Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

236 Pages·2019·4.36 MB·English

by  Brett Story

Prison Land
This page intentionally left blank
Prison Land
Mapping Carceral
Power across
Neoliberal
America
Brett Story
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis | London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance provided
for the publication of this book by the Margaret S. Harding Memorial Endowment, honoring
the first director of the University of Minnesota Press.
Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were published in “The Prison and the City: Tracking the Neoliberal
Life of the ‘Million Dollar Block,’” Theoretical Criminology 20, no. 3 (2016): 257– 76. Portions of
chapter 1 were published in “Against a Humanizing Prison Cinema: The Prison in Twelve
Landscapes and the Politics of Abolition Imagery,” in The Visual Criminology Handbook, ed.
M. Brown and E. Carrabine, 455– 66 (London: Routledge, 2017). Portions of chapter 3 were
published in B. Story and J. Schept, “Against Punishment: Centering Work, Wage, and Uneven
Development in Mapping the Carceral State,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and
World Order 46 (forthcoming in 2019).
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Story, Brett, author.
Title: Prison land : mapping carceral power across neoliberal America / Brett Story.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045509 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0687-0 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0688-7 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Prisons—United States. | Prisons—Canada. | Discrimination in
criminal justice administration—United States. | Discrimination in criminal justice
administration—Canada. | Corrections—Political aspects—United States. | Corrections—
Political aspects—Canada. | Capitalism—United States. | Capitalism—Canada. | BISAC:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Penology. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography. | SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural.
Classification: LCC HV9471 .S843 2019 (print) | DDC 365/.973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045509
For birdie
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction The Prison out of Place 1
1 The Prison in the City: Securitizing Property 29
in Bankrupt Detroit
2 N eighborhood Watch: Reform and Real Estate 51
in Gentrifying Brooklyn
3 Rural Extractions: Work and Wages 79
in the Appalachian Coalfields
4 The Prison In- Between: Caretaking and Crisis 105
on the Visitors’ Bus
5 Community Confinements: Social Control in Everyday Life 137
Conclusion Freedom Struggles and the Future 167
of Carceral Space
Acknowledgments 185
Notes 189
Bibliography 193
Index 213
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
I came to the prison, at first, indirectly. Not through arrest or conviction
at all, but through eviction. The first time I was evicted, it was the mid-
1980s and I was a child living in Toronto with my mother, a single parent
on social assistance. We shared a bedroom in a house with a group of
other, mostly low income, women. The real estate market in our neigh-
borhood had just begun heating up, and the collective rent paid by the
tenants in our house didn’t match what other apartments in the neighbor-
hood were starting to rent for. So our landlord took advantage of a loop-
hole in the municipal rent-c ontrol rules to evict all of us. Modest single-
family homes in that same neighborhood now sell for millions of dollars.
Almost twenty years later, I found myself facing eviction again, under
similar circumstances, though as a student rather than as a child. I’d
moved to Montreal in the late 1990s, just as its independent music scene
was exploding and the hangover of Quebec separatism still guaranteed
cheap rents for working people, artists, and activists. The province’s
flight risk (manifested as late as 1995 in a province- wide referendum on
independence from Canada) made the terrain too unstable for real- estate
capital, which was good news for everyone I knew. It meant we could
work part- time jobs and spend our real time doing political organizing,
making art, and building community. But that eventually started to
change, and the real estate developers descended. When my landlord
evicted my roommates and me in a legally suspect move with echoes of
the eviction I’d faced as child, I decided to make a film about gentrifica-
tion and its consequences.
ix