This ethnographic dissertation project is an applied philosophical project that takes an ontological and critical phenomenological approach to the enactment of carceral bodies. This dissertation set out to answer two central questions. First, how do jail intake processes enact carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the ontological implications? Second, how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? The process of answering these questions offers an early attempt at empirical abolitionist science and technology studies research as it offers an intervention in the essentializing biomedical and criminological understandings of "the criminal." This is achieved by tracing the enactment pf carceral bodies across the domains of datafication, space, and time. First, with the advent of digital technologies, the science and technology of criminality continues to be informed by the desire to use metrics to identify and define criminal man. Like their precursors, however; when taken together these quantified characteristics contribute to the production of a body predisposed not to crime but to incarceration. This predisposition arises out of datafication and algorithmic characterization. The data comprising the raw material of this assignation pulls together the digitization of one's race, ethnicity, school (reflective of the school-to-prison-pipeline), address, sex, socio-economic status, disability status, mental health status, etc. Carceral algorithms, and the structures they arise out of, inform one's incarcerability. The carceral body of data and its risks are multiple and are represented in a number of ways, just as it is experienced variously. There are infinite permutations of the intake process across which categories come to stand in for human suffering, for risk, for job performance, etc. The data generated and its infrastructures are reflective of the broader political and socioeconomic context. The role of data collection, management, and analysis surrounding the intake process makes visible the politics and stakes of the carceral bodies enacted. The two primary epistemologies and attendant professions brought to bear upon the carceral body are medicine and criminology. These epistemologies rely upon quantification, categorization, and calculations of risk to generate data from which carceral knowledge is made (and in turn makes). This project characterizes the data infrastructures of the jails as socio-technical objects, practices, and architectures that are multiple and complex. It is through this lens that managerialism, algorithms, and knowledge production are characterized. Together, these facets provide insight into the making of carceral bodies of data and the logics and mechanisms of the carceral-data-industrial-complex. Second, this project addresses the spatialities that carceral bodies are generative of and situated in. The spaces of intake are suffused with values, politics, and epistemologies that play out in a number of ways. In order draw out these facets, the ontological approach was integrated with carceral geography. This approach elevates micro-scales of space and time, placing the personal and particular beside within the broader social and political contexts. This shift in scale has important implications for the study of correctional facilities as it is from this scale that the complexities, relationalities, materialities, contradictions, and multiplicities are visible. This approach relates to Foucault's carceral archipelago, which conveys the complexities of carceral spaces, surveillances, and their leakiness. Carceral geography's reading of Foucault requires an engagement across carceral societies that incorporates the body as a prime site from which to understand complex dynamics of control. Carceral geography offers a helpful approach drawing out spatialities enacted through performances and experiences, making concertina wire fences permeable and ever-mutable. The carceral body carries carceral spaces within it and beyond it that arise out of epistemes, policies, and practices that are mutually reinforcing and enmeshed. These embodied spaces include emotions and mental self-scapes alongside digitally recorded diagnoses and correctional designations. When considering how security infrastructures permeate society, well beyond correctional facility gates, this has important implications for this carceral society. The buildings and physical spaces of incarceration are read as reflective of the values and logics of the state, this brings into view the extra-penological function of incarceration, in which specific populations are disproportionately removed and disciplined/ punished by the state even before they are determined to be guilty or not guilty by a court. This hyper-incarceration of certain populations underlines the spatial logics of carceral networks that reflect the machinations of a neoliberal state that disappears those who have been Othered via carceral networks. This takes on even more problematic hues when considering the torturous conditions unsuitable for any creature, including humans. Third, despite Western constructs of linear or absolute time, the study of the carceral temporal body demonstrates the relativities, multiplicities, and disjunctures that challenge the notion of a universal clock. This dissertation tells of carceral bodies made into and across multiple time points. Bodies become metaphoric timeclocks through managerial oversight processes in which they are assigned varying times across different electronic record systems, with these different from their time of arrest and remand. In this space, the temporal jurisdictions diverge, giving rise to frictions and conflict. Further, these assigned temporalities differ greatly from the ways time is experienced across embodied states (e.g. experiencing acute withdrawal symptoms). The theoretical frameworks employed to understand carceral time are designed to address how carceral bodies come to be anticipated. In part, this is enacted through professional and bureaucratic routines that are often protracted and repetitive. These routines give rise to waiting and urgency. This empirical engagement with carceral temporalities draws out epistemic and experiential forces. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that drawing out the ontological multiplicities of mass incarceration can countermand its fixities and generate abolitionist epistemologies. Abolition has generative potentials that coalesce with science and technology studies' investment in the otherwise. Over time carceral abolition has come to refer to a wide range of social movements, theoretical frameworks, and activism. The various approaches to abolition share a sense of urgency and resistance to gradual or eventual change, as this has historically led to the perpetuation and maintenance of racialized criminal justice systems and mass incarceration. Carceral epistemologies (e.g. penology, criminology, biomedicine, public health) are steeped in racisms and classisms, which inform broader imaginaries of crime and criminality. As political discourse has been reduced to simplistic chants and pithy soundbites, the aim of this dissertation has been to "complicate the discourse" surrounding the carceral-industrial-complex and the carceral body in particular. Understanding the carceral body through its ontological multiplicities serves as the grounds from which resistances to the status quo can be formulated. This is vitally important in light of the diffuse assemblages detailed in this project and the pervasiveness of carceral logics. In sum, this dissertation has demonstrated that carceral bodies are made and not born. It points to the difficult work still needed and the utility of ethnography in eliciting the multiplicities of practices and materialities in carceral settings. The abolitionist dreams arising from this project demand the embrace of ontological multiplicities as new logics and imaginaries unweave the criminal justice system. While it does not fall within the purview of this project to delineate a specific set of directives, it does suggest that abolitionist dis-epistemology requires logics and tactics equally as multifaceted and nuanced as the criminal justice system itself. / Doctor of Philosophy / This is an applied philosophy project based on ethnographic research in the New York City jails. It provides insight into the practices of jail intake as a way to draw out the ways in which carceral bodies come to be enacted. The project grows out of feminist science studies. The two central questions are 1) how do jail intake processes produce carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the implications? 2) how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? These questions are addressed through the domains of data, space, and time, which serve as the organizing framework of this project. The focus on intake enactments draws out the multiplicities of carceral realities, which has the potential to resist essentializing conceptualizations of the criminal. In doing so, this dissertation project demonstrates the potential for abolitionist science and technology studies to disrupt the criminal justice status quo.

The Great Appalachian Flood of 1977 was a historic flood that killed over 100 people, damaged nearly 1,500 homes, and displaced almost 30,000 Appalachian residents. The flood lasted from April 2nd to April 5th, 1977 affecting southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. This project focuses on the disaster relief efforts by the incarcerated population of Wise County Correctional Facility, commonly known as Unit 18, in Wise, Virginia. This project utilized locally produced primary sources known as the Mountain Community Television interviews. These interviews were archived online through the Appalshop Archives in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The Mountain Community Television interviews used for this project were recorded three to four weeks following the early April flood in Wise by media activists and volunteers. The reporters interviewed incarcerated men from Unit 18, the administrative staff and correctional officers at Unit 18, local business owners, and residential community members of Wise. This article examines how the community of Wise, Virginia reacted to the disaster relief efforts in the community. The disaster relief work performed by Unit 18 inmates in the aftermath of the 1977 flood exemplifies a growing reliance on prison laborers in central Appalachia specifically, and rural America more generally. The majority of residential community members in Wise expressed NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) attitudes toward the prison facility and incarcerated population at Unit 18. On the other hand, local business owners who directly benefited from disaster relief work and prison labor changed their opinions about Unit 18 inmates. This project details how the April flood influenced local business owners to move from "Not In My Backyard" to an expanding reliance on incarcerated labor. Most of the Wise community retained NIMBY perceptions about Unit 18 and the incarcerated population after the April flood relief efforts excluding local business owners, a small but important sect of the Wise population. The article concludes by examining Unit 18 inmates' reflections on their labor, wages, and the rehabilitation programs at the Wise County Correctional Facility in the late 1970s. / Master of Arts / In 1977, a catastrophic flood impacted the central Appalachian region of the United States. This flood later became known as the "Great Appalachian Flood of 1977." The flood primarily affected small towns and rural communities in southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and southern West Virginia. Disaster relief efforts in the aftermath of the flood varied across the region causing regional activists to criticize the government's relief efforts. In Wise, Virginia imprisoned men from Wise Correctional Facility Unit 18 volunteered to help the local community in their time of need. This project pays direct attention to Wise, VA community members' changed or solidified opinions about the local prison population at Wise Correctional Unit 18. The writing examines how Unit 18 prisoners viewed their role in the Wise community, their labor and wages, and the different approaches to prisoner rehabilitation. This project uses primary sources from the Appalshop Archives labeled as the Mountain Community Television interviews. In the late 1970s, Mountain Community Television interviewers were a group of local activists and volunteers that circulated broadcasts in southwestern Virginia. The Mountain Community Television interviews were conducted in the following weeks after the Great Appalachian Flood in Wise,Virginia. The interviews describe how local business owners of Wise and Unit 18 correctional administrators worked closely to change the working relationship between the community and the inmates at Unit 18. The vast majority of community members of Wise did not change their opinions about the location of the prison or the population of Unit 18 despite prisoners volunteering to help the community in the aftermath of the flood. On the other hand, the imprisoned population at Unit 18 advocated for more inclusion in the community with an expansion of educational and rehabilitative programs at the correctional facility after. This research is important because it highlights how rural communities and small towns contribute to mass incarceration in the United States. The project can be used to explain how Wise, Virginia directly, and central Appalachia generally, became an important landscape for the U.S. prison regime before the end of the twentieth century.

In the present study we investigate the impacts of carceral confinement by means of the judiciary practices related to the execution of the penalty of deprivation of liberty in the state of Sergipe. We give privilege to an ethnographic perspective of insertion in the research field and use procedures of qualitative research: semi-structured interviews, participant observation, register and analysis of the field diaries, analysis of documents and records made by judiciary and administrative institutions. The professional condition of a psychologist in a Penal Executions Court has allowed a privileged access to the organizations and to the social actors and, on the other hand, deflagrated the insertion of the researcher as part of the very phenomena that she intended to study. We have identified, in the carceral system of Sergipe, that the geographic disposition of the prisons is a strong strategic component of the penal operation. As from this are engendered complex effects of power, whose logic we denominate penal geopolitics. We point the factors that work in the composition of the mechanisms of carceral recruitment to a certain clientele. We describe and analyse how judiciary devices work as propellers of the impacts that imprisonment inflicts as much upon those who are directly submitted to it as upon their respective socio-familiar and other relations. / Neste estudo, investigamos os impactos do confinamento prisional através das práticas judiciárias correlatas à execução da pena privativa de liberdade no estado de Sergipe. Privilegiamos uma perspectiva etnográfica de inserção no campo de pesquisa e utilizamos procedimentos da pesquisa qualitativa: entrevistas semiestruturadas, observação participante, registro e análise dos diários de campo, análise de documentos e de registros efetuados pelas instituições judiciárias e administrativas. A condição profissional de psicóloga numa Vara de Execuções Penais permitiu acesso privilegiado às organizações e aos atores sociais e, por outro lado, deflagrou a inserção da pesquisadora como parte dos próprios fenômenos que pretendia estudar. Identificamos no sistema prisional sergipano que a disposição geográfica das prisões é um forte componente estratégico do funcionamento penal. A partir disso, engendram-se complexos efeitos de poder, cuja lógica denominamos de geopolítica penal. Apontamos os fatores que atuam na composição dos mecanismos de recrutamento prisional sobre determinada clientela. Descrevemos e analisamos os modos de funcionamento dos dispositivos judiciários como propulsores dos impactos que o encarceramento impõe tanto aos que a ele são submetidos diretamente como também às suas respectivas relações de natureza sociofamiliar ou outras.

This thesis engages in a counter-visual ethnography, using Alcatraz as a site to examine the workings of U.S. memorialization practices and visuality, specifically regarding carcerality. In examining the U.S.’s most popular site of penal tourism, this ethnography aims to provide new vantages from which to perceive of Alcatraz in relationship to the contemporary carceral moment. This is done in part by analyzing the processes of visuality through which hegemonic meanings of carcerality are circulated and consolidated at the site. The work is to at once see and unsee the ways Alcatraz is visually structured, in the process creating alternative ways to perceive of the site in its historical contingencies and relation with the wider workings of the carceral state.

This dissertation examines the relationship between community colleges and prisons as similar institutions that absorb and manage displaced workers, economic refugees, and dispossessed adult populations. Based on interviews with adult learners in two community college settings, I discuss how these two seemingly distinctive institutions work together to subvert individual and collective desires for self-determination through policies and pedagogies that institutionalize discouragement and emotional management. Specifically, I am concerned with what it means for working-class adults to participate in higher education in the context of precarity and incarceration-literally and figuratively. Drawing from the growing field of scholarship that underscores the consolidation of practices and interdependency between academia and incarceration (Chatterjee, Davis, 2003, 2005, Meiners, 2007, Sojoyner 2016), the contexts I have chosen for this project are two institutions where students gather each week to participate in the project of higher education. Carrying past and present traumas related to schooling, many participants viewed community college as the one remaining institution deigned to help them remake their lives. This study asks how participants made sense of their lives, choices, and sacrifices to participate in higher education and how these factors structure their expectations of what college might provide them. Utilizing critical race theory, this dissertation offers a theoretical framework pedagogy of repair, which I define as the interpretive structures and stories used by non-traditional students to make sense of their past and potential futures amidst the normative neoliberal structures of precarious labor, vulnerability, social abandonment and debt.

abstract: Low-income communities of color in the U.S. today are often vulnerable to displacement, forced relocation away from the places they call home. Displacement takes many forms, including immigration enforcement, mass incarceration, gentrification, and unwanted development. This dissertation juxtaposes two different examples of displacement, emphasizing similarities in lived experiences. Mixed methods including document-based research, map-making, visual ethnography, participant observation, and interviews were used to examine two case studies in Phoenix, Arizona: (1) workplace immigration raids, which overwhelmingly target Latino migrant workers; and (2) the Loop 202 freeway, which would disproportionately impact Akimel O'odham land. Drawing on critical geography, critical ethnic studies, feminist theory, carceral studies, and decolonial theory, this research considers: the social, economic, and political causes of displacement, its impact on the cultural and social meanings of space, the everyday practices that allow people to survive economically and emotionally, and the strategies used to organize against relocation. Although raids are often represented as momentary spectacles of danger and containment, from a worker's perspective, raids are long trajectories through multiple sites of domination. Raids' racial geographies reinforce urban segregation, while traumatization in carceral space reduces the power of Latino migrants in the workplace. Expressions of care among raided workers and others in jail and detention make carceral spaces more livable, and contribute to movement building and abolitionist sentiments outside detention. The Loop 202 would result in a loss of native land and sovereignty, including clean air and a mountain sacred to O'odham people. While the proposal originated with corporate desire for a transnational trade corridor, it has been sustained by local industry, the perceived inevitability of development, and colonial narratives about native people and land. O'odham artists, mothers, and elders counter the freeway's colonial logics through stories that emphasize balance, collective care over individual profit, and historical consciousness. Both raids and the freeway have been contested by local grassroots movements. Through political education, base-building, advocacy, lawsuits, and protest strategies, community organizations have achieved changes in state practice. These movements have also worked to create alternative spaces of safety and home, rooted in interpersonal care and Latino and O'odham culture. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Environmental Social Science 2014

abstract: This dissertation analyzes the transformation of noncitizen detention policy in the United States over the twentieth century. For much of that time, official policy remained disconnected from the reality of experiences for those subjected to the detention regime. However, once detention policy changed into its current form, disparities between policy and reality virtually disappeared. This work argues that since its inception in the late nineteenth century to its present manifestations, noncitizen detention policy transformed from a form of exclusion to a method of state-sponsored violence. A new periodization based on detention policy refocuses immigration enforcement into three eras: exclusion, humane, and violent. When official policy became state violence, the regime synchronized with noncitizen experiences in detention marked by pain, suffering, isolation, hopelessness, and death. This violent policy followed the era of humane detentions. From 1954 to 1981, during a time of supposedly benevolent national policies premised on a narrative against de facto detentions, Arizona, and the broader Southwest, continued to detain noncitizens while collecting revenue for housing such federal prisoners. Over time increasing detentions contributed to overcrowding. Those incarcerated naturally reacted against such conditions, where federal, state, and local prisoners coalesced to demand their humanity. Yet, when taxpayers ignored these pleas, an eclectic group of sheriffs, state and local politicians, and prison officials negotiated with federal prisoners, commodifying them for federal revenue. Officials then used federal money to revamp existing facilities and build new ones. Receiving money for federal prisoners was so deeply embedded within the Southwest carceral landscape that it allowed for private prison companies to casually take over these relationships previously held by state actors. When official policy changed in 1981, general detentions were used as deterrence to break the will of asylum seekers. With this change, policy and reality melded. No longer needing the pretext of exclusionary rationales nor the fiction of humane policies, the unencumbered state consolidated its official detention policy with a rationale of deterrence. In other words, violence. Analyzing the devolution of noncitizen detention policy provides key insights to understanding its historical antecedents, how this violent detention regime came to be within the modern carceral state, and its implications for the mass incarceration crisis. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2018

Conduite, de 2005 à 2009, à partir d’une étude des 222 procédures disciplinaires enregistrées au greffe de la maison d’arrêt de Vesoul et d’entretiens avec les détenus sanctionnés pour avoir transgressé le règlement intérieur de l’établissement, cette recherche a pour but de mesurer les effets sociaux de la discipline pénitentiaire. De nombreuses travaux étant régulièrement consacrés aux aspects pratiques de la question carcérale (politiques pénales, organisation institutionnelle...), il nous est apparu pertinent de compléter ces approches par une attention portée aux représentations que les différents acteurs du champ pénitentiaire (détenus, personnels de surveillance et de direction…) ont des rapports d'autorité imposés dans les maisons d'arrêt et plus particulièrement du mitard, considéré comme la clef de voûte de l'édifice disciplinaire. Le classement des discours recueillis en « figures de rhétorique » met à jour les tactiques d’utilisation ou d’évitement du mitard par les personnes détenues ; il éclaire la capacité de ces dernières à demeurer acteurs dans un contexte où l’enjeu est de préserver et d’élargir sa marge de liberté. L’opposition constatée dans la majorité des cas entre les discours des détenus et les logiques institutionnelles interroge la prison dans la mise en œuvre de la mission que lui confère le législateur de participer à la réinsertion sociale de la population pénale : la discipline pénitentiaire, telle qu’elle est conçue, ne participe-t-elle pas au contraire, par un effet d’étiquetage et de stigmatisation, à consolider le rôle de déviants des détenus sanctionnés ? L’exploration d’autres pistes envisagées au terme de cette démarche praxéologique, conduit à proposer une pratique nouvelle, autorisée par la mise en œuvre des règles pénitentiaires européennes (RPE), au service d’une meilleure adéquation entre l’impératif sécuritaire et la nécessaire réinsertion des condamnés / This research was conducted from 2005 to 2009 based on a study of the 222 disciplinary proceedings recorded at the registry of the Vesoul remand centre as well as on interviews with the convicts who were punished for transgressing the prison’s bylaw. It aims at measuring the social effects of carceral discipline. As a number of researches are already devoted to the practical aspect of the carceral issue (such as penal policies or institutional organisation), it has seemed relevant to complete these approaches by looking into how the various actors in the carceral field (inmates, guardians, heads of staff) view the power relations as established in prison and how they view the shoe in particular, wich is seen here as the keystone of the carceral structure. A rhetorical analysis of the interviews of the inmates puts into light how the shoe is either tactically used or avoided. It highlights the inmates’ ability to remain active in a context in wich the main stake is to keep and to broaden one’s space of freedom. The contrast between the words of the inmates and the philosophy of the institution questions the ability of prison to deliver on the mission imparted to it by the legislator, i.e. to assist with the social rehabilitation of the incarcerated population. One can even wonder whether carceral discipline does not contribute to the consolidation of the criminal role of inmates through a system of labelling and stigmatization. The conclusions of this analysis grounded in decision theory lead the author to suggest new professional practices, made possible by the implementation of the European Prison Rules, to better match the security imperative and the necessary rehabilitation of convicts

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The Beat poet Bob Kaufman was in many ways nearly destroyed by the state. Forcible electroshock therapy, repeated targeting by police, repeated brutalization by police, and frequent homelessness all threatened to snuff him out, but Kaufman refused to give in. He remained a political beacon of hope for his community throughout his life, asking those around him to envision a world where he could be free. Through his poems, through the poems of Etheridge Knight and Jimmy Santiago Baca, and through contemporary visions of abolition from Angela Davis and community organizers that become ever more relevant as the prison system continues to destroy its subjects, we can look towards a deeply necessary shift. Envisioning the world without prisons is foreign to many, perhaps even unimaginable. However, with the perspectives I will incorporate in this thesis, the necessity and beauty of envisioning abolition is clear.