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Asian-American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex: Departures and Re-narrations

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10714410500228918

1556-3022

Dylan Rodríguez,

Race, History, and American Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Angela Y. Davis offers a schematic definition of the prison industrial complex in Colorlines: Race Culture Action, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1998): “When prisons disappear human beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social problems, penal infrastructures must be created to accommodate a rapidly swelling population of caged people. Goods and services must be provided to keep imprisoned populations alive. Sometimes these populations must be kept busy and at other times—particularly in repressive super-maximum prisons and in INS detention centers—they must be deprived of virtually all meaningful activity. Vast numbers of handcuffed and shackled people are moved across state borders as they are transferred from one state or federal prison to another. …All this work, which used to be the primary province of government, is now also performed by private corporations, whose links to government in the field of what is euphemistically called ‘corrections’ resonate dangerously with the military industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from investment in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking into account the structural similarities and profitability of business–government linkages in the realms of military production and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a ‘prison industrial complex.’” 2. For a full discussion of the schema of “racial formation,” as it is linked to a Gramscian notion of social formation and hegemony, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd edn), New York: Routledge, 1994. 3. While the “panethnic” rubric fails to account for the persistence of various political antagonisms that necessarily fracture alleged “Asian American” organizing practices (particularly along the lines of nationality, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and class), the term nonetheless signifies a hegemonic logic for the emergence of various community organizations, grass roots campaigns, academic initiatives, cultural/artistic productions, and entrepreneurial efforts. See Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (1992) and Espiritu and Lopez, Panethnicity in the United States: A Theoretical Framework, Ethnic and Racial Studies, No. 13, (1990). 4. See generally Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex (ed. Sudbury), New York: Routledge, 2005. 5. Civil death references the formal extermination of the prisoner's civil personhood and political subjectivity under the auspices of criminal “conviction.” In addition to being held captive, the imprisoned are actually made immediately available for enslavement by the state. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or anyplace subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added] 6. See Orlando Patterson's seminal work on the centrality of “natal alienation” to the social death of the slave, from the Roman invention of the “legal fiction” of dominium (“inner power over a thing”) to the racial chattel slavery of the U.S. South, which linked natal alienation to a conception of Black bodily fungibility. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). See also Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 7. This number may be a slight underestimation, as it does not include those incarcerated in mental health facilities, and may severely undercount the numbers incarcerated in children's prisons, “immigrant detention” facilities (including those overseen by the U.S. government outside of its domestic auspices), military prisons, and other state-proctored sites of human captivity. For a basic overview of existing data, see Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Women Offenders,” (12/99 NCJ 175688), and “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2003 (05/04 NCJ 203947); Amnesty International, “Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody” (Washington, D.C.: Amnesty International, 1999); Irwin, Schiraldi, and Ziedenberg, “America's One Million Nonviolent Prisoners” (Washington, D.C.: Justice Policy Institute, 1999), and Justice Policy Institute, “The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millenium” (Washington, D.C.: Justice Policy Institute, 2000). 8. In using these categorical racial terms here, I am specifically invoking the state-sanctioned and state induced technologies of racialization that rely on the rigid socio-political and discursive distinction between “Black” and non-Black racial categories, while also referring to the troubled and contradictory terms through which the state attempts to render the categorical presence of poor (non-Black) urban and rural Mexicans/Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and other “Hispanics” and “Latinas/os.” As the following portion of the essay concisely shows, the peculiarity of the United States racial formation since the 1960s has involved the state's inscription of a generalized categorization of racialized “minority” populations that distinguishes between Asians on the one hand, and “Blacks”/“Browns” (specifically Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) on the other. Not coincidentally, those Pacific Islander populations that have been historically marginal to the construction of Asian American panethnic coalitions—Pinays/oys, Samoans, Native Hawaiians, etc.—are the same which have been overwhelmingly addressed by the U.S. police state as constituents within a criminalized Black/Brown racial continuum. 9. Barry Goldwater, 1964 Nomination Acceptance Speech, 28th Republican National Convention, reprinted by The Washington Post, May 30, 1998. 10. Ibid. 11. Some useful background texts include: Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee, Eds., Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization in the United States, Boston: South End Press, 2002; Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, New York: Verso Press, 2000; Jill Nelson, Ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology, New York: Norton, 2000; Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978. 12. Parenti's Lockdown America provides a rigorously documented and extensive overview of this landmark period in U.S. policing, including summations of the shifts in federal budget commitments and multiple juridical overhauls that accompanied the dramatic expansion of police forces across local, regional, and federal scales. 13. Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech at the 28th Republican National Convention. 14. Giroux, p. 53. 15. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965. 16. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (1966), p. xlv. See also Lewis's Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) and “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American, October 1966. 17. Lewis, La Vida, p. ii. 18. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore's seminal (re)definition of “racism” in the essay “Race and Globalization,” Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World (2nd edn); Johnson et al., eds., 2002. 19. Notably, while the focus of Lewis's La Vida was the “Puerto Rican family,” he considered the culture of poverty to clearly encompass “Negro family life” in the United States as well. 20. Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S., U.S. News & World Report, December 26, 1966, p. 73. 21. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (2001), p. 4–6. 22. Robert S. Chang, “Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space,” California Law Review, No. 81, p. 1264. 23. Ibid., p. 1264. 24. “Behind the Power of 41 Bullets: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore,” Colorlines, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1999–2000. 25. Nicole Davis, “Schoolground or Police State?” Colorlines, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1999–2000. 26. Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, p. 54. 27. Giroux, p. 49. 28. Giroux, p. 45. 29. The most important book-length study of this ongoing attempt to articulate and consolidate a white-Asian political bloc remains Dana Takagi, The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics, 1992. 30. See “Los Angeles Police Scandal May Soil Hundreds of Cases,” The New York Times, February 16, 1999. 31. Chang, “Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship,” p. 1264. 32. See the documentary film Sa-i-gu, Kim-Gibson and Choy, dirs. San Francisco, CA: National Asian American Telecommunications Association, 1993. This film has played a seminal role in circulating a discourse of Korean American marginalization by the corporate media and its lack of “protection” from the Los Angeles Police Department, the latter of which apparently provoked Korean American storeowners to arm themselves in paramilitary fashion to protect their property from “rioters” during the 1992 uprising. Central to the film's narrative is a generalized negrophobia founded on the specter of (property) victimization at the hands of an unnamed, though unmistakably Black, unleashed and lawless urban mob. 33. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 27. 34. This contention derives in large part form an ongoing conversation with Prof. Jared Sexton (African American Studies, University of California, Irvine) based on his conference presentation, “Proprieties of Coalition: Between ‘Blacks and Asians,‘” paper delivered at “Blacks and Asians: Encounters Through Time and Space,” Boston University, April 2002. 35. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 1983, p. 253. 36. See Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 1999. The Sentencing Project, a Washington, DC-based progressive policy think tank, has also published a useful bibliography of key law review articles. Among the most useful to informing this portion of my argument are: Alfred Blumstein, “Racial Disproportionality of U.S. Prison Populations Revisited,” 64 University of Colorado Law Review, 1993; David Cole, “The Paradox of Race and Crime: A Comment on Randall Kennedy's ‘Politics of Distinction,‘” 83 Georgetown Law Journal, 1995; Angela J. Davis, “Prosecution and Race: The Power and Privilege of Discretion,” LXVII Fordham Law Review, 1998; Michael Tonry, “Racial Disproportion in US Prisons,” 34 British Journal of Criminology, (1994); and The Sentencing Project, “Hispanic Prisoners in the United States,” pamphlet, 2003. 37. Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg write, “Like any industry, the prison economy needs raw materials. In this case the raw materials are prisoners.” The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy, 1998.