Week 10

Key Questions

• What role do police and prisons fulfill under racial capitalism? How have police and prisons evolved to manage and control surplus populations?

• How are policing and incarceration gendered? How are police and prisons related to social reproduction?

• How is neoliberalism implicated in the expansion of carcerality?

Required Materials:

• Robin D.G. Kelley, "Insecure: Policing Under Racial Capitalism"

• Jaime Amparo Alpes, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil, "The Favela-Prison Pipeline"

Supplementary Materials:

• Alex Vitale, The End of Policing, "The Police Are Not Here to Protect You"

• Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, "All Cops Are Bastards"

• Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism, "Policing as Plunder: Notes on Municipal Finance and the Political Economy of Fees and Fines"

• Marisol LeBrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, "A War Against the Victims"

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, and Opposition to Globalizing California, "The Prisons Fix"

Exercise

Police and prisons manage and control racialized, classed, and gendered surplus populations under racial capitalism. Given their integral role in the capitalist system, should they be resisted? Is abolition a necessary component of anti-capitalism? Consider how carcerality can be contested and what it would look like to live in a world without police or prisons.