Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pelot-Hobbs, Lydia

Series:

Justice, Power, and Politics Series

Justice, Power, and Politics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Capitalism.

Mass incarceration.

Petroleum industry and trade.

Prison abolition movements.

Racism against Black people.

Louisiana--Politics and government.

Louisiana.

Genre:

History

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (384 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

The University of North Carolina Press 2023

Summary:

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

Contents:

Decentralizing Angola: liberal interventions, overcrowding crises, and the making of a new era

Consolidating and contesting law-and-order austerity

Jailing Louisiana: sheriffs, policing, and growing opposition

Carceral disasters: Hurricane Katrina, organized abandonment, and racial state violence

Reconstructing the New Orleans criminal legal system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

To walk down the street without fear: curbing criminalization and demanding life in the New Orleans tourism economy

Making freedom.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-4696-7513-7

979-88-908627-7-8

1-4696-7972-8

1-4696-7512-9

OCLC:

1409076264