Contesting Carceral Logic

Michael J. Coyle, PhD is Professor, Department of Political Science and "Criminal" Justice, California State University, Chico. He is the author of Talking Criminal Justice: Language and the Just Society (Routledge 2013) and the forthcoming Seeing Crime: Penal Abolition as the End of Utopian Criminal Justice (University of California Press). Mechthild Nagel teaches philosophy and Africana studies and is the Director of the Center for Ethics, Peace, and Social Justice at SUNY Cortland. She co-edited Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality (Africa World Press, 2007) and The End of Prisons: Voices from the Decarceration Movement (Rodopi, 2013).

• Introduction: Penal Abolitionism as a Challenge to Carceral LogicMichael J. Coyle and Mechthild Nagel PART 1: The Harms of Carceral Logic: People and Places1 Prison Provokes People into Being More Aggressive, Hyper Sexualized and Prone to CrimeJoseph (Dont’e) Williams2 If I Weren’t White I’d Be DeadGabriella3 ReaderEmanuel Eoz4 Carceral Other and Severing of People, Place and Land: Redefining the Politics of Abolition through an Anti-Colonial Framework Vicki Chartrand and Niko Rougier5 The Lawlessness of Law: Outlaw Nation, Settler Colonialism, and a Possessive Investment in WhitenessMechthild Nagel6 Not Behind Bars: The Rippling of Carceral Habitus and Corrective Violence on the Family and Community Life of Prison GuardsS.M. Rodriguez and Brittany ClarkPART 2: Creating Anti-Carceral Knowledge7 StartEmanuel Eoz8 The Only Advice I Got is ‘Stay Out of Trouble’David Head9 Designed to Bury You in a Mental GraveAdrian Outten10 The CourtroomPhilip Johnson11 Generating Abolitionist Affect: Decarceral Feminist Methodologies and the Closure of Holloway PrisonCarly Guest and Rachel Seoighe12 ‘There is no Justice, There is Just Us!’ Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Critique of Policing Using the Example of Racial Profiling in EuropeVanessa E. Thompson 13 Humanism and Penal Justice: A Foucauldian CritiqueClécio Lemos PART 3: Case Studies Pointing to Radical Alternatives 14 Feet on the GroundEmanuel Eoz15 The System is Designed for Me to FailDouglas Knakmuhs 16 Incarceration as the Worst Possible Treatment for Mental IllnessRichard Sean Gross17 The Rhetoric of Dehumanization: Japanese American Concentration Camps and the US Criminalizing SystemMichael J. Coyle and Stephen T. Young18 RAP’s Significance to the Formation of the British Abolitionist MovementMarc Jacobs19 The Struggle Over the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre: Challenging Neutralization Techniques, Fighting State InertiaAaron Doyle, Justin Piché, and Kelsey Sutton PART 4: Resisting Carceral Logic20 Something From HereEmanuel Eoz21 DisenthrallJamine Emmanual Felton22 Contesting the Collateral Damages of Imprisonment from BelowValeria Vegh Weis and Julieta Sosa23 Land, Race and State: Situating the Carceral State and the Mass Imprisonment of Māori in Aotearoa within the Settler-Colonial LandscapeVerena Tan24 Extreme HazardsEmanuel EozIndex

"Contesting Carceral Logic is a truly inspiring volume that draws energy from one of the most momentous social movements of our time. It is visionary as an anthology of collective voices from activists to scholars, profoundly anchored in the voices of the incarcerated themselves, besides, a critique that travels deep into the prison’s modern history and far into its unexpected impact for those who of us who believe we dwell peacefully and securely outside the system. Offering the fundamentals for abolition theory along with glimpses into what may well summon us beyond an epoch of social life rooted in punishment, it would be key reference for understanding calls for defunding the police as well as for imagining in ways both practical and philosophical a new way of living." - Cynthia Willett, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University"Our so-called logics of crime and punishment deform our thinking to comport with scar tissues of consciousness founded upon the lawlessness of colonial exploitation. In Contesting Carceral Logic, voices from inside and outside prison walls document and bravely resist the relentless harms of our carceral world order. As this book demonstrates, another logic is necessary, and the struggle to secure it is well underway." – Greg Moses, Editor of The Acorn: Philosophical Studies in Pacifism and Nonviolence and former college instructor at Greenhaven Prison