Topic: Carceral Geography in El Paso, Texas: Carceral Geography

Brett Story is a non-fiction filmmaker, activist, social science author, and geographer by academic training. Story grounds her work, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, through early experiences with eviction and gentrification in Toronto and Montreal in the mid to late 80s. The process of wealthier inhabitants and area beautification and revitalization produced an environment of displacement and exclusion that Story rightfully associated with carceral spaces. As Story mentions in her preface, “the power of real estate capital in determining who gets to be in certain spaces and who doesn’t,” (x) reflected the poverty and homelessness around her, and speaks to the prison “not as a place,” but a “set of relations” (11). By incorporating several case studies, Story analyzes different carceral spaces associated with the prison regime and expounds upon geographies beyond carceral physical structures and traditional Euro-centric narratives of crime and punishment, and law and order.

In Prison Land, Story reframes the discussion about prison reform by reframing the definition of a prison itself; she argues that a prison is not merely an architectural or institutional construction, but is more broadly a set of social relationships that serves as a mechanism of power within the neoliberal capitalist state and which acts within racialized, politicized, and commodified social and carceral landscapes in a feedback loop to reinforce the power of capitalism and neoliberal settler colonialism.

Through understanding the prison and carceral landscapes in this way, Story shows readers that the neoliberal state is the carceral state, which does not allow for the reformation of the prison system, but just restructuring. The state, she says, is the site of social formation and the manufacturer of race. Moreover, within the context of the prison as a fundamentally social entity, carceral spaces encompass a much larger geography than the disappeared locations on the fringes of human settlements; areas occupied by previously mobilized individuals and groups of people who are subsequently coerced to immobility within the prison architecture are also carceral spaces. The relevance of Prison Land to our project cannot be understated because the context of carceral spaces as social structures within a community is relevant in El Paso, where the identity of a community as one on and within borderlands in the 21st century is pivotal to studying the carceral geography of El Paso.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is an activist and scholar who has studied the political and economic effects of the development of prisons in California. Her study was written in Los Angeles through two research projects in 1992 and 1994 on behalf of African American mothers who rode a bus to Sacramento and searched for freedom for their relatives serving long sentences in prison. The mothers had reached out to Gilmore for help in understanding the intent of the state’s laws, the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988, and Proposition 184 (1994). Gilmore's weekly workshops revealed that the mandates twisted justice's meaning and practice. She found that California's expansion of prisons raised the issue of “uneven development” (p.10). There is a standard view that prisons sit in the edges “of social spaces, economic regions, political territories” (p.11), usually in rural areas. This book thus asks: How have prisons become so wide-scaled in late 20th century California?

Gilmore discusses how California had two urgent issues: guaranteeing potential prisoners in new buildings and how to finance them. In solution to the former, the state legislature changed the classification of some offenses (i.e., a residential burglary was subsequently considered a felony requiring a prison term upon conviction). But then arose the problem of sitting struggles in which California wished to exercise eminent domain and “condemn lands in order to accumulate sufficient acreage for project development” (p.102). Eighteen of the 24 new prisons sited between 1982 and 1998 were built on former agricultural lands, with only four sited outside suburbanization. The state’s politicians had justified the need for more prisons by merging “gang membership, drug use and habitual criminal activity into a single social” (p.109) category.

Gilmore seeks to dismantle a number of conventional ideas of what prisons are — both structurally and conceptually. For example, she harkens back a number of times to the idea that prisons exist as a result of crime, and that their existence and use makes the society at-large safer. Countering, she notes that this is not rooted in evidence, citing as one example, that as prisons expanded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, crime was actually going down. She also discusses briefly the intersections that exist between prisons, race, and politics — in particular war-waging. This work provides a definition and framework of prisons through an abolitionist, or at least “status-quo-rejecting” perspective, and may serve as a good foundation for recognizing this particular understanding of prisons and counter-arguments.

Michel Foucault was a 20th century French philosopher with broad influence in the United States. He was a professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France in Paris from 1969 until his death in 1984. Foucault wrote Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in 1975. In this work, he established that the result of changes to punitory systems starting in the 18th and 19th centuries had effects that, while likely unintentional, created increased leverage of state and institutional power. He posited that the transformation of the dungeon and torture chamber to the cleaner and more transparent institutional prison complex introduced discipline as a social function both inside and outside the penitentiary because the built-in opportunity and, indeed, function, of constant panoptical surveillance has proven to be useful to establish and maintain power in a multitude of societal institutions. The book intersects history and philosophy, serving a critical look at the societal structure of discipline from Foucault’s context of history, psychology, and structuralism.

In the chapter ‘Panopticism,’ Foucault effectively establishes that within the modern institution, individuals are objectified en masse through the act of subjection, which is facilitated by authoritarian surveillance so constant that the individuals’ behavior is modified by the expectation of surveillance itself. This behavior modification is the purpose of the prison but is useful as a means of social control within other institutions including the factory, hospital, and school. The author references Bentham’s Panopticon at length, because a panoptical vantage point and institutional architecture that enables internal transparency is a key function of the surveillance apparatus that enables social control within these institutions.

There are a multitude of questions addressed in the chapter on Panopticism. What is the purpose of punishment? Wherein does it begin and end? How is it enacted? To what extent does punishment differ within different political contexts - particularly monarchical vs. democratic? How has the establishment of the modern democratic social institution affected the way punishment is enacted? If a system of punishment is transparent, can it by definition function as a tyrannical system? What is discipline? What role does discipline play within modern power structures?

Foucault’s analysis of the physical, historical, and psychological structure and function of the prison as an institution that is emblematic of other institutions within our social fabric provides an important context for Carceral Geography because it allows us to explore the different ways that, as individuals, we collectively internalize the institutional disciplinary structures that support incarceration in geographical, psychological, and historical contexts. So to say, the beast runs itself.

Nancy Hiemstra is a political and cultural geographer, who writes about global migration, immigration enforcement practices, detention and deportation, homeland security, borders, gender, race, Latin America, and feminist epistemology and methodologies. Hiemstra’s chapter “‘You Don’t Even Know Where You Are’: Chaotic Geographies of US Migrant Detention and Deportation,” in Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, centers on the forced transportation of Ecuadorian immigrants apprehended, put in detention, and then deported. “‘You Don’t Even Know Where You Are’” maps the movements of the Ecuadorian detainees in order to visualize (maps are provided in the article) the chaotic travels and adverse effects thrust upon these people. Hiemstra’s fieldwork in Ecuador involved helping family members locate migrants detained in US (ICE) custody. The “time and space geographies” from the migrants' detention to their eventual deportation become the focal point for Hiemstra throughout the chapter (57).

The main argument of Hiemstra is that the “uneven, illogical time-space geographies” that are experienced by detained migrants creates a detention and deportation system with multiple “chaotic geographies” (57). In addition, by paying attention to the chaotic geographies the disorganized, erratic, and nonsensical immigration policy and enforcement in the United States can be exposed. Furthermore, the detention and deportation system “both capitalizes on and contributes” to the chaos of the migrants’ movement through economic incentives from occupied bed spaces and individualized products like calling cards (58). Also, the remote locations and ‘spur of the moment’ departures offer little time to coordinate help from family members and offer little to no legal services in the detention areas. The chaotic geographies of immigrants in the ICE detention centers contributes to the overall confusion of the immigration center and offers little standardization and predictability for the immigrants trapped in an oppressive and traumatizing for-profit industrial complex.

River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.