In November 1983, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) received its first federal contract from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to build an immigrant detention center in Houston, Texas. The following April, it opened the Houston Processing Center, designed to accommodate roughly 350 individuals. It took just five months for the CCA to finance, design, build, and open the Houston center—though still not fast enough for the INS, which had already begun to enforce the more punitive policies of the early Reagan administration and to carry out a mode of governance that conflated criminal and immigration procedures.² These policies had spatial consequences, taking shape in new architectural devices meant to support a broader and enduring carceral system that instrumen- talizes and weaponizes the built environment.

On January 22, 1984, with the construction for the Houston Processing Center underway, the CCA opened an interim facility at the Olympic Motel along Interstate 45. The motel’s short-lived role as detainer is preserved only in a horrifyingly hokey video of CCA cofounders T. Don Hutto and Tom Beasley recounting the early days of their company.³ The INS had “very unrealistic expectations,” says Hutto. “They gave us ninety days.” The two arrived in Houston on New Year’s Eve to begin searching for their surrogate detention site: “We were both getting pretty weary. We had found a lot of places, but nothing seemed quite to work, nothing you could secure in a short period of time. Then we saw this big ‘ole sign: the ‘Olympic Motel.’”⁴ They made an offer to lease the place.

Once rented, the CCA installed a 12-foot cyclone fence around the perimeter of the motel, “laced with bamboo to thwart the curious” and topped with coiled barbed wire.⁵ The pool was drained and filled in with sand. The rooms were secured, windows outfitted with iron bars, and doors with exterior locks. Promising to return the motel in “three times as good a condition” and to leave all the “improve- ments in place,” not much else was done to the existing building. Signs were left untouched: “Olympic Motel,” “Color TV, Radio, Telephone,” and “Day Rates Available” were still advertised to the highway. The renovation was an exercise in DIY securitization that included Hutto, American Express card in hand, running to a Houston hardware store for supplies and a Walmart for toiletries; the CCA hiring the landlord’s family as staff; and the motel employing additional guards from ABM Security Services. On Super Bowl Sunday of 1984, Hutto produced ad-hoc photo ID cards and fingerprinted individuals himself while other company leaders “distributed sandwiches and helped security staff escort detainees to their living quar- ters.”⁶ The architectural sleights of hand carried out at the Olympic Motel modeled the ease with which motel slipped into detention site, living quarters into cells, and hostelry into (site of ) captivity.

This slippage is at the heart of the CCA’s founding. Describing the company’s premise, co-founder Tom Beasley once said you could “sell prisons ‘just like you were selling cars, real estate, or hamburgers.’”⁷ Or, considering that CCA obtained its initial funding from serial entrepreneur Jack Massey—famed eventual owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and founder of the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA)—it was just like selling fried chicken or hospitals. The forced equivalence underwriting CCA’s corporate model prefigured its speculative and opportunis- tic development model, which registered the built environ- ment through spatial analogs.

That the Olympic Motel came to house 140 asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation over the course of four months ultimately faded into obscurity once the official Houston Processing Center opened. Hutto and Beasley’s use of the motel is now a self-professed scrappy origin of one of today’s largest for-profit prison corporations—CCA “was a start-up before start-ups were fashionable. We met the dead- line, the detainees arrived, and a new relationship was forged between government and the private sector.”⁸ This privately run detention facility speaks to a particular spatial tendency within the larger neoliberal project: “enterprise zones” that privatize the usual functions of the state. The company found an untapped site of possibility in the space behind bars, a space cleared by the social engineering, deregulation, and financialization of the 1970s and 80s, which converted government, corporations, and citizens into opportunities for investment and capitalization.⁹

The CCA positioned itself as the answer to two interrelated problems: corrections bureaucracies—“the most entrenched bureaucracies of all”—and the growing demand for detention space.¹⁰ The company sold a more “efficient” and “economical” delivery system of detention from construction to operation. Its ability to open the Houston Processing Center in roughly five months and at a cost of $14,000 per bed—opposed to the two years and $26,000 per bed it would have taken the INS—was celebrated by proponents of privatization.¹¹ Today, the company claims that it delivers cost savings up to 25 percent and cuts the construction time of new facilities by 40 percent. Unencumbered by red-tape (like public approval), the company could “act faster than public agencies in everything from [attaining funding to choosing a site] to construction to buying shampoo.”¹²

The Olympic Motel modeled the private-prison product CCA would ultimately become known for. It gave built form to the fiscal conservatism and tough-on-crime policies of the time that also recast asylum seekers and refugees, primarily from Latin America, as criminals. On the heels of the Mariel boatlift and in the midst of a raging civil war in El Salvador, the INS saw detaining large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees as a form of deterrence. By 1982 “all aliens without proper travel documents [were to be] detained pending a determination of their status.”¹³ Not only did the INS’s budget for detention grow exponentially throughout the 80s (from $15.7 million to over $149 million) but so did its capacity to hold individuals and the average length of detention (from approximately 7 days in 1984 to 23 days in 1990).¹⁴ As the INS intensified its policing and detaining efforts in the border region, US senator Lloyd Bentsen aired that it seemed the entirety of South Texas had become a “massive detention camp.”¹⁵

In the context of this hostile territory and to the desperate eye of the CCA, the Olympic Motel offered 12,466 square feet of latent detention space. While this particular narrative of corporate annexation fell in line with a longer history of recycling and reusing sites of internment, it also marked the beginnings of an increasingly pervasive model that propagates the need it intends to fulfill. It is a model in which architecture is both the promise and the guarantor of carceral expansion. The fast and cheap delivery of beds at the Olympic Motel satisfied the current demand and also incentivized a future demand. It was proof for the CCA that they had not only devised an iterable scheme for the privatized service of carceral detention, which presupposed its continuance on a new market, but also that they had innovated a system of delivery through the built environment.

The case of the Olympic Motel shows how the late-capitalist carceral system might be less about producing new architectural forms than constructing new uses out of an otherwise familiar spatial environment. It is a story that recounts both the situated origins of a particular model of carceral production and the pervasive workings of neoliberalism. Sara Ahmed writes that “use offers a way of tell- ing stories about things,” that “what has been used in the past can just as easily point us toward the future,” and that “if use records where we have been, use can also direct us along certain paths.”¹⁶ That the Olympic Motel was taken up, put to use, or misused by the CCA on behalf of the INS is not intended to overly “direct” attention to the prominence of private corporations in the prison-industrial complex, nor is it intended to perpetuate the misconception that private prisons are the “corrupt heart” of this system of incarceration.¹⁷ Rather, it is a story of urban-carceral transformation that evidences how the state—in this case through its corporate appendages—moves, restructures, and expands itself across the built environment accord- ing to its coercive functions. This is a narrative, then, that traces the sites of production, buildings, legal proceedings, rhetorical arguments, and financial instruments it uses to do so. The path that emerges from the Olympic Motel offers a way to describe contemporary carcerality, which entangles the devouring tendencies of privatization and the sanctioned punitive policies of the racial state. In other words, the short-lived fate of the Olympic Motel helps to tell the story of the status quo. “What is the status quo?” asks and answers Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Put simply, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”¹⁸

Use is contingent on the form it is given by practice, ideology, and policy. That the Olympic Motel could be “secured in a short period of time” speaks not only to its architectural characteristics but also to longstanding and widespread social beliefs about what kinds of places contain, support, enable, or are needed by certain ways of life. Take, for instance, Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the 2015 Supreme Court case City of Los Angeles v. Patel:

This vision of how crime and poverty are distributed in space directs how the motel is legislated, policed, and circumscribed along racial lines—“insofar as geography,” as Jackie Wang observes in Carceral Capitalism, “is a proxy for race.”²⁰ Scalia’s statement evinces the biases that enlist the motel as a mechanism of racial enclosure. The degree to which crime is inherent at motels, and thus the degree to which those who use, live, or reside in them are criminalized, deprived, and immobilized, is also determined through a partisan push and pull. In the majority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor articulates her own argument about the intended and non-intended function of architectural objects: “Hotels—like practically all commercial premises or services—can be put to use for nefarious ends. But unlike the industries that the court has found to be closely regulated, hotels are not intrinsically dangerous.”²¹ While this juxtaposition may in some ways reproduce an all-too-easy dichotomy between conservative and liberal agendas, it also demonstrates the way in which judicial and political arguments proscribe and prescribe legitimate uses of state force in the built environment. At the very least, these contrary opinions insert the motel and the manifold vulnerabilities, itinerancies, and possibilities that it supports into the struggle over how and where carceral state power is expanded and justified.

“We can ask about objects by following them about,” Ahmed writes.²² This call to attend to the “strange temporalities of use” unsettles certain assumptions about the built environment’s relationship to and participation in the carceral state. It offers a way to unfix the prison as a place and also as a set of political, pedagogical, and theoreti- cal concerns. This implies eschewing the often all-too-sta- ble concept of “site” and “place” within the discipline of architecture. It is a specifically architectural misprision to understand incarceration as a solid architecture that one is “put into” or “let out of,” an isolated and neatly pack- aged typological envelope of discipline and control. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality is instead premised on an understanding of the prison as a diffuse, porous, and mobile entity that coordinates the tactics, materials, and bodies that circulate beyond and through it. It is concerned with the “both/and” of the prison, where “the physical instantiation of the carceral is at once everywhere and also very specifically somewhere,” as Wendy L. Wright writes. (363–384) That is, this book attempts to register the mobility of carcerality—which casts the prison as a machinery of oppression, a social and political economy of confinement that extends well beyond the institution’s walls.

The prison pervades, with various degrees of intensity and duration, the everyday terrain between distinct spaces of containment: typologies and histories and lived experiences assumed to be “outside” of the sphere of incarceration. As Brett Story offers, “to consider ‘ordinary space’ is therefore to contend with how the prison system etches its violence into the social fabric in ways as diverse and complex as they are quiet and mundane.” (211–237) To bring this idea back to the history of the Olympic Motel, it is perhaps the motel’s ordinariness that obscures the extraordinary circumstances that have come to mark and mobilize it.

To understand the prison today, one must pursue, as Jarrett M. Drake powerfully proposes, “not a cultural biography of things but rather an ethnography of exchange.” (241–265) This book aims to trace the contours of such an exchange. It follows the objects and ideologies that under- write the prison, how they ebb and flow across the carceral continuum in the present, tracking how these objects and ideologies mutate in their historical course. The Olympic Motel models a very discrete exchange—a single site that moves “through hands, contexts, and uses” with enormous consequences for the lives within it—while also demand- ing that we look elsewhere, in time and in place, to see how such spatial fungibility is made possible. To tell the story of the state’s insatiable custodial appetite, one must pursue various protagonists (human and otherwise), slip between past and present, and move across both discursive and material sites. It requires a narrative that is not set spatially or historically but that, in its movement, pieces together a layered geography of carcerality. Drawing on the struggle, imagination, and potential of Black women’s geographies to reframe and undo traditional geographic “arrangements,” Katherine McKittrick writes in Demonic Grounds “that our engagement with place, and with three-dimensionality, can inspire a different spatial story, one that is unresolved but also caught up in the flexible, sometimes disturbing, demands of geography, which some people ‘wouldn’t think was so sane.’”²³ Paths to Prison is deeply indebted to McKittrick’s work and seeks to engage the long tradition of thinking, living, and writing oppositional discourses that resist and find ways out of dominant spatial patterns that actively try to block the possibility of holding various places, practices, and oppressions in mutual relation.

Accounting for architecture’s participation in the carceral state means leaning into inconclusiveness. This book thus also emerges from an invitation put forth by Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters to “make contact with what is without doubt often painful, difficult, and unsettling” and to write new stories about “what happens when we admit the ghost—that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present—into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world.”²⁴ Gordon’s ghost—like McKittrick’s unresolved story and Ahmed’s proposal to follow—offers new epistemologies, methodologies, and ways of writing for the field of architecture. It insists that current accounts of the built world carry the full presence or weight of the past and insists on registering how the supposedly “over-and-done-with” is materialized in “new” forms and “new” structures. Paths to Prison proposes that we look behind and across carceral sites to see how historical forms of racial violence and dispossession are inherited, learned, determined, naturalized, and struggled over in the present—how incarceration manifests or reenacts racial, economic, and social hierarchies.

As Dylan Rodríguez poignantly states, the term “mass incarceration” has “canonized a relatively coherent narrative structure, based on a generalized assumption that such juridically sanctioned, culturally normalized state violence is a betrayal of American values as well as a violation of the mystified egalitarian ethos that constitutes US national formation.” (97–128) Taking Rodríguez’s diagnosis as a challenge, this book aims to counter the apparent stability of that narrative with non-linear and mobile accounts of the seemingly disparate institutions, ideologies, practices, and spaces that enforce and perpetuate carceral power. It picks up the argument that this work is constitutive of and faithful to the foundations and values of the United States of America—that what we have come to call “mass incarceration” is not an aberration among American values but representative of them.

On April 17, 1969, prisoners of the Cummins Prison Farm at the Arkansas State Penitentiary filed a suit in the District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas to chal- lenge the conditions of their confinement. They argued in Holt v. Sarver that the prison’s isolation unit constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.²⁵ Two months later, Judge Jesse Smith Henley agreed with the prisoners, conclud- ing that their prolonged confinement in the unit was not only “mentally and emotionally traumatic” but “physi- cally uncomfortable,” “hazardous to health,” and “degrad- ing and debasing.”²⁶ Judge Henley ordered injunctive relief and required Arkansas’s Commissioner of Corrections— Robert Sarver, the named defendant in the case—to report the progress being made at Cummins.²⁷ This case sparked an almost decade-long series of litigations against the Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADC), which culmi- nated in the 1978 United States Supreme Court case Hutto v. Finney. The petitioner in this final litigation was Terrell Don Hutto, the head of the ADC between 1971 and 1976— and the future cofounder of CCA.

On February 18, 1970, prisoners of Cummins and the adjacent Tucker Intermediate Reformatory filed additional claims against the ADC in Holt v. Sarver II—citing that the entire system, not just the specific practice of isola- tion, amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” Judge Henley ruled again, this time more vociferously, against the entire state penal system: “For the ordinary convict a sentence to the Arkansas Penitentiary today amounts to a banishment from civilized society to a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world, a world that is administered by criminals under unwritten rules and customs completely foreign to free world culture.”²⁸

To the petitioners of Holt v. Sarver II, Cummins ex- tended a familiar political-economic system of power, violence, and exploitation, with “rules and customs” rooted in the nation’s history of slavery. Unfreedom at Cummins was anything but “alien” to them, as Judge Henley would have it. The prison farm reeked of the plantation. Their claims expressed a lived historical consciousness, not a departure from some body of civilized norms. Cummins enshrined a set of practices and forced labor that was not “foreign to free world culture” but integral to it. Despite his denunciation of the system, Judge Henley rejected the petitioners’ additional assertion that forced, uncompen- sated prisoner labor violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servi- tude” shall exist “except as a punishment for crime.”

While much has been written about how the Thir- teenth Amendment rearticulated a model of labor exploita- tion based on racial subjugation—forced upon those made unfree by criminalization rather than by bondage—the legal arguments in Holt v. Sarver II are evidence of another transition. The case documents not only how the state of Arkansas exchanged the plantation for the prison farm in the twentieth century (swapping one form of incarcera- tion for another) but also how legal rhetoric and language obscures this particular typological fungibility in the pres- ent. The question of how slavery endures is a question of how it metamorphosed in its abolition; it is a question that offers a framework to excavate the legal, economic, and social regimes that shape—with various degrees of consis- tency/inconsistency, continuity/discontinuity—the spaces and practices of captivity rationalized by “crime” and those rationalized by “race.” In other words, in what ways does Holt v. Sarver II continue (or not continue) the work of the criminal justice system post-Emancipation more broadly, which, as Angela Y. Davis has said before,“played a significant role in constructing the new social status of former slaves as human beings, whose citizenship status was acknowledged precisely in order to be denied”?²⁹

Cummins Prison Farm, today called Cummins Unit, is a 16,600-acre maximum security prison and working farm that houses up to 1,876 individuals. It is the oldest prison in Arkansas alongside the Tucker Unit. In 1897, as the state took an outsized role in determining labor rela- tions with the land following Reconstruction, the Arkansas General Assembly authorized public “purchase with funds at its disposal [of] any lands, buildings, machinery, live- stock, and tools necessary for the use, preservation, and operation of the penitentiary.”³⁰ A few years later in 1902, the state purchased the Cummins and Maple Grove plan- tations from Edmond Urquhart, one of the “oldest cotton oil men in the country,” for $140,000.³¹ In 1916—three years after the state abolished convict leasing and turned more fully to penal farms—it gobbled up the nearby Tucker plantation in Jefferson County too. That Cummins Prison used to be Cummins Plantation—and that Arkansas’s prison system consolidated the acreage of a planter class— was not unique. There was “Ramsay” in Texas, “Angola” in Louisiana. These names signaled the exchangeability, inextricability, and slippage between sites of labor: one under (and governed by) slavery, and one apparently not.

Descriptions of prison life at Cummins and of the economic system circumscribing it reproduce this metonymic link.³² Judge Henley’s 1970 opinion quoted extensively from a report prepared by the Penitentiary Study Commission of 1967 on the fertility of Cummins’s land and the profits reaped by the state from the prison- ers’ labor. ³³ According to the report, there were 9,070 acres of land in cultivation at Cummins; the principal crops were cotton, soybeans, vegetables, and fruit; and prisoners tended to 2,070 cattle, 800 hogs, 40 horses, 160 mules, and 1,600 poultry. In 1966, the prison made $1,415,419.43 from the sale of crops alone. Rational and capitalistic, Cummins was representative of the “ideal goal for southern penology” in the early twentieth century.³⁴ While the self-sup- porting prison farm was dressed in reformist and agrarian rhetoric—not only claiming to “make a man out of Ishmael” or “good” laboring citizens out of criminals but also requiring the warden to “be an experienced farmer of known executive ability”—it maintained a brutal economic form underneath.*

The court’s verdict that the carceral machine in Arkansas was not slavery, the prison farm not the plantation, is indicative of the way formal law eclipses lived experience.³⁶ The analogic reasoning of Holt v. Sarver II reifies social and spatial boundaries. These legal distinctions follow strictly semantic definitions that prohibit the judicial system from coming to terms with embodied realities on the ground, which reproduce similar systems of production marked by a racial-colonial-capitalist matrix of exploitation, accumulation, and dispossession. At the same time, from a contemporary perspective, it is crucial to take stock of all the ways that prison labor today is different from slave labor; all the ways that logics of exploitability co-exist with logics of disposability in carceral labor relations; all the ways that the mechanisms of dehumanization, which shape the laboring body under these regimes, emphasize different devalued identities and subjectivities.³⁷ However, the legal emphasis on how the prison farm and the plantation are categorically not the same—especially when, in the case of Cummins, it is the same land, the same soil, being tilled over and over again—forecloses the possibility of seeing how they might be interlocked, or at least tethered to one another, in a shifting and drifting narrative of institutional evolution that exists in unfinished and inexorable ways, across space and time.

To determine whether the ADC as a whole constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” required evaluating it against other prevailing (and constitutional) systems, practices, and conditions. It required extending analogical models across time and across status quos. Judge Henley’s opinion was inextricably linked to what is, or what was at the time, considered “modern.”³⁸ His interpretation of “cruel and unusual punishment” was contingent upon this modernness too: “The term cannot be defined with specificity. It is flexible and tends to broaden as society tends to pay more regard to human decency and dignity and becomes, or likes to think that it becomes, more humane.”³⁹ In addition to declare what the institution was not—“We are not dealing with free world housing; we are not deal- ing with theatres, restaurants, or hotels”—the court had to establish a comparative model to assess how “bad” or how different the ADC was from other acceptable, or more palatable, correctional administrations elsewhere. These statements about typology contain implicit judgements about who deserves certain protections and who does not, which in turn determine the quality of life of those subject to the law: again, “we’re not dealing with children… but with criminals.”⁴⁰

Prompted by Henley’s ruling, what change would come over the next decade would be piecemeal and superficial. In 1971, Sarver would be replaced by CCA’s T. Don Hutto, who was then warden of the W.F. Ramsey Unit, a notoriously brutal prison farm in southeastern Texas. As the new commissioner of the ADC, Hutto would, among other things, attempt to modernize and streamline certain conditions at Cummins, building new facilities to alleviate overcrowding and converting the manual farming opera- tion to a more mechanized one.⁴¹ In 1973, Judge Henley would release the ADC from the court’s jurisdiction, writ- ing, “the Court is convinced that today it is dealing not so much with an unconstitutional prison system as with a poorly administered one.”⁴² This ruling-cum-warning would continue to play out in the court. In 1976, Judge Henley would rule again that specific aspects of the ADC were indeed unconstitutional, citing, in particular, two of Hutto’s innovations: the punitive wing of the new East Building and the “grue” disciplinary diet (which he had brought and introduced to Cummins from Ramsay).⁴³

Writing in the New York Times on February 17, 1978, only four days before the case would be argued in the United States Supreme Court as Hutto v. Finney, Thomas O. Murton—the superintendent of Arkansas’s penal system before Robert Sarver—summed up the “Arkansas effect:” “The hearings have come and gone, four commissioners of correction have come and gone, paid staff guards have replaced the former inmate guards, new buildings have been erected. But the more things change, the more they apparently remain the same.”⁴⁴

On June 23, 1978, delivering the majority decision for the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens affirmed that certain conditions of confinement in Arkansas’s pris- ons were unconstitutional. While the legal question had been diluted to whether punitive isolation for more than thirty days violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments (the answer was an equivocal yes), the case also revisited the routine abuses suffered by incarcerated people in Arkansas. That the question of forced labor at Cummins was only a footnote in this final decision— and that the Thirteenth Amendment was absent—is not surprising. Rather it speaks to the ways that contesting an entire social institution, “from the fields to the hole,” on the basis that it reenacts the brutalities (and racial control) of another is continually thwarted by the court. The law serves to entrench social and racial hierarchies: it only offers remedies when claims against those hierarchies are non-intersectional and non-systemic. The persistence of the plantation model short-circuits questions of constitutionality. It should not be minimized: the long legal arc of Holt v. Sarver marked the first successful lawsuit filed by incarcerated people against a correctional institution—and no matter how incremental the change was, it represented, in the words of Judge Henley a decade earlier, the first large-scale “attack on the System itself.”⁴⁵ Yet to rule against the cumulative damages, harms, and effects of the penal system would mean to admit or rule against forms of violence that are foundational to US jurisprudence—and to acknowledge that normalizing systems of power tread through and across supposedly “over and done with” historical antecedents into the present.

Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality invites the discipline of architecture to think about typology diachronically—to extend the geography of architectural inquiry to encompass “plantation futures,” which, as Katherine McKittrick writes, offer a “conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city.”⁴⁶ Rather than recapitu- late the neoslavery narrative, this book asks: How is the logic of the plantation reconfigured in post-slave contexts, and how might these logics undergird or pass through socio-spatial life, organization, development, and expro- priation in the present?

The warning, however cliché, from Thomas O. Murton about the supposed reforms of the Arkansas Department of Corrections—“the more things change, the more they apparently remain the same”—resonates with legal scholar Reva Siegal’s description of a mode of “pres- ervation through transformation.” Siegal’s term offers a framework for understanding the way basic forms of racial, class, and gender domination remain intact even when the legal rules and rhetoric governing those hierarchies change as the status quo, and what can be socially stomached, changes.⁴⁷ It also offers a way to evaluate to what degree white supremacy relies on the typological continuity of repressive mechanisms. This book thus asks: Which discursive formations and physical sites preserve white supremacy and maintain the blueprints for today’s racial carceral state while claiming they don’t? What other supposedly distinct typologies are entangled in this exchange?

Siegal’s proposal to hold continuity and change together can also be reframed: Notions of “freedom” are always shadowed by the ways we are made unfree by design. Jasmine Syedullah asks, “What if the spaces where we have been taught to feel most at home are hold- ing us captive?” (459–484). She argues that all imagina- tions of freedom should be rooted in the practice of inhab- iting spaces of confinement.⁴⁸ Beyond the loophole of the Thirteenth Amendment, this book aims to puncture languages of liberation and bring together architectural narratives that practice this kind of inhabitation—that in addition to looking at the ways architecture imprisons, looks at the ways it apparently does not. What other loopholes—legal, spatial, financial, or otherwise—blur the distinction between freedom and unfreedom? This is another method of shifting the frame away from the prison as such and towards the promises and spaces of liberalism, as a way to see all other conditions of civil existence knotted into and connected to the prison. In this way, this book aims to describe the “double bind of freedom,” which, as Saidiya Hartman has written, intertwines the “emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject.”*

Maintaining this “bind” takes routine ideological, rhetorical, economic, legal work—which determines and distributes forms of citizenship unevenly across the built environment and renders those inequities as “normal.” The work of carceral normalization is not always overt; it is not simply carried out by extreme acts of authority or blatant criminalization but by what Naomi Murakawa and Katherine Beckett have called the “shadow” carceral state, which “operates in opaque, entangling ways, ensnaring an ever-larger share of the population through civil injunctions, legal financial obligations, and violations of administrative law.”⁴⁹ It operates through “liminal,” “fuzzy,” “fungible,” and “serpentine” mechanisms that reproduce and “mimic” punishment under terms that declare themselves “not-punishment.” This book hopes to surface how the carceral state annexes that which is supposedly free from its grips and to make visible the effort exerted by this entity’s many tentacles to normalize the production and maintenance of penal power.

Thirty-five years after its first detention facility opened in Houston, Corrections Corporation of America, now called CoreCivic, owns and operates forty-three correc- tional and detention facilities and manages an additional seven federally owned facilities—which altogether span 14.5 million square feet and hold 73,000 beds across the United States. The company has also expanded its portfo- lio to include twenty-nine residential reentry facilities and an additional twenty-eight properties that it leases to third parties or government agencies. The company’s rebrand- ing and its expanding real estate portfolio are two sides of the same coin: the corporation’s “new view of corrections” that increasingly relies on the acquisition and transforma- tion of the built environment. Not only does the company pride itself on controlling approximately 59 percent of all privately owned prison beds in the United States, but it also believes itself to be, more generally, “the largest private owner of real estate used by US government agencies.”⁵¹ The cover of CCA’s 2009 annual letter to shareholders encapsulates this relation. Titled Partnership Prisons: The Best of Both Worlds, the document juxtaposes two equally generic images: a white corrections officer and an exterior view of an unspecified facility somewhere in the desert. Save for the blurry perimeter fence in the background, the property looks like any other office park. The “best of both worlds” refers to CCA’s public-private partnerships: “the essential oversight and accountability of government” coupled with “the flexibility, efficiency, and cost effective- ness of private business.” No matter how trite, this image captures a corporation in transition—a corporation that, for political expediency, future viability, and risk transfer- ence, has managed to move seamlessly from detainer to landlord and back.

This movement is possible because of a particular financial mechanism: the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Created by Congress in 1960, REITs were designed to give investors the opportunity to pool capital for income-producing real estate—entirely free from federal corporate taxes. Operating like a mutual fund, the trust structure offers stockholders the chance to invest in large- scale commercial real estate assets and earn a share of the profit without having to actually buy, manage, or finance property themselves. For a company to qualify for REIT designation, it has to derive at least 75 percent of its gross income from real estate (rents from real property) and 95 percent from “passive” financial instruments (as opposed to “active” business activities).⁵² This distinction between “passive” and “active” investment is crucial to understand- ing what passes the REIT income test—and what kind of bureaucratic maneuvering was undertaken by the CCA. REITs are restricted by the types of activities and services they can provide to their real estate assets, but the passage of the REIT Modernization Act in 2001 produced a loop- hole that allows companies to reap the benefits of massive tax breaks by breaking apart their active business activ- ities (the operational side of, for example, private prison management) from their passive real estate investment (such as the ownership of correctional and detention facili- ties) through subsidiaries.⁵³

And that’s exactly what CCA did. In 2013, the com- pany (still CCA at the time) successfully converted its corporate structure to an REIT.⁵⁴ This meant that it had convinced the IRS of two things: first, that its facilities are not “lodging” or “healthcare,” and second, that the money it receives from government tenants is “rents from real property.’”⁵⁵ Declaring what the company (and thus what corrections) was not (neither site of care or hous- ing) allowed CCA to claim that their property was held for investment, not operation. There is a similar denial in its second request: to consider money paid by federal agencies to incarcerate and house people as rent meant fundamen- tally bypassing the actual tenants of CCA’s facilities. The IRS’s determination opened up a redefinition of carceral space—labeling the state as the tenant and not the indi- viduals sanctioned there.

The REIT regime incentivizes building and leasing, not managing or operating. While the Houston Processing Center was the CCA’s first model of privatization (financed, owned, and operated by CCA), the company has since shifted toward other models: privately financed and owned but publicly operated; privately financed and owned but eventually transferred to the public sector (i.e. rent-to- own); and publicly owned but privately financed, designed, constructed, and maintained.⁵⁶

In CCA’s 2012 annual letter to shareholders announc- ing its new tax status, the company put forth a mark- edly different image of the company: as $3.6 billion in fixed assets. Alongside the narrative of REIT-generated double-digit growth, the company doubled down on its commitment to real estate with sterile and glossy aerial photographs of its properties—described not according to function but to acreage, square footage, number of beds, and age. These specifications were part of a new language aimed at repackaging CCA’s facilities as attractive investment opportunities.⁵⁷ The company’s ability to build share- holder value was thus intimately connected to its ability to build a stable real estate portfolio. CCA’s portfolio was sold as a “just-in-time inventory” of leasable space— one that was integral to the growth model of the company. The inventory was intended to accommodate the immedi- ate and future needs of government partners and policy makers, thereby linking what the company offers (and what the company is) to whatever political, economic, and cultural climate it faces.

CCA’s tactical sprawl picked up speed between 2013 and 2016. In response to dips in national prison popula- tions and increasing criminal sentencing reforms, CCA letters to shareholders began to cite “America’s recidivism crisis,” emphasizing “alternatives” to incarceration and an increased interest in reentry programming. In three years, it acquired three “community” corrections companies. These acquisitions enabled CCA to be a “better” service pro- vider to its government “tenants,” but they also enabled the company to consolidate its increasingly dispersed (and diverse) footprint. The groundwork was laid for an emerging “treatment industrial complex.”⁵⁸ If this was “the link between prison and the community,” then CCA, according to Hininger, was poised to supplant that connection as it continued to “develop a robust pipeline of acquisition opportunities in this fragmented market.”⁵⁹

In October 2016, CCA became CoreCivic. With a solid REIT backbone and the foundation already laid for a pipe- line to the community, the company underwent another round of rhetorical sanitization, corporate renovation, and targeted acquisition.⁶⁰ Everything about the way CoreCivic presents itself today is designed to be benign. Alongside the tagline “Better the public good,” the company adopted a “bolder, sleeker and more modern” typeface and a color palette intended to invoke “safety, strength, passion, stability, integrity and seriousness.” Its new logo? A 13-stripe American flag extruded to symbolize a building. Business offerings like “Inmate Services” and “Security” were replaced with “Safety,” “Community,” and “Properties”—new umbrella terms for an expanding inventory of diverse carceral products. Today, CoreCivic Community encompasses a vast network of residential reentry centers and non-residential services. In 2018, the company acquired Rocky Mountain Offender Management Systems (RMOMS) and Recovery Monitoring Solutions, adding to its portfolio new programs like probation supervision, electronic monitoring and GPS tracking, remote elec- tronic alcohol monitoring, random urine screening, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Perhaps not unlike the early prison-farm experiments in agricultural techniques, CoreCivic’s “community” and those in it have become the test site (and subjects) for a technological-social apparatus of governance—the gears of which have already been and will continue to be loosened for general use.

The REIT regime is a regime of ownership, and regimes of ownership are racially constructed. CoreCivic’s sprawl manifests the long legacy of state-sanctioned white posses- sion—its external reach both a product and productive of settler colonial dynamics. The company’s ambition is infra- structural. Its “robust pipeline of acquisition opportunities” serves to lay claim to an even greater territory that spans corrections and non-corrections spaces, the prison and the community, already-cornered markets and new markets. In January 2020, CoreCivic announced that it had acquired an additional twenty-eight properties, which it would lease exclusively to the General Services Administration. Distributed throughout the mid-South, this additional 445,000 square feet is intended to house numerous federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Hearings Operations.* By catering itself to federal and state bureaucracies through property relations, the company aims to become even more “critical” to the function- ing of government—perhaps even a “critical infrastructure,” to use the federal government’s own parlance. And it is through this criticality, through its role as landlord to the state’s “non-coercive” business, that CoreCivic manages to reinscribe the punishing and criminalizing functions of the carceral state anew. For as a discursive and legal categorization, “critical infrastructure” assigns national value and security to supply chains of capital—supply chains that “make daily life possible”—and criminalizes efforts to disrupt and upend those chains.* As a technique of settler colonial governance—of invasion, expropriation, accumulation, and dispossession—these projects, writes Anne Spice, anticipate “the circulation of certain materials, the proliferation of certain worlds, the reproduction of certain subjects” and disavow the rights and jurisdictions of other subjects, worlds, and materials. (307–358) What values, beliefs, and ways of living are foreclosed or peripheral or antagonistic or dangerous to the state’s epistemology of critical infrastructure?

Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality parses the ideological backbone of American society in order to reveal how it criminalizes any subjectivity that opts out or does not fit within the consolidating “we” of the nation— but also how this backbone is entirely dependent on and supported by the continued exploitation of these communities. As outgrowths of the state, these “invasive infrastructures” might make daily life possible, but they only do so for some, and the futures they aim to structure are settler futures.⁶⁴ Perhaps the Olympic Motel was early evidence of this colonial futurity—for “colonialism is justified as using what is unused,” reminds Ahmed.⁶⁵ Paths to Prison attempts to account for these Janus-faced constructions. As James Graham warns, the “double rhetoric of plight and opportunity is the cleared and leveled site on which a long string of government-backed dispossessions—of native lands, of mineral rights, of labor power, of unfree bodies—takes place.” (159–206)

This book interrogates how the groundwork is laid for this more invasive understanding of carceral infra- structure—one that folds the punishing regime (and thus the prison) into “other” regimes (ownership, knowledge, martial, and so on). It helps to elucidate that “savage encroachments of power take place through notions of reform, consent, and protection,” or through Property, Community, and Safety.⁶⁶ The aim here is to complicate the metaphor of “pipelines” to prison, which so dispropor- tionately affect communities of color and which are most acutely guided by the conditions of daily life.⁶⁷ While the book aims to describe various spaces, institutions, and practices that enact or reflect the structural violence of the prison, it does not intend to create hard-and-fast linkages between those sites, nor does it intend to suggest that these connections, as modes of conveyance, are smooth, easy, and without friction. The book engages “pipelines” only insofar as they can be disrupted—not a relentless or unchanging explanation for the way things are but an intersectional account that helps widen the frame used to understand architecture’s relationship to the carceral state.

If pipelines aim to guarantee a certain future and fate, then this book is assembled against these projections: “Permanence is not the goal here,” writes Adrienne Brown. (133–155) Pipelines clog and leak; they can be rerouted, subverted, blocked by official and unofficial means. Instead of confirming straight lines or tracks, Paths to Prison eluci- dates the physical and social contraptions that attempt to circumscribe or enclose certain lives, places, and communities, and the insurgent “social relations” that emerge “in excess of” (again, Brown) and against these invasive incursions.

The Olympic Motel may no longer be in use, but it is still valuable as a model and a caution for the way the racial logics of occupation, terror, and exception are injected into the built environment. “Racial difference,” writes Mabel O. Wilson, “became productive of the material conditions of modern life, fueling the unequal distribution of the resources—food and shelter—that sustain it.” (389–409) Perhaps the Olympic Motel testifies to a moment of redis- tribution, in which resources have been usurped, trans- formed, and reapportioned to serve a carceral machinery that relies on racial difference being maintained. As Naomi Murakawa reminds us, policy “produces social effects that reinforce their own stability.”⁶⁹ The word “spatial” could be added to that sentence: Policy, immigration or criminal, produces social and spatial effects that promise and guar- antee the continuation of this expansion. Amidst the now sprawling landscape of immigrant detention, the motel has resurfaced over and over again.⁷⁰ It is a site that not only captures the militarization against and dehumanization of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented people but also evidences this violence. In 2018 the Trump Administration sought to end the twenty-two-year-old Flores Settlement Agreement. Settled in 1997, Flores was the result of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of two young girls, Alma Yanira Cruz and Jenny Lisette Flores, who had come to the US fleeing the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s and who were instead met with the punitive and procedural brutality of the INS. The agreement set protections and standards for the treatment of minors in detention. As the world confronted the brutal conditions at immigration facilities along the US southern border in 2019, Flores emerged again in the mainstream media—revealing that at the origin of Flores, there too was a motel.

For weeks after entering the US, Cruz and Flores were locked in over-crowded rooms at a makeshift deten- tion center in Pasadena, CA. “The facility was a 1950s-style hotel shaped like a U,” recounts Carlos Holquin, the law- yer who eventually brought the case to court. “The INS essentially put a chain-link fence in front of it with a sally port and concertina wire on top.” Behavioral Systems Southwest, who had been contracted by the INS to operate the facility, drained the swimming pool. The children had no access to visitation, no recreation, no education: “The kids would essentially just hang around by the drained pool or on the balconies for days—or weeks or months— until it was determined what to do with them.”⁷¹

As Sara Ahmed writes, “We learn a lot about form when a change in function does not require a change in form.”⁷² In both Flores and the Olympic Motel, the perim- eter fence, the concertina wire, the iron bars, and the drained pool all signal that the motel has ceased to be a motel as we know it. They are provisional signs of a change in function, which does not compromise the existing form but communicates that guests “cannot check out at will.” Or, that, perhaps, guests are not “guests” at all. That this exchange is possible testifies to certain ideas that have coalesced around the motel already. In these stories, it is possible to glimpse how the motel is reinforced and consol- idated at the level of enclosure and also rendered typo- logically and spatially expansive at the level of an urban system of circulation and capture.

Over two and a half years, 80,000 names were disclosed and countless individuals arrested, detained, and deported as a result of warrantless searches, often in the form of “knock and talks.” These enforcement tactics repre- sent a particular regime of policing that asserts state force in everyday life through the cooperation and consent of the private sector. Motel 6 shared its guest data by choice—a choice made possible by the previously cited City of Los Angeles v. Patel, which declared that hotel/motel operators are not obligated to turn their guest data over to police without a warrant—turning the supposedly protected “bed space” of the motel room into the captive bed space of another. This cooperation finagles apparent if illusory thresholds between the right to be secure in one’s room (not to mention one’s body, home, and life) and the inter- ests of the state (which has a monopoly on violence). Given that Motel 6 owns and operates 12,000 motels and 105,000 rooms across the US and Canada, its disperse geography of “places of public resort, accommodation, assemblage, or amusement” expresses the pervasive tyranny of possible coercion or probable cooperation: “for every wall that provides shelter is one that confines.”⁷⁴

This potentiality, the fine line between two radically different embodied conditions, and the degree to which the motel is used by the state as a force of immobility rely on a set of assumptions and biases that are constructed along racial, political, and class lines. Take for instance ICE spokesperson Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe’s defense of the agency’s specific targeting at motels: “Hotels and motels have frequently been exploited by criminal organizations engaged in highly dangerous illegal enterprises, includ- ing human trafficking and human smuggling.”⁷⁵ O’Keefe’s statement does a lot of work: it defines the motel as a place of deviancy, it criminalizes individuals who frequent it, and it ultimately legitimizes the agency’s strategic, racially motivated violence and excessive surveillance at Motel 6 locations across the south- and northwest. All of these fabricated conditions naturalize a continuum of punishment and a distributed form of governance organized around a building typology, enforced and carried out by cooperating institutions, organizations, and corporations. As Angela Y. Davis has famously argued, the “institution of the prison and its discursive deployment produce the kind of prisoners that in turn justify the expansion of prisons.”⁷⁶ The motel is thus a spatial opportunity for ICE, as it was for T. Don Hutto.

The motel has always accommodated mobility. It, too, must be considered unstable as a site that moves between these determined oppositions. It offers a way of attending to carcerality in the built environment that is both local and general, fixed and fluid, concerned with citizen- ship and noncitizenship, freedom and unfreedom, legality and illegality, who deserves the state’s incursion and who does not. It is a site where rights are never just asserted but contested. What is a death trap for some is a lifeline to others, and endlessly vice versa. While the motel has been a useful agent of social death for CoreCivic and its corporate peers, for ICE, and for the Supreme Court, it has also been a space for asserting collective life. Other motels across the southwest are being repurposed as migrant shelters—as way stations on longer paths toward asylum.⁷⁷ But even across Motel 6s, individuals are demonstrating how “it is always possible to create space for opposition within the hold of structural violence and domination, to move closer to freedom while still within the borders of hostile territory,” as Syedullah writes again. And this opposition is crucially not always expressed in loud acts of resistance but through the quiet persistence of seeking out ways to survive, to access resources not otherwise available, and to live fully. Individuals detained at Motel 6 reported being there for many reasons: some relied on the chain to escape sweltering heat, to access an air-conditioner, to find space away from their families to wrap Christmas presents.⁷⁸ These examples are not intended to reproduce a hierarchy of “innocent” need or behavior. For need—“nefarious’’ (to use Sotomayor’s phrase) or not—should never be crim- inalized. Full stop. These examples instead point to all the ways one finds sanctuary, shelter, and freedom not necessarily via routes leading somewhere else supposedly free or totally different but via practices that carve out new space for mobility within even the most restricted environments and circumstances.

How the institution of the prison has been and continues to be represented is a political project. Just as the prison is discursively called on to legitimize its own expansion, it is also visually deployed to make a reality without it seem impossible. It is worth repeating Gina Dent’s often-cited statement on the grip that images of prison hold on our imagination: “The history of visuality linked to the prison is also a main reinforcement of the institution of the prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape.”⁷⁹ The task of this book then is to make the familiar unfamiliar, to uncongeal the congealed, to denaturalize all that has been naturalized for us—shifting the epistemological frame away from the prison as such (or, in certain moments, zooming so far into the center of it) that we lose sight of it altogether, and recording what comes into view in its stead. Paths to Prison picks up and echoes a provocation from Brett Story: “Prisons are spaces of disappearance.”⁸⁰ She means this in many ways: Prisons disappear bodies; they disappear the social crises they are tasked to solve; they are built in increasingly distant sites meant to disappear the violence, pain, and grief that they inflict and leave behind. But when directed at the field of architecture—a field that prides itself on its capacity to envision worlds totally different than our own—this proposition demands we rethink what it even means to visualize, to see or to not see, a space that actively holds itself out of view. The discursive underwrites the visual. The intelligibility of our language structures the coherence of our images. Sable Elyse Smith repeats that “scale and infrastructure are sometimes weapons. And language is both.” (293) By changing or by disappear- ing and decreasing the opacity of the vocabularies, narratives, myths, and pedagogies that confirm the prison at the center of our field of vision—and that block out all of the other architectures that prop up the social functions of the prison as it courses through daily life—perhaps the discipline can start to un-circumscribe how it imagines, understands, and rejects its own complicity in the carceral state.

The “paths” of Paths to Prison offer not a fixed or inexorable account of how things are but a set of starting points and methodologies for re-seeing the architecture of carceral society and for undoing it altogether. As paths, they let us sidestep, arrive, bypass, and look back at the prison differ- ently—carrying us through other sites, past and present, that serve “to establish a spatial distinction between the dispossessed and the free, the expendable and the nonex- pendable, the abnormal and the normal, and to manifest the ongoing production of racial boundaries of this transi- tional space,” as Leslie Lodwick writes. (413–454) By locat- ing architecture along other disciplinary paths too, we can better see its impact and be more critical about how it participates and exerts (or refuses to exert) this power. Paths to Prison intends to write new paths to prison into histories of architecture—histories that, by extending both what constitutes the carceral and what is ensnared in it, reveal more possibilities for rejecting it altogether. This is a book then that moves to see the prison anew, that shifts the frame in order to yield a different picture:

Not of concrete walls but of highways, archives, the control unit, FamilySearch, Sensorvault, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the plantation, White Reconstruction, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Com- pany, fire camps, Appalachian coal mines, the Los Angeles Police Department, clinical psychology, critical infrastruc- ture, a north Harlem apartment, the Thirteenth Amend- ment, alternative charter schools, private telecommunica- tion networks, chain-link fences…

Not of crime but of oppression, redlining, debt, counter-insurgency, domestic warfare, wage theft, anti-Blackness, residential apartheid, extraction, White Geol- ogy, pathology, racial difference, surveillance, racial- colonial state violence, data colonialism, unemployment, home-ownership, imperialism, gentrification, invasion, home contracts, Otherness, stigma…

Not of only the racial state but also of liberal multi- culturalism, the American Dream, popular consent, coop- eration, diversity, reform, “something akin to freedom,” the post-racial state…

Not of social death but of rent parties, eviction resis- tance, human and other-than-human relations, homeful- ness, poverty scholarship, captive maternals, liberation, repair, rebellious affects, anti- and ante-ownership, lines of flight, sitting with what is, writing, touching, dancing, kinship, care, self-determination, waywardness…

Here, it is the tyranny of the (white/multiculturalist) “we” that animates the subject of patriotic outrage and asserts a universalized American accountability, bypassing the long historical facts of particular peoples’ alienation from the nation-building project.

“Mass incarceration” evidences an ideological formation that shapes the language and policy of the contemporary (abortively “post-racial”) racist state while expanding the conceptual and political scope of a punitive and racist approach to policing, criminalization, and human capture. Craig Willse offers a critical method that illuminates how the racially criminalized condition of “homelessness” is not only a systemic outcome of economic, cultural, and juridical relations of dominance, but also a violently normative discursive regime that assembles institutional power by rigorously obfuscating the modalities of life produced by such systemic dominance:

Following Willse’s analytical and theoretical approach, i am concerned with how “mass incarceration” has become a strangely generic term of twenty-first-century liberal-progressive coalescence. The rhetoric of “mass incarceration” hails a broadly reformist consensus that selectively displaces, appropriates, obscures, and/or overtly dismisses radical and abolitionist approaches to carceral state violence, gendered racial criminalization, and anti-Black social liquidation. How, then, does the discourse of “mass incarceration” spread the subtle absurdities of a multiculturalist, post-racial liberal agenda by subsuming the targeted casualties of the racial-colonial carceral state under the terms of a “mass”? What are the extended consequences of a “mass incarceration” reform narrative that rests on the premise that the criminal justice regime is not functioning as its founders and most fair-minded administrators intend it to function? The narrative structure of mass incarceration misapprehends the cultural-political fallout of carceral domestic warfare. The long historical consequences of the dynamic, carceral marshaling of police power, criminal justice policy, and racialized national culture are transgenerational, and they have fundamentally deformed the capacities of targeted communities to reproduce within a sociality that is constituted by the logics and juridical-policing protocols of gendered racist state violence.

Recent grassroots formations like Chicago’s We Charge Genocide, for example, demystify the targeted (hence not “mass”) casualties of carceral domestic war and demonstrate why it may be necessary to depart from mass incarceration discourse and its implicit reliance on false equivalences, fraudulent (white/multiculturalist) humanist universalisms, and generalized erasure of anti-Blackness as the structuring formation of dominance and violence that animates the modern regimes of policing and criminalization in the US and elsewhere. ⁴ Here, i am following João Costa Vargas and Moon-Kie Jung’s definition of anti-Blackness as “structured, ubiquitous, and perduring disadvantages for Black people and structured advantages for nonblacks. Such articulated disadvantages and advantages take place in the realms of ontology (how individuals constitute and define themselves as such), sociability (lived social experience), and access to resources… The likelihood of social and physical death is a direct function of antiblackness.”⁵

Anti-Blackness, in this conceptualization, is the epistemic, aesthetic, ontological, and political condition of colonial, chattel, and modern socialities and not merely a secondary expression or consequence of otherwise nonanti-Black social formations. To the extent that anti-Blackness constitutes sociality as such, it permeates the institutionalizations of private property, criminal justice, law enforcement, and post-emancipation approaches to incarceration. A radical recognition of the long carceral genealogy of anti-Blackness structured We Charge Genocide’s grassroots work between 2014–2016, which authored a story of the historical present tense that exemplifies a critical, abolitionist, Black radical departure from the political telos of mass incarceration narrativity. ⁶ Defined as “an intergenerational effort to center the voices of the young people most impacted by police violence,” We Charge Genocide articulated its mission through a Black radical and Black feminist radical tradition that drew on the legacies of Ida B. Wells and the Civil Rights Congress.⁷ Typical of its narrative praxis, We Charge Genocide excoriated the American Civil Liberties Union in 2015 for its weak, uninformed negotiations with the Chicago Police Department over its notoriously racist “stop-and-frisk” policies. ⁸ We Charge Genocide confronted and re-scripted the ACLU’s reductive understanding of Chicago policing:

We Charge Genocide’s narrative praxis exemplifies a form of creative, collective critique that disrupts and transforms the common lexicon of “police brutality” while bringing urgent, incisive attention to the historical present tense of ordinary peoples’ normalized encounters with state-facilitated and state-condoned social evisceration. This radical genius emanates from a shared, complex comprehension of the United States as an accumulation of multiple generations of institutionalized dehumanization. Following We Charge Genocide’s narrative logic: before there was “mass incarceration,” there was already incarceration, structured in the logics, geographies, and architectures of anti-Black policing and chattel genocide.

The (anti-)social formations of militarization, criminalization, and patrolling are historically central to the construction, reproduction, and institutional coherence of the white Civilizational project’s most classical iterations in racial plantation slavery, racial colonialism, land occupation, genocidal conquest, and post-emancipation apartheid. It is dangerous, however, to conflate the martial institutionalization of such relations of dominance with a transhistorical dependence on white bodily monopoly (or even majority) within the institutional geographies of personnel, administrative leadership, and bureaucratic management.

The notion of “White Reconstruction” names a historically persistent, continuous, and periodically acute logic of reform, rearticulation, adaptation, and revitalization that constitutes worldmaking and white social and ontological self-making within the changing humanist (and modern) projects of Civilization/Manifest Destiny/Progress, etc.¹⁰ While its logics of (anti-)social formation are inseparable from a chronic global white supremacist modernity, it is nonetheless possible to identify when its projects unfold with an intensity that is period-specific: like the long half century that followed the formal juridical abolition of the US apartheid order, often called the “post–civil rights period.”

The most recent, ongoing period of White Reconstruction encompasses a racial-political complex—a dynamic interaction of institutional protocols, jurisprudence, policy, popular and state cultural productions, and public discourses—of liberal reform, prima facie institutional inclusion (and the accommodation of disfranchised identity claims, like diversity, multiculturalism, etc.), capital accumulation, hetero-patriarchal dominance, industrialized ecological expropriation, territorial occupation, and criminalization of profiled bodies and targeted geographies. This complex, which is relatively symbiotic (though sometimes apparently chaotic and contentious), includes the unfolding, quaking, and convulsive reactions against the liberationist rebellions and social-political transformations that defined the mid-to-late-twentieth-century Western racial-colonial order: from the US-based Black freedom and anti-apartheid Civil Rights movements to revolutionary anti-colonialist struggles and feminist insurgencies worldwide. The crystallization of this ensemble of transformation, reform, and reaction raises epochal questions: How do the terror of gendered white supremacy, the violence of anti-Black sociality, and the Civilizational order of conquest, colonialism, and militarized white occupation (e.g. gentrification, Zionism, settler nationalism) outlive the formal abolition of specific racist state and social regimes? How do the living, collective, accumulated experiences of this terror, violence, and colonial occupation toxify and constitute once-excluded peoples’ access to rights, civil subjectivity, and other forms of political recognition within the reconstructing Civilizational order?

What if the sociality of the “post–civil rights” United States is constituted by the carceral displacement, systemic damaging, and degradation of targeted bodies? What if these are the conditions through which social totality is rendered “whole”—as nation, community, people? While there are many ways to illuminate the force of White Reconstruction across intimate and macrosocial scales, it may be useful to engage in a genealogy of the pluralist inhabitations of historical white supremacist social logics and political technologies within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. At face value, such institutionalizations appear to significantly reform or substantively transform regimes of racist state violence that are historically characterized by white bodily monopolizations of personnel/leadership/administration as well as generally aggressive white supremacist ideological animus. Yet, on deeper analysis, such systemic rearticulations extend and complicate rather than disrupt or abolish historical ensembles of racial-colonial state violence.

White Reconstruction encompasses a period-specific mobilization of institutional rhetorics, cultural and discursive regimes, political-juridical strategies, and (militarized) racial statecraft that 1) sustain anti-Black and racial-colonial (domestic) war as the condition of the social formation of the United States, while 2) constituting struggles for political and cultural hegemony that are strategically, unevenly, and inconsistently inclusionist, diversity directed, and/or multiculturalist in form. These diversitydirected struggles for hegemony are significant in their relative newness. This is in part because they are waged on or in proximity to the normative racial statecraft of liberal/desegregated racial-colonial “recognition,” in which people historically targeted by formalized protocols of categorical alienation and exclusion from the racialized chattel settler state are non-consensually subjected to the novel and constantly changing mandates, processes, and compulsory rituals of pluralist inclusion and accommodation into proper national personhood (citizenship). Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) crystallizes the centrality of liberal recognition to Indigenous peoples’ exposure to the post-1980s iterations of the Canadian nation-state:

For Coulthard, the pageantry and public exercises of liberal recognition (e.g. voting rights, formal equality under the law, citizenship status, compulsory multiculturalism and “diversity” mandates, state apologies and/or piecemeal financial redress for past atrocities) extend rather than replace, repair, or even mitigate the ensemble of state and cultural practices that sustain colonial occupation and war as Canada’s condition of national coherence and sovereignty. The implications of this critique are vast: the invasive premises of the liberal extension of politicality (and full sociality) permanently delineate, disrupt, and redefine the structures and discursive regimes of citizenship, freedom, bodily integrity, and personhood as they are contingently accessed by the non-normative (non-)subjects and targets of the anti-Black, racial-colonial settler state. In this context, criminal law, policing, electoral politics, border militarization, corporate media, carceral schools, foundation- and think-tank-funded academic research agendas, prisons, jails, reservations, detention centers, and other such institutions signify the relations of coercive power that overdetermine White Reconstruction’s struggles over hegemony (as the mediated, non-coercive power of consent). Put differently, the cultural-political terrain of White Reconstruction’s particular moment of hegemonic struggle is distinctive because the conditions of anti-Blackness, racial-coloniality, and domestic war are the necessary precedents and foundations on which a logic of white/multiculturalist solicitation anticipates the bodily presence and delimited inclusion of human groups previously marginalized or excluded from the domain of political coalitions, historical blocs, and social subjectivities within the modern (post-conquest, post-emancipation) US nationbuilding project. ¹²

Consider the Los Angeles Police Department’s conspicuous efforts to augment and publicly signify the demographic diversity of its officers during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Responding to the far-reaching, systemic corruption of the LAPD’s Rampart Division throughout the 1990s, a June 2001 federal consent decree forced the City of Los Angeles and the LAPD to remediate what US Attorney General Janet Reno and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice called “a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful conduct that has been made possible by the failure of the City defendants [City of Los Angeles, Board of Police Commissioners of the City of Los Angeles, and the LAPD] to adopt and implement proper management practices and procedures.”¹³ (The terms of the decree allowed the city, the Board, and the LAPD to admit no culpability.) In the wake of this liberal racial state intervention, the LAPD engaged in a series of piecemeal internal reforms and public relations pageantry that included sponsoring the 2005 Gay Games Sports and Cultural Festival (part of a national initiative to increase the numbers of out gay cadets), cosponsoring the 2006 Tenth Annual International Criminal Justice Diversity Symposium under the leadership of LAPD Chief William Bratton (the former New York Police Department commissioner who famously authorized citywide police harassment of Black and Latinx residents under the rubric of “broken windows” policing), and the ongoing “Join LAPD” recruitment initiative. ¹⁴

Enacting a public-facing mission of domestic militarist inclusivity, the LAPD has been guided by the recommendations of a 2009 study by the RAND Center on Quality Policing (funded by the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation), which included both a directive to “identify ways to streamline and prioritize applicants in the recruiting process that can meet both recruiting and diversity goals” ¹⁵ and a summary recommendation to “tailor media mix to attract diversity target groups.” ¹⁶ The LAPD’s diversity recruitment efforts are animated by the pedantic cultural and visual production of a reforming racial state, relying on vernacular and visual exhibitions of bodily difference and non-normative subjectivities as their primary vehicles of popular outreach. Headlined by its “Join LAPD” campaign, the state’s aspirational notion of a refurbished, reconstituted police demographic flows through highway billboards, internet advertisements, and multiple social media venues, including a widely visited Facebook page, constantly updated “@joinlapd” Twitter and Instagram accounts, a devoted YouTube channel, and a self-standing “Join LAPD” website (joinlapd.com) that is distinct in substance and design from the LAPD’s official site (lapdonline.org).

Stuart Hall’s versatile and durable reconceptualization of “hegemony” helps contextualize “Join LAPD” as an exemplary articulation of the pedagogical and cultural technologies of the racial-carceral state. For Hall, the contemporary state is a complex arrangement of institutions, interests, and political blocs that is actively engaged in struggles to build consensus-based—that is, hegemonic—social rule across different gendered racial constituencies. While the racial state remains the central apparatus for the expression of coercive rule (that is, legitimated state-sanctioned violence), Hall argues that its primary expression of power in the post–World War II context increasingly takes the form of institutional mobilizations that attempt to cultivate some version of popular consent across a dominant ensemble of authorities, ideological assumptions, and institutional protocols. He writes,

Following Hall, the pedagogical racial state actively produces and participates in a discursive terrain that encompasses visual culture, the built environment, official vernaculars and slogans, and other material texts that form the cultural conditions through which White Reconstruction coheres as a particular ensemble of consensusbuilding regimes, even and especially as it imagines, marshals, and coordinates the reform and periodic expansion of gendered racist domestic warfare. The uneven (though significant) implementation of diversity mandates, compulsory tolerance and sensitivity protocols, and other “post–civil rights” multiculturalisms signify the (perhaps momentary) obsolescence of classical white supremacy as a model of power and socially-ordering violence that is based primarily or even predominantly on the vesting of hegemonic institutional power in the exclusionary collectivity of the white social body.

The critical challenge, in such a moment, is to consider the political and cultural implications of a multiculturalist white supremacy that actively releases—or is forced to release—its stranglehold on apartheid forms of institutionality at the same time that it reproduces the ascendancy of White Being. Guided by Sylvia Wynter’s radical critique of European and Euroamerican humanism and “Man,” i understand White Being as the militarized, normative paradigm of human being that inhabitants of the ongoing half-millennial Civilizational project have involuntarily inherited as a violent universal. Wynter’s durable contribution to Black Studies and the critical humanities enables a conceptualization of White Being as a narrative, ceremonial, ritualized practice of human being that pivots on relations of dominance with other beings (human and otherwise) and aspirational mastery over the wildness and unknowability of nature and the physical universe. ¹⁸

White Being’s ascendancy, in turn, requires perpetual mobilizations of (legitimated state and extra-state) violence and colonial-chattel power that form the premises of the degrading, negating, and deadly differentiations. Postracial, multiculturalist, diversity-valorizing Americanism is the racial narrative telos of the twenty-first century US, even and especially amidst white supremacist and “white nationalist” reaction. ¹⁹ While the phenotypes of white supremacy expand and multiply—a reordering of bodies necessary to the reproduction of White Being’s ascendancy in changing historical conditions—the internal coherence of white supremacy as a logic of social formation is sustained, complicated, redeemed, and enhanced.

Thus, between the subtle rainbow flag overlay on the windshield of an LAPD squad car and the Instagram commemoration of 2019 International Women’s Day, the “Join LAPD” initiative offers a dynamic, living archive of liberal multiculturalism as a political and pedagogical tactic of racial state rearticulation that expands as it reforms the logics and protocols of racial-colonial domestic (carceral) war. Here, the imperatives of militarized, gendered racial policing are intensified by the rhetorical and ideological turn toward demographic, identity-based inclusivity in the hiring and mobilization of domestic militarism’s on-the-ground personnel. In this context, “Join LAPD” cannot be reduced to a pandering public relations campaign or short-lived pseudo–affirmative action drive. Rather, it is part of a sustained, reformist diversity mandate that has resulted in the percentage of “Latino” LAPD officers more than doubling and the proportion of “Asian” officers tripling between 1990 and 2015. Notably, these augmentations have been paralleled by a decrease in the ratio of Black LAPD personnel during the same period. While rigorous explanations for the latter trend exceed our purposes here, it is worth questioning whether domestic militarism’s multiculturalist rearticulation rests on the continued police violence against Black communities, bodies, and profiles, and whether this structure of continuity produces a culture of virulent alienation between police forces and their prospective Black cadets. ²⁰

Read within the logics of White Reconstruction, “Join LAPD” is simultaneously a recruitment device and pedagogical racist state regime that attempts to displace, deflect, and abandon the LAPD’s place in this twentieth-century ensemble of modern US racial-colonial state power. Max Felker-Kantor’s critical interdisciplinary history of the LAPD in the years between the 1965 Watts rebellion and 1992 LA uprising concisely frames the longer precedents of this multiculturalist rearticulation:

Understood in the context of the 2001 consent decree and the longer, post-war history of establishing and violently enforcing geographies of criminalization and racial dominance in Los Angeles, ²² the LAPD’s twenty-first-century diversity recruitment efforts must be differentiated from two implicit possibilities: first, the sudden overhaul of the LAPD’s on-the-ground-policing methods (e.g. use of gang “task forces” and databases, SWAT, gendered racial profiling, and juridically sanctioned killing of Black and Latinx civilians); ²³ and second, the institutionalized antiracist commitment to ending focused and strategic militarizations against (queer and transgender) sex workers, homeless people, undocumented communities, and criminalized Black and Brown youth. Rather than aborting its long historical role in the Southern California theater of domestic war making, the LAPD seems to be offering an institutional concession that “classical” white supremacist policing must undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable. This process, rendered compulsory by federal state intervention as well as ongoing grassroots resistance, rebellion, and periodic retaliation from people and communities most vulnerable to police violence, entails a dismantling of the white supremacist policing regime’s most evidently classical elements—including (but not limited to) the optics and nationalist theater of white (male) police officers patrolling, detaining, humiliating, intimidating, harassing, abusing, torturing, and assassinating city residents targeted by racialized, sexualized, and gendered criminal/suspect/gang profiles.

Qualitative, anecdotal, and statistical evidence indicate that initiatives like “Join LAPD” do not retract or even reduce the asymmetrical policing of racially criminalized populations. Instead, diversity mandates signify revisions of the white supremacist institutional phenotype, a model of racial reform that has become increasingly widespread since the successful mid-1990s neoconservative attacks on affirmative action. ²⁴ The LAPD has, in this way, become a state platform for a form of public theater that performs the obsolescence of old-school white supremacist policing while retaining a paradigmatic commitment to juridically sanctioned, culturally legitimated racial domestic warfare.

As the multiculturalist approach to officer recruitment gains discursive and bureaucratic traction, the white supremacist substructure of policing remains a primary determination of the LAPD’s on-the-ground operations. Damien Sojoyner’s study of the symbiotic continuities between policing, criminal justice, and public schools in Los Angeles County suggests that the widely shared liberalprogressive rhetoric of the “school-to-prison pipeline” is not only a fatally flawed metaphor, but also drastically underestimates how (poor, Black, and Latinx predominant) schools must themselves be conceptualized as criminalized, actively policed carceral sites (“enclosures”). By conceptualizing schools as enclosures, Sojoyner draws on Clyde Woods’s historical geography of the Black South to create an analytical framework through which to comprehend the normalization of carceral domestic war—policing, criminalization, and incarceration—in the continuous flow of staff, jurisprudence, state/law enforcement officials, administrators, and discursive structures (languages of Black student and family pathology, criminalizing representations of “at-risk” youth, etc.) across schools, courts, jails, prisons, and youth detention facilities. ²⁵ Sojoyner contextualizes the ramping up of the LAPD’s militarized repressive capacities in the latter decades of the twentieth century as the precursor for the symbolic, ideological, and political maneuvers of “Join LAPD” and other such publicity/recruitment campaigns:

Prior to and since the issuance of the 2001 consent decree, the LAPD’s identification with high-profile, scandalous incidents and institutionalizations of racist state violence have rendered the notions of both “scandal” and “incident” insufficient. Los Angeles has long boasted the largest jail system in the United States (and, according to the ACLU, “the world”)—a carceral toll overwhelmingly borne by poor Black and Latinx people (including youth, undocumented migrants, and those jailed while awaiting trial). ²⁷ Throughout the late 1990s, the LAPD’s Rampart Division was involved in multiple conspiracies to fabricate and steal evidence (including over $1 million of cocaine) used to frame hundreds of innocent people (more than 100 of whom have since been released from prison and jail after courts overturned their convictions). The Rampart Division was engaged in numerous incidents of civilian shootings, in-station beatings, and street tortures. Crucially, a prevalence of Black and Latinx officers were exposed as central figures and implicated as co-conspirators in the investigation and criminal proceedings that revealed the depth and scope of the “Rampart scandal.” ²⁸ In continuity, the widely broadcast police violence of the 2007 May Day repression, in which LAPD riot control officers—many of them Latinx—attacked immigrant rights activists and other civilians during a peaceful gathering at MacArthur Park, further demonstrates that the institutional logics and inhabitations of racist state violence are not reducible to the uniformed, reactionary white cop. ²⁹

Political scientist and Black Lives Matter Los Angeles (BLMLA) chapter co-founder Melina Abdullah illustrates the diversified LAPD’s continued (post–consent decree) complicity in patterns of fatal racist state violence. In a September 2017 radio interview with KPFK (90.7 FM, Los Angeles), Abdullah asserts:

A more rigorous conception of the systemic logic of white supremacy—which is not reducible to the white body itself—might help delink white supremacy’s “substructure” (its logics of violence and ordering) from reductive notions of the white supremacist “phenotype” (the exclusive or otherwise overwhelming presence of white bodies). Put differently, i am asking us to consider how white supremacy is fully engaged in the organization of systemic violence and the social subjection of white civil society’s historical racial antagonists, even and especially as its institutional forms—including its political and intellectual leadership— convene a (relative) diversity of nonwhite bodies. What new political languages, organizing strategies, and conceptual frameworks can enable an adequately critical, ambitiously transformative response to multiculturalist white supremacy?

“Join LAPD” indicates a constitutive tension in White Reconstruction’s struggle to reconstitute hegemony while retaining the militarized protocols and methods of the racist state: the reconstruction simultaneously solicits the historical targets of white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative racial-colonial violence, while refurbishing (and thus reproducing) the relations of dominance that constitute the primary terms of the modern racial order. To consider the multiculturalist “turn” in the demographic composition of certain bureaucratic, professional, and administrative spaces within historically white supremacist social and state formations, then, is to apprehend how Sylvia Wynter’s “Man” attempts to sustain and galvanize a global order of power by selectively revising the bureaucratic pathways and discursive terms of piecemeal (that is, contingent and non-comprehensive) access for historically excluded others to participate in an ensemble of hegemonic institutions (schools/colleges/universities, police, military, electoral politics, and state-funded service professions, to name a few). Wynter’s “Man” references the peculiar “genre” of the human that is forcibly imposed on the rest of humanity as the universalized template for proper species-being. The New World slave plantation is, she writes,

Following Wynter, multiculturalist white supremacy is Man’s solicitation and incorporation of “nonwhite” and counter-normative/queer/trans subjects and bodies into a millennial order of white power/ascendancy. These processes of bodily exhibition, institutional expansion, and symbolic-ideological rearticulation attempt to discipline, selectively assimilate, and otherwise dissipate insurgent modalities of human being that persist within and against the violent and violating ascendancy of Man—including and especially Wynter’s particular logic of the plantation, a relation of dominance against Afro-descended Black people that shapes and influences other Civilizational racialcolonial power formations.

Here, it is necessary to consider again how White Reconstruction raises a structuring racial-colonial contradiction: there is a struggle for hegemony as a system of social order and dominance; the notion of “hegemonic” power is premised on the primacy of consensual rather than coercive/ violent relations of power; yet, because anti-Blackness and racial-colonial relations of dominance constitute and cohere sociality as such, the struggle for hegemony is already confounded by the conditions of carceral state and extrastate violence (domestic war). In order to fully appreciate the LAPD’s response to the 2001 consent decree as a symptomatic indication of the speculative cultural algorithms of White Reconstruction, it is also necessary to consider how the “Join LAPD” campaign is more than a cynical, superficial ploy to quell federal governmental criticism and the decree’s implicit threat of receivership. Rather, such efforts reflect a dynamic, dialogical relation between state agencies and institutional geographies that expand the capacities of the racial/racist state as a pedagogical (and not merely coercive) political, juridical, and culturally productive totality. Here, the notion of a speculative cultural algorithm suggests that the historical field of White Reconstruction involves an interplay between the actuarial (predictive and anticipatory) routines of institutional protocol, discursive rationalization (of reform, repression, contradiction, etc.), and disciplinary-to-punitive statecraft (jurisprudence, policing, criminalization, etc.), and the aspirational and experimental (hence speculative) dimensions of a period-specific statecraft, which constantly coordinates and rearticulates domestic warfare and gendered racial reform as a complex and simultaneous totality rather than an irreconcilable or explosive internal contradiction.

The scholarly activist obligation, in the contemporary moment, is to consider the political and cultural implications of a multiculturalist white supremacy that actively releases—or is forced to release—its stranglehold on apartheid forms of institutionality at the very same time that it reproduces the ascendancy of White Being. As the planners, organic intellectuals, administrators, and armed officers of the pedagogical state continually test, revise, and institutionalize the cultural algorithms of White Reconstruction, there is neither respite nor security from the recalibrations of domestic racial-colonial warfare. How are we to conceptualize, confront, oppose, creatively disrupt, and/or transform this multiculturalist renaissance of the white supremacist form? How does the recasting and redistribution of bodies, subjects, and identities within the formally desegregated geographies of white supremacy compel a reframing of antiracist, abolitionist, antigenocide, decolonizing, and radical liberationist work?