Carceral Capitalism Quotes

“The conversion of poverty into a personal moral failure was intimately tied to the construction of black Americans as disposable and subject to mass incarceration.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“The a priori association of blackness with guilt and criminality comforts white America by enabling people to believe that black Americans are deserving of their condition and that the livelihoods of whites are in no way bound up with black immiseration.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“Increasingly, municipalities (and companies contracted by municipalities) are behaving like businesses, viewing residents as potential sources of revenue, as well as viewing the generation of revenue via fines as a form of productivity.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“In the cracks of the prison, something blossomed. A field of wildflowers imposed on the night sky. Blood was coming. Joy and dread mingled there, infusing the air with a powerful sense of rapture and uncertainty.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“However, to maintain a good credit rating during periods when revenue is lagging, municipalities must fuck over residents by implementing austerity measures such as firing public employees, cutting pension funds and health-care benefits, weakening the power of labor unions, cutting the education budget, and so forth.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“Moreover, it is not merely a matter of a few white people being sadistic; whiteness as a category is, in part, maintained by ritualized violence against black people and white consumption of spectacularized images of antiblack violence.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“As the U.S. deindustrialized and the welfare state was gutted (a process that started in the 1970s), the solution to the problem of what to do with the unemployed people who had migrated to cities to become industrial workers—as well as the mentally ill people housed in hospitals that were shutting down en masse—was racialized mass incarceration.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“It is usually the case that somewhere in the world, yesterday's workers are today's surplus population. This process continually opens up new domains for expropriation and value generation, whether it is through moneylending or warehousing people in prisons. (p. 109)”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“In April 2014 a settlement agreement was reached in court, and Detroit had to pay $85 million to USB AG and Bank of America Corporation to terminate the swaps. The use of variable-rate instruments, such as swaps, to finance debt was the single "biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit's legacy expenses.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis—not reckless public spending.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“As Iyko Day notes, Native dispossession occurs through the expropriation of land, while black dispossession is characterized by enslavement and bodily dispossession.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“This evolution in the social function of the state from provider of social services to provider of security also represented an evolution in how racialized populations in the United States would be manged. The project of dismantling the welfare state gained legitimacy through the association of social entitlements with blackness.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“In other words, their [police] survival and expansion becomes bound up with their capacity to use the police power and the court system to loot residents.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism