Prison Capital

Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781469675114, 9781469675107
• eBook ISBN: 9781469675121
• Subtopic: North American History

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana’s unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana’s carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding “crime.” However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana’s carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Decentralizing Angola: Liberal Interventions, Overcrowding Crises, and the Making of a New Era
• 2. Consolidating and Contesting Law-and-Order Austerity
• 3. Jailing Louisiana: Sheriffs, Policing, and Growing Opposition
• 4. Carceral Disasters: Hurricane Katrina, Organized Abandonment, and Racial State Violence
• 5. Reconstructing the New Orleans Criminal Legal System in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
• 6. To Walk down the Street without Fear: Curbing Criminalization and Demanding Life in the New Orleans Tourism Economy
• Conclusion: Making Freedom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index