To understand further the ways the imperial and colonial are deeply embedded in the development, expansion, and consolidation of the US carceral state, consider Weber’s American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, along with historical sociologist Julian Go’s Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US. Both texts show how the US carceral state is deeply linked to the rest of the globe, expanding our very understanding of where we might locate the US carceral state. By the “carceral state,” I am referring to the vast web of punitive institutions, policies, practices, and logics that are implicitly and explicitly sanctioned by the state and function to incapacitate criminalized populations and eliminate social threats. This certainly includes but is not limited to prisons, as both Weber and Go powerfully demonstrate.
Indeed, Weber and Go, through their focus on incarceration and militarized policing respectively, show how the US has functioned as a carceral archipelago, comprised of sites across the country and around the world that together work to maintain and facilitate racial hierarchy, capitalist extraction, and territorial expansion. As Weber concludes, “If the rise of the carceral state is considered a continuation of slavery and the Jim Crow racial caste system, it has also always been a strategy of empire building.”
Where, then, is this carceral state? It is not merely those discrete places in which prisoners are held; instead, it is the vast system that is required to hold those prison walls in place.
A little over a decade ago, I began my career at Dickinson College, a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania. Dickinson is in Carlisle, a town that worked hard to promote a quaint, welcoming aesthetic. Yet this exterior hid a much more complicated history and reality of white supremacy, economic abandonment, and pharmaceutical predation.
When I talk about my time at Dickinson, I often remark that it was a place that was heavily marked by layered histories of violence. Certainly, I was not-so-obliquely referencing the violence that academia so often inflicts on young queer scholars and scholars of color. But I was also signaling the violent histories literally embedded in the place itself, which marked daily life in ways both subtle and overt.
Carlisle was the site of the country’s first federal Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Opened in 1879, the Carlisle School was the brainchild of Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War veteran who promoted the forced assimilation of Native people into white culture as a solution to the “Indian problem” seen as impeding continental expansion. Pratt succinctly summed up this mission as “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”