The Spider’s Web

The chapter situates Native American incarcerations within a long history of broken treaties, circumscribed sovereignty, land theft, forced removals, reservation and boarding school confinement, and economic and cultural paternalism. The framework that the chapter offers is one centered on what the author calls “settler custodialism,” where the root of Indian incarceration runs through the reservation system. The chapter locates Native American prisoner resistance within a longer trajectory of struggle against settler colonialism that has drawn on traditional ties to land, family, tribe, and community. The rising consciousness of the American Indian Movement (AIM) is linked directly to the incarceration of two of its principal founders, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt. From AIM’s police patrols to the Alcatraz Island prison takeover, the radicalization of the Red Power movement had more to do with its encounter with the carceral state than has been previously recognized. The chapter concludes that the prison also served as a blunt instrument to dismantle the Red Power movement when many of its leaders were incarcerated following the 1973 Wounded Knee operation.

“From Dachau with Love”

The chapter explores how memorial constructions of George Jackson’s resistance against California’s prison system provide a discursive symbol of prisoner liberation that stretches across time and space. Writing between traditions that have both excoriated Jackson as criminal and celebrated Jackson as an intellectual, the chapter takes up Jackson’s activism within the framework of his lived experience as a California prisoner whose choices were always restricted by prison’s bondage. To break free of prison’s metaphorical and physical walls, Jackson’s activism was rooted in a transnational struggle for Black Liberation that equated the prisoners’ plight alongside Marxist movements for national revolution and independence in Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa, and South America. After his 1971 death at the hands of California prison guards, Jackson became a cultural martyr and a palimpsest as a memorial and symbolic inspiration to future abolitionist and protest campaigns against carceral regimes. Drawing on the transnational cultural memory of Jackson as ardent prison abolitionist, the chapter discerns a new era of prison protest where California’s prison hunger strikes in 2012 and 2013 share Jacksonian inspiration with the first-ever national prison work strike in 2016.

Private Prisons

The chapter considers privatization, private prisons, and prison services outsourcing within a Sun Belt to Global South framework. Eschewing the inclination to frame the Sunbelt as a region that merely modernized the South, the chapter reveals instead a series of contradictions—chief among them neoliberal rhetoric and anti-statist politics alongside the seemingly contrasting policies that were dependent on New Deal–era public infrastructure and government planning. By analyzing such service industries as health care, telecommunications, food catering, and construction within a public–private partnership, this chapter reveals how privatization masks neoliberal anti-statism even when growing the state through mass incarceration. The model for this fusion of public services and private industries was the Cold War’s defense industries, where contractors played a pivotal role in decision making within a symbiotic partnership. The chapter concludes that the modern-day prison industrial complex is more a product of the New Deal state than of a neoliberal conservative ascendency. When the Sunbelt’s private–public partnership partnered with corporate globalization, contemporary prison labor occurs within a “Global South” marketplace more than a framework of “neo-slavery.”

The Means and Meanings of Carceral Mobility

This chapter explores how trains and steamboats—the iconic engines of mobility, freedom, and transcontinental connection—also served nativist designs as the new technology for mobile captivity and national expulsion. Situated between the intersection of settler economy and rapid industrialization, the chapter’s transnational exploration of deportation trains dissects the private–public partnership between state agencies and the Southern Pacific Railroad. This partnership first detained and deported Chinese immigrants in the American West, and from that experience a “hybrid public–private space” was created as an engine of deportability that affirmed national border control through rapid locomotion. After being detained, the state placed Chinese and Mexican noncitizens aboard train cars where moving segregation and speedy expulsion ensured locomotive border control. This chapter argues that historians must adopt a “mobility turn” that moves beyond the permanence of fixed carceral structures and institutions to adopt a more transnational view where the coerced and confined dislocation of people is bound to the blur of carceral motion.

Introduction

The introduction analyzes the ways in which distinct regimes of incarceration and removal—from jails and prisons to Indian reservations and immigrant detention centers and deportation trains—have constituted what Michel Foucault has called a “carceral continuum, network and archipelago” that stretches across time, space, and region. Foucault defined this “carceral continuum” as a disciplinary network where the prison served as the core and root of carceral power but where different branches of other carceral regimes entwined. The introduction expands Foucault’s “carceral continuum” to explore how a variety of federal, state, local, and privatized institutions developed from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. The introduction situates overlapping “carceral networks” as the core nexus that connects otherwise distinct historiographies of the American West, the Jim Crow South, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As a collection of essays that analyzes the intersection of carceral networks across different regions and transnationally between different nations, the introduction addresses a historiography of carceral literature that is often defined by its attachment to regional characteristics and different methodological approaches. The introduction concludes that the intersection of these carceral states may yet provide the critical lens needed to dismantle the tangled state of mass incarceration.

The Path to Pelican Bay

The chapter showcases California’s prison bureaucracy where correctional bureaucrats pioneered the development of the “supermax” high-level-security prison, or “prisons within prisons.” Drawing on forty oral history interviews with prison administrators, lawyers, prison architects, and reformers, the chapter demonstrates how correctional bureaucrats initiated solutions to address local problems without political scrutiny. By focusing on local control through correctional bureaucrats, the chapter argues that bureaucrats acted as more than policy implementers but as “policy initiators” who reacted to fears over mounting prison uprisings, gang strife and racial violence, and prisoners’ rights lawsuits by redesigning the prison scheme to arrive at their “solution” of architectural cell isolation. In contrast to the top-down federal narrative of mass incarceration, this chapter reveals that correctional bureaucrats had near total control when advocating for the holistic redesign of the entire prison system within a supermax framework. Correctional bureaucrats thus remapped California’s prison system around a supermax framework with very little political and judicial intent, oversight, or scrutiny.

Blood In, Blood Out

The chapter offers a study of changing social relations within the prison system during the transition from 60s-era activism to gang formation in the beginning decades of mass incarceration. Between the decades of the 1960s and 1990s, California experienced a societal shift within prisons from interracial and Black Power campaigns for prisoners’ rights to the racialized balkanization and violence stemming from the rise of prison gangs and the worsening of prison conditions due to overcrowding. Within prisons, mass incarceration’s effect reshaped prison societies because the rapid growth of prison populations accelerated the violence that accompanies human caging. Internal dynamics of societal change reflected California’s changing racial demography, as Cold War defense industries and giant agribusinesses attracted African American laborers from the U.S. South and Mexican migrant laborers from across the border. As mass incarceration swept up more people of color in California’s overcrowded prison system, the prior social networks centered on politicization and protest were disrupted and replaced by rival prison gangs who met the needs of a sub rosa internal prison economy with racial violence and competition.

“They Are All She Had”

The chapter offers a unique exploration of the struggle for women’s suffrage by analyzing how formerly incarcerated women responded to the concept of infamy, the legal category of the loss of citizenship rights. The chapter highlights the tension between the South’s disenfranchisement practices and the concurrent demands of the suffrage movement by analyzing petitions to regain citizenship rights for female felons. These petitions come from a variety of states, including one from Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokolani alongside many other unrecognized women. Whereas most discussions of felony disenfranchisement have focused on African American men, this chapter uncovers a previously unwritten history that connects the struggle for suffrage with the struggle for voting rights among formerly incarcerated women. Rather than relegate these women as politically voiceless and nonhistorical actors, however, the essay instead recognizes convicted women as political actors willing to fight for their full citizenship rights as individuals inspired by the suffrage movement but without the organizational movement behind their individual efforts.

Menacing (Re)Production

The chapter reconsiders Georgia’s chain gang labor system by shifting the lens from the Jim Crow South’s convict labor production to the medicalized control over incarcerated Black women’s reproduction. In its exploration of medicalized language and the role of doctors in convict labor camps, this chapter explores how incarcerated black women experienced reproductive exploitation and control after the Civil War. At the heart of this essay is the Jim Crow South’s broader assault on black motherhood and the ways in which the Southern convict labor camp was a site meant to regulate labor production and human reproduction as shared elements of a carceral network. During slavery, black women’s wombs were commodified. After slavery, they were no longer of value. The chapter concludes that the regulation of black woman and motherhood at the site of Southern prisons had deleterious consequences for black women and the black family that stretched beyond the prison.

Cultural Resilience as Resistance

The chapter reveals how cultural connections to Mexico and a shared Mexican heritage allowed Mexican American prisoners survive the isolation and quotidian colonization of Mexican people within the confines of Southwestern prison farms during the Great Depression. The chapter explores how Mexican American prisoners on the U.S. side of the border relied on cultural persistence and survivals to reshape Texas prison farms into spaces of cultural continuity. By taking readers inside the confines of Texas’s only all-Mexican prison, the Blue Ridge State Farm, known as “Little Mexico,” the chapter reveals how language, song, sport, food, religious practices, and a Spanish-language prison newspaper sustained a “hidden script” and practices of everyday resistance that fashioned what the chapter calls a “colonia within the carceral state.”