Prison Land: An Interview with Brett Story
Interviewed by Willie Mack
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Willie Mack speaks to filmmaker and geographer Brett Story about her book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. Story reexamines the prison as a set of social relations which includes property, race, gender, and class across the urban landscape. In this way, Story demonstrates how carceral power is distributed outside of the prisons walls to include racially segregated communities, gentrifying urban spaces, and even mass transit. She defines these areas as “carceral spaces,” which are ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism and exclusion.
Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America
By Brett Story
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
240 pages
Can you define the terms neoliberalism and the carceral, and talk a little about how those two terms work together in your book to form carceral space?
I’ll start by saying that I recognize that neoliberalism is a fraught term, and there has been much debate over the years about its precise meaning and usefulness. The way I use the term, following thinkers like David McNally and Wendy Brown, in the book is to describe a set of transformations in the capitalist economy and the state’s role within those transformations over the past half century. So, neoliberalism as I use it broadly describes the construction of new institutional forms and regulatory conventions designed to secure and extend market rule into all realms of life, including the roll-back of the Keynesian welfare functions of the state, deregulation of the labor market, and the financialization of the economy. The term also signals a shift in public consensus around the role of the state and its relationship to society. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher perhaps summed up the neoliberal project best when she said there’s no such thing as society, only “individuals and their families.” Indeed, alongside massive deregulation and disinvestment from the state’s welfare functions, we’ve also seen over this period an entrenchment of the ideology of individual responsibility in all realms.
These transformations can be dated from about the early 1970s onward across the Western world, which is also, not incidentally, the period that saw a massive buildup of prison infrastructure across the United States and skyrocketing incarceration rates. We have come to describe this period using the term “mass incarceration.” As I argue, following scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jamie Peck, that the massive buildup of the carceral regime has functioned as the necessary “exostructure” of neoliberal policies and logics. The state has not retreated in the neoliberal period, but rather it has been reconfigured, and the buildup of its military, policing, and carceral functions can be understood in large part as the means by which the state manages and absorbs, on behalf of capital, the multiple social calamities and social crisis that are consequent to the neoliberal shift. That management works on a number of levels. Surplus workers who might once have earned living wages in unionized, public sector jobs are warehoused in carceral facilities. Deindustrialized towns devastated by the flights of global capital are targeted for new prison facilities, their residents’ hopes for the future hitched to the often the false promise of a prison job. Single mothers whose low-wage work doesn’t afford them time to take care of their children are made to believe that their housing precarity or food insecurity is somehow their individual fault, rather than failings of their government or the economy. And poor and working people of all races and immigration status are pitted against each as competitors for scarce resources, increasingly through the language and ideology of “criminality,” rather than as necessary allies in potential mass movements for social change. The carceral is the control, containment, and disciplinary means by which the multiple crisis endemic to not just to neoliberal policies, but racial capitalism more broadly, are managed by the state in order to reproduce the social order — a social order predicated on massive economic and racial inequities.
You talk about how Prison Land “displaces” the prison. How does it do that? What does it mean to displace the prison?
When I use the term “displace” I use it in two senses. On the one hand, the more literal I suppose, I mean it in the sense of situating elsewhere. We tend to focus our understanding of the prison system at the actual site of the penitentiary, and then target our methods of inquiry at that site. It makes sense, right? Why wouldn’t we want to study the actual penitentiary — the conditions, the architecture, the experiences of people inside, the rules and regulations — in order to produce critical understanding of that space? But one argument I put forward in my book is that that gaze is not only too narrow, but may also be distracting. To understand our contemporary regime of penal control as a system and as a set of relations we need to expand our view beyond not only the site of incarceration but also beyond the narrow orbit of what gets called the “criminal justice system” — the police precincts, the courtrooms, the legislative bodies. We already know — because the data has told us so — that incarceration patterns do not track alongside crime rates so much as they track alongside other transformations in social, economic and political life: inequality rates, cuts to social welfare provisions, deindustrialization, upsurges in social protest, stagnation of wages, cuts to public services, and so on. So, the proposition of the book is that we actually have so much more to learn about why, how, and with what consequences the state deploys and expands its capacities to criminalize and incarcerate if we examine a set of sites beyond the penitentiary and its most immediate auxiliaries. It turns out that redlined neighborhoods, impoverished coal towns, and gentrifying urban enclaves tell us much more about why the state builds prisons and then fills them then, say, examining any one jail or courtroom or prison. And therefore, they also tell us much more about how we might stop that building and filling of prisons.
On the other hand, I also mean displace in the sense of disrupt or unsettle. Here, I’m suggesting that the prison not only takes up material space in the landscape, but it also takes up space in our imaginations of what justice means or might look like. There’s a political as well as epistemological project to my book, and that is to offer an entry into an abolitionist re-envisioning of the world. For that re-envisioning to happen, we need exits out of the trap — and it is a trap — of believing that prisons and prisons alone keep us somehow safe from danger, or alone can enact meaningful justice. Not only do prisons actually pose danger to many people, and institutionalize and manage systemic injustice, but they actually make it harder to do the work that needs to be done to build the infrastructures of care that might actually meet our needs and ameliorate our harms.
You use Brownsville, Brooklyn as an example of how “carceral alternatives” fail to work to “interrupt the cycle of mass incarceration.” Can you explain what carceral alternatives are, how they work, and why they fail?
Carceral alternatives can mean a lot of different things. Certainly, there are important decarceration efforts that have identified or proposed alternatives to detention that genuinely serve as meaningful harm reduction mechanisms. But we have to be careful, because not all carceral alternatives actually offer opportunities for freedom and flourishing or constitute opportunities for building lives free of harm. And these, unfortunately, are often the kind of non-carceral alternatives that tend to get funded by government agencies and NGOs looking for ways to respond to public pressure without having to invest in the kinds of investments and disinvestments that would actually interrupt the carceral regime or resolve the social problems it stands in for.
In the case of the Brownsville, Brooklyn initiatives that I describe in the book, there is a diversionary element that can keep some of community members out of cages. And that’s great. But the problem is two-fold. First, when you look more closely at these programs you see that they at best do very little at all to change the conditions that might lead some neighborhood residents to engage in criminalized activities (activities which are often just survival activities). So they offer “job readiness” classes, but no jobs; resume writing, but no skills development. And at worst, they reproduce the logics that reinforce the system as a whole, such as the idea that so-called criminality is based in individual failing and fault, rather than policy and policing.
Second, we need to look what is driving these alternatives. Are they rooted in community knowledge, accountability, and grassroots efforts to decrease harm? Again, in the case of Brownsville what I found is that Brooklyn’s real estate pressures, and speculations on this neighborhood’s future prospects for gentrification, were just as much part of the push to lower incarceration rates in the area as the New York Police Department’s public relations crisis. Carceral alternatives that further penal logics and simultaneously offer cover to the cozy relationship between police and real estate capital are not actually alternatives at all, for they allow the system as it exists to live on another day.
How does Brooklyn’s gentrification contribute to the development or evolution of carceral space in Brooklyn?
To understand how Brooklyn’s gentrification contributes to the development or evolution of carceral space we have to think simultaneously about the political economy and the economic geographies of the prison system. The prison industrial complex in the United States, like elsewhere, is rooted in the logics and imperatives of racial capitalism. So is gentrification. The capitalist drive to extract profit out of the need for housing turns landlords and developers and even urban planners into capitalists first and foremost. They become accountable only to the bottom line. The capitalist drive to extract profit out of people’s laboring bodies produces a hierarchical wage-labour structure that demarcates some lives as worth less than others, some lives more disposable than others. Capitalism requires that people experience starvation and want precisely so that they will be work for very little. It requires that activities that circumvent the labor market or obstruct the extraction of profit from land and real estate be disciplined and criminalized, and that the actual people that pose a threat to capital accumulation — maybe because they occupy a rent stabilized apartment, maybe because they sell loose cigarettes on the street to make a living, maybe because their poverty is considered “unsightly” — be moved elsewhere. Criminalization and incarceration are means, among other things, of moving people elsewhere.
The history of criminalization and policing is rooted in the enforcement of property rights and the governance of survival activities. That function has not changed that much, even while the institutions of policing and criminalization have become more militarized and even more entrenched within the state apparatus. Today, what we see in cities across the West, and certainly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, is the targeting of poor, often racialized neighborhoods by police who have at their disposal various means — from municipal ordinances to criminal laws to brute authority — to harass, arrest, threaten, and charge residents for activities that in other areas people wouldn’t get bothered about. Why does that happen? Are the police just being arbitrarily mean? No, of course not. When we trace the political economy of uneven policing, arrest, and criminalization patterns in urban areas we find that the neighborhoods at the “frontier” (to use geographer Neil Smith’s term) of gentrification (which is class conquest) are also those neighborhoods that tend to be targeted by “broken windows” policing, subject to so-called “gang injunctions,” and otherwise most hard hit by the intertwined punishments of eviction, criminalization, and immiseration. In Brooklyn, again like elsewhere, these neighborhoods are majority working class, Black, Latinx, and immigrant communities. This is also who we see in our prisons.
Can you tell us about your experience on the New York City prison bus and how it functions as a carceral space?
I only took the bus from Manhattan to upstate New York (specifically Attica prison) a handful of times, unlike the regular riders who might take hundreds of journeys over the span of their loved one’s prison terms. But even over that handful of rides it was clear how this bus ride constitutes its own form of carceral violence. For one thing, it just takes a long, long time — up to twelve hours! So, when we talk about the way in which incarceration is a form of time theft, we have to talk about the time — the hours, the days, the years — it takes from the people who love and support the incarcerated person as well. The bus costs money, and that money adds up, especially for low-waged working-class people, who are most of the people who ride the bus. So the long overnight trip to visit loved ones, to keep loved ones connected, to give them news of family and home, to give them a chance to see their kids — that trip is a form of time theft and resource theft. That time and those resources could otherwise be spent in any other way — sleeping, helping kids with homework, working another shift, cooking dinner, resting, and instead it has been sucked into the dead, exhausting, life-shortening regime of carceral control.
The bus is also a regimented space that is uncomfortable on the body and on the psyche. It was not uncommon for me to hear the bus driver make an announcement at the beginning of the ride telling us that usage of sanitary products were not allowed in the bus bathroom. And that was when the bathroom was even working. The bus is almost impossible to sleep on — lights turn on and off, stops are frequent especially if there are multiple institutional destinations, and quarters are cramped. These riders — who are, it must be said, mostly women and mostly women of color, often accompanied by children — are processed by guards at the visiting center when they arrive. That process is often humiliating, time consuming, and regimented by its own arcane set of rules that can frequently result in the visitor being turned away. That’s why the riders often bring multiple changes of clothes — just in case they are told that what they are wearing for their visit is somehow in contravention of the visiting guidelines. It’s a process that is defined at every turn by forced idleness, bodily wear, and disciplinary subjugation, just like incarceration is. And at the same time — and this should not surprise us — because the prison bus is a collective space, and the people who share it tend to share life experiences within and outside of the prison system, the bus can also be a space of conversation, connection, knowledge share and solidarity. Which is what we also see happen within jails and prisons as well, for as long as they have existed.
Brett Story is a documentary filmmaker and geographer. She is an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. Her award-winning film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is based on the same research that informs Prison Land.
Willie Mack is a PhD student at SUNY-Stony Brook and an associate editor for Gotham. His research interests include 20th century US history, race, capitalism, and carceral studies.