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This thesis analyzes the legal history of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment case law as it relates to the police practice of Stop and Frisk which shifted drastically in 1968 with the creation of the “Terry Stop”. From that decision, it analyzes the broader role that both the Judiciary and Law Enforcement, as fundamental American institutions, played in the creation of the Carceral State. This research draws on archival Supreme Court records to demonstrate that the decision to reinterpret the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures was made in full view of the politicization and racialization of crime. Further, it shows that the Supreme Court both faced and succumbed to the immense pressure that Law Enforcement, lobbyists, and the United States Department of Justice placed on it. In response, the Court created a semantic carveout of the Fourth Amendment that permitted the practice of racially motivated Stop and Frisk, and the confiscation of contraband found during such frisks as evidence of a crime. In doing so, the Court demonstrated its allegiance to Law Enforcement—in the face of significant evidence to the contrary—by continually dismissing arguments that police practices were motivated by negative stereotypes. In legalizing the Stop and Frisk in 1968, the Court empowered Law Enforcement to practices to gradually shift away from the racially motivated police harassment from the Vagrancy Regime of the Jim Crow era to a constitutionally permissible Stop and Frisk regime. This thesis situates the advent of that change in Police Power which brought about this new regime as a primordial cornerstone in the creation of the Carceral State which was characterized by police as the agents who gathered Black bodies from American streets into the justice system.

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation analyzes how lesbian activism contributed to the genealogy of the prison abolition movement from the late 1980s through the early 2000s through collective practices, including grassroots organizing, exchanging writing and art, and acts of intimacy. Although the language of prison abolition did not emerge widely until the 1990s, their work —though not explicitly abolitionist at the time — proved instrumental to the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. Through archival research and oral histories with Judy Greenspan, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, and Eve Rosahn, this research shows how these activists interceded in abolition's genealogy through their nuanced interrogations of gender, sexuality, and incarceration within the broader context of systemic racism and imperialist violence. Their critiques challenged mainstream feminist and gay and lesbian movements' failure to recognize their interdependencies within the carceral system. In 1986, as anti-imperialist lesbian activist Susan Rosenberg was led to a prison isolation unit, Rosenberg called out “Don’t let them bury us!”; excavating these genealogical threads enriches our understanding of abolitionist thought and illuminates crucial intersections between lesbian activism, anti-imperialism, and the struggle for a world without prisons.</p>

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In April 1997 Kainos Community in HMP The Verne, Dorset, England became the first faith-based prison unit to be established in the Western world. The foundations and ethos of Kainos are based on Christian concepts of ‘loving your neighbour’ and forgiveness. The community operates as a hybrid therapeutic community (TC) and cognitive behavioural programme (CBP). It is open to and inclusive of prisoners of all faiths and none. The aim of this study is to explore the Kainos community ethnographically, guided by the principles of grounded theory and thematic analysis, in order to investigate whether or not Kainos ameliorates some of the de-humanising aspects of prison, and if so, how it rehumanises the prison space. Theoretically, this study highlights the dehumanisation of imprisonment, and illuminates the role that a holistic, Christian-based approach can play in terms of making the prison environment ‘more human’. My findings reveal that on Kainos there are physical, liminal and spiritual spatial mechanisms, in which a family of sub-themes interact to enable flourishing to occur. Kainos has created a physical space in which spaces of architecture and design; sensory experience; movement; and home interact to enable flourishing, whereby prisoners feel ‘more homely’, ‘free’, safe, and calm. Kainos has created a liminal space in which spaces of atmosphere; identity; home; and creativity interact to enable flourishing, empowering prisoners in their self-expression; as a cathartic tool; and as a means of regaining or creating a new identity. Kainos has created a spiritual space in which spaces of Christian activism, love, and forgiveness enable self-worth, healing, transformation, and meaningful change. The implication is that Kainos has created spaces of flourishing, safety and peace within an otherwise dehumanising carceral space, and this plays an important role in the process of transformational change imperative in the desistance process. If society must have prisons, this study concludes that Kainos provides a model for how they should be.

In the tradition of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, this thesis focuses on Miami’s graffiti subculture and the conflicts between market economies and economies of social meaning. As a reference point, I consider Miami’s “Penits”: the name given to the seemingly abandoned buildings where graffiti is performed. Short for penitentiary, the term derives from the 1980s after a large building rumored to be a prison was defunded midway through its construction. After this first reclamation, every other graffiti heterotopia in Miami has been similarly recoded as spaces that mock structures of discipline and industry. Through Michel Foucault’s biopolitical framework I argue that the sovereign state and marketplace conspire to dually criminalize and commoditize the subculture’s performative defiance. I conclude by illustrating how the market itself reinforces the carceral archipelago by framing the subculture’s vandal aesthetic through the normalized, self-interested boundaries of conduct that the market itself deems il/legal.