states forbid convicts placed on probation from exercising their political rights and 32 states also interdict parolees. In 14 states, ex-felons are barred from voting even when they are no longer under criminal justice supervision—for life in ten of these states. The result is that nearly 4 million Americans have temporarily or permanently lost the ability to cast a ballot, including 1.47 million who are not behind bars and another 1.39 million who served their sentence in full. A mere quarter of a century after acceding to full voting rights, one black man in seven nationwide is banned from the electoral booth through penal disenfranchisement and seven states permanently deny the vote to more than one fourth of their black male residents.

Through this triple exclusion, the prison and the criminal justice system more broadly contribute to the ongoing reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the polar opposition between praiseworthy ‘working families’—implicitly white, suburban, and deserving—and the despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers, and leeches, a two-headed antisocial hydra personified by the dissolute teenage ‘welfare mother’ on the female side and the dangerous street ‘gang banger’ on the male side—by definition dark-skinned, urban and undeserving.