On Incarceration

VOL 4.3

Letter from the Editors

27 July 2020

The Process editorial board welcomes new and returning readers to Issue 4.3, On Incarceration. On the one hand, this is perhaps the timeliest theme we have ever chosen: in the three months since our Call for Papers, issues intimately connected to the topic of incarceration, including the racism and injustice in our legal systems, the prison abolition movement, and the importance of bail funds, have appeared to explode into public consciousness thanks to worldwide activism in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McCade, Carlos Carson, and other Black people. On the other hand, such a claim to timeliness, as the essays here attest, would also be misleading. Although the topics and perspectives vary, all of the pieces in this issue carry a deep awareness of the ways that their subjects are not novel; that they are, or ought to be, well-trod ground, with deep connections to history (explicit or not) and attentiveness to the destructive force of antipathy. 

In “Abolition is Anti-Racist: Prison Abolition and the Black Radical Tradition,” Jadyn Fauconier-Herry studies the liberation theory of Black activists such as Angela Davis and George Jackson, arguing that the origins of the prison abolition movement can be seen in the prisoner’s rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the larger Black radical tradition. By placing prison abolition within this context, Fauconier-Herry asserts the importance of “heeding the calls of the institution’s most targeted individuals” in reckoning with the violent, racist histories of imprisonment in the U.S. Juliette Frontier’s “An Archipelago of Camps” uses the Calais Camp de la Lande (perhaps better known as the Calais Jungle) as a case study for considering how the memory of camps in the twentieth century has been manipulated and politicized, rejecting the notion that the use of concentration camps is unique to totalitarian regimes. The use of refugee camps for displaced people, Frontier argues, is a form of symbolic incarceration that enables governments and citizens in liberal democracies to look away, ignoring their mutual responsibility to other people. Tomas Keen, in “Another Reason for Education: Inmate Finds Hope, Purpose, and Support Through College-in-Prison Programs,” reimagines and reinvigorates two commonplace genres, the graduation speech and the reflection on the benefits of education programs. In an essay that draws on the speech he gave as a graduate of the University Behind Bars, Keen creates an indictment of mass incarceration and a moving, urgent assertion of the importance of liberal arts programs in forming communities.

The essays in this issue remind us of the long-term, multifaceted work of confronting systems of incarceration and add valuable perspectives to that work. We hope that as you read, you are inspired to think further about the forms and impacts of incarceration around the world. 

We also invite readers to read the call for papers for our next issue, On Movement(s), and we look forward to seeing your submissions!

Sincerely,

Emily George & Kathleen Reeves

Editors-in-Chief

Abolition is Anti-Racist: Prison Abolitionism and the Black Radical Tradition

Jadyn Fauconier-Herry

Fauconier-Herry examines the theoretical foundations of prison abolitionist politics and praxis, focusing in particular on the liberation theory of Angela Davis and George Jackson. She establishes that the modern prison abolition movement is not a 21st-century development, but rather a radical offshoot of the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Through an analysis of Davis’s Black radical feminist theory as well as an interrogation of various antiracist, revolutionary sociopolitical theories from within the Black radical tradition, the essay connects prison abolition to a larger project of Black liberation.

Keywords: abolition, prison abolition, Black radical tradition, Angela Davis, George Jackson.

Another Reason for Education: Inmate Finds Hope, Purpose, and Support through College-in-Prison Programs

Tomas marco keen

In this commencement speech and accompanying essay, Tomas Marco Keen celebrates the possibilities of college-in-prison programs such as University Beyond Bars in Washington State. Describing mass incarceration as “a juggernaut fed by manifold conduits of oppression and exclusion,” Keen highlights a dire lack of funding and support for rehabilitative programs in prison. “Incarceration saturates prisoners with the very factors that produce negative communities: isolation, violence, conflict, shame,” Keen points out. College in prison provides an opportunity for people to “pursue power, identity, and purpose,” and in turn fosters a strong, passionate, confident, and positive community.

Keywords: college in prison, transformative education, graduation

An archipelago of camps: Do we learn anything from history?

juliette frontier

In her senior thesis, Frontier scrutinizes the refugee camp as a 21st-century response to displacement—a way that supposed liberal democracies maintain a group of ‘non-desirable’ people in confinement. She argues that camps operate symbolically as sites of incarceration, trapping displaced people in states of ‘permanent impermanence.’ Situating modern refugee camps within a longer history of internment, re-education, and concentration camps, Frontier illuminates haunting parallels and lessons that should have been learned from the past.

Keywords: camps, biopolitics, displacement, memory