Dissertation: The Contested Terrain of the Louisiana Carceral State: Dialectics of Southern Penal Expansions, 1971-2016
My dissertation is a critical geography of the historical present that tracks the dialectical relationship between the formation and contestation of the Louisiana carceral state from the 1970s to the present. Through a combination of archival, oral history, and ethnographic research, I seek to both chart out the political economic conditions under which Louisiana became the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the nation and to explore how grassroots activists are organizing against the broad-based criminalization of urban communities of color and putting forth alternative notions of justice and freedom. Central to this project is an examination of the role of activist-knowledge production in revealing the logics and structures that underpin the systematic violence of policing and prison. I contend that by attending to the particularities of the Southern carceral state, we can better articulate the governing structures and logics of the U.S. racial capitalist state as a whole and the moments of rupture possible through grassroots movements.
Captive Words: An Anthology of Angola Prisoner Poetry
This edited anthology consists of poetry published in The Angolite, the prisoner magazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (AKA Angola), during the twenty year period the magazine ran as an uncensored publication. The poetry in this collection explore a wide range of topics including freedom, health, love, boredom, religion, and death.
“Scaling Up or Scaling Back: The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Leveraging Federal Interventions for Abolition”
This article traces how federal court interventions into the Louisiana penal system had the unintended consequence of shepherding the growth of the state’s penal system through the logics of racial liberalism, homophobic panics, and the rehabilitative ideal.
“Patriarchy, Prisons, and Planning: The ‘Public’ Struggle Over the Expansion of the Orleans Parish Prison” (co-authored with Siri J. Colom)
This paper analyzes a key moment in the post-Katrina landscape: the rebuilding of the city’s jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP). The public meetings surrounding the redevelopment of OPP serve as a glimpse into how these supposedly democratic planning processes have, in actuality, served to reproduce the racialized and gendered disciplinary power of the state and reinscribe the very carceral logics that legitimize hyper-incarceration.
