Week 1

Key Questions

• What is the prison industrial complex? What does it encompass beyond simply prisons and police?

• How has the prison industrial complex historically developed? How has its development been entangled with racial capitalism?

Required Materials:

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalization and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesianism Militarism"

• Loïc Wacquant, "From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the 'Race Question' in the US"

• Alex Vitale, "The Police Are Not Here to Protect You" (AUDIO)

• Micah Herskind, "Cop City and the Prison Industrial Complex in Atlanta"

Supplementary Materials:

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

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Geographies of Racial Capitalism"

• Zine Library, “Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition”

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “Imprisonment and Reform”

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

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “The Prison Industrial Complex”

• Critical Resistance, “What is the PIC?”

• Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, “Introduction: Origins of Mass Incarceration”

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, and Opposition in Globalizing California, “The Prison Fix”

• Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020”

• Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview”

• Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, "What's Race Got to Do with It?: Bolstering and Challenging the Carceral State"

• Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, “Forced Passages: The Routes and Precedents of (Prison) Slavery”

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison”

• Stuart Schrader, “The Making of the American Gulag”

Exercise

Using your knowledge of the prison industrial complex, fill in the diagram of the prison industrial complex below. How far does it extend into our lives? Is it just prisons, jails, and police? Think about how carcerality transcends the traditional institutions that we typically consider constitutive of carcerality.