CONCEPTUAL EXORCISM AND THE IDEA OF REHABILITATION

‘Crime’ is a concept that nation-states develop in order to demarcate a border between what it conceives as “goods” and “evils.” This border is never about the actual behaviors, but rather about circumstantial factors, such as the who and the where of the behaviors deemed either good or evil. This border is, in this way, like most borders, both nebulous and sharp, depending upon the circumstances of one’s relationship to it. The judgment of behavior is most closely linked to one’s social location. The state elucidates this relationship with great clarity via the notion of status offenses. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore states, “a status offense is something that is illegal or demands prison time only because of the condition of the person charged.”3 In many ways, it is instructive to view all offenses as status offenses. An important key to imagining these relations of biocentric4 taxonomies of crime and criminality is through this notion of the condition.5

With this in mind, what occurs when the “crime” is placed within the “criminal”? Within this linguistic and cultural logic, complex societal ills are mapped onto and into the body and identity of the supposed ‘criminal.’ Under this formulation the only way to then address these problems is to remove said societal ill from the body; all the while though, this process still marks the body of the “criminal” as the center of deviance in order to ensure the society’s self-conception of “good” bodies to be evolved towards. Angela Davis discusses this formulation by describing the Alderson Federal reformatory for Women. Davis writes,

When crime is considered a conceptual evil, that which is antithetical to all that are invented as of ‘good American value(s),’ and if that crime is then ontological, that is, the Being of the “criminal,” then the only possible way to address this evil is with a conceptual exorcism. Stephan Chorover points out that the cause of criminality was once thought to be a result of demonic possession; in the eighteenth century, this shifted to physical characteristics.7 Presently, I maintain that our society has linked these two formulations and added a new one which, with the rise of germ theory as a latent social theory, presents racialized notions of “criminality” as communicable, this communicable “criminality” resulting in a conceptual demonic possession that leaves but few options of how to address this conceptual possession—the preeminent one being that of so called “rehabilitation.”

In an interview, Michel Foucault discussed his thoughts about crime, citing how integral it was to the functioning of the apparatus of the police as a regulating body for the state to interject its control upon the subjects of a given society. Foucault writes,

It is also very important for the state to point to crime as the demarcation of a conceptual evil. For crime, as it is based on the who/where, opposes the prescribed goals of the state, from which a particular model of Being is asserted and maintained. One can think of this in the following terms: rule-following most often equates to role-following. Foucault’s formulations that read “crime” as regicidal can allow one to see the traces of counter-hegemonic knowledge it contains; such knowledge can be read as eloquent speech acts that serve to challenge a ruling group, whose language conditions such dominance.9 While this is not the most nuanced reading of what “crime” is, I believe these formulations are useful for thinking about some of issues of our contemporary moment. As such, reading crime as rebellion can be instructive, especially for the reasons that it is rarely done in mainstream media or academic works on the subject.

One can though turn to the perspective of those who are meant to embody this “evil,” the young Black male drug dealer, in order to inquire into differing accounts about what “crime” is. Embracing this counter-state identity is Young Jeezy, for example, in his song, “Soul Survivor.” Akon sings the chorus and declares, “‘Cuz if you lookin' for me you can find me / On the block disobeyin' the law.”10 As he says, and as was the case with The Black Codes of the post slavery era,11 if the state is looking for lawbreaking, they can always find it. Such unabashed counter-hegemonic knowledge is also posited by Jeezy as he (re)turns the gaze towards the state’s own behavior as “criminal” when he writes, “got us under surveillance / like animals they lock us in cages.”12 In this way, Jeezy also articulates Foucault’s formulation about the operation of a panoptic gaze in order to maintain disciplined and docile bodies. In addition, one should make note of the usage of “you” and “they” in order to see who is enacting this mode of oppression. It is clear to the listener who Jeezy and Akon are talking about—the state in its multiple and diffuse manifestations. To this end, the title of the song, “Soul Survivor,” should be considered as a mode of rebellion against this system of thought that has invented the category of the “criminal,” whose gendered embodiment has become isomorphic with young Black men. This rebellion pronounces: although you (the state, in all its articulations, that as Lubiano pointed out are so pernicious as a result of their spectral presence) have attempted to negate my Being via your tools of symbolic death, my soul is in fact surviving. Similarly James Baldwin discusses this when he writes of Black English as a necessary tool in order to outwit the death that is washed upon those for whom the hegemonic “language is meant to define.”13

Similarly, as one can see with the antagonism of the state towards hip-hop music and the virulence with which it has attacked what it has called “thug life,” the sources of that “criminalized” knowledge must therefore be made to embody the state’s prescribed torrid zone of value(s). Foucault also makes this point by writing about how the state must work to not allow the “criminal” to rise as a hero—that the criminal must be an enemy of those who are epistemologically and thus ontologically negated.14 As such, the state has inscribed this mutinous knowledge upon the bodies of those marked as the negation of the human—the figure of the racialized “criminal.” The knowledge they posit about their own experience is considered illegitimate, in spite of the fact that, as Frantz Fanon points out, “the fellah, the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth.”15

It is from this formulation that the United States, with its founding narrative of economic-evolution—The American Dream—must institute another narrative in order to account for the status of the “criminal.”16 This has come to be the medicalized notion of the criminal as dehabilitated.17 In this grand narrative, we are all created equal as political subjects, just never treated as such. In accordance with this knowledge, the prison functions alternatively as a site for “rehabilitation,” but also for erasure. “What you do not see does not exist,” some have said. And, in this way the task of the prison is to erase the costs of our nations’ economic-evolution from the gaze of the dominant society. Manuela da Cunha, in her discussion of women and the Portuguese war on drugs, articulates a formulation about the role of the prison where she proposes that the new social divide is not primarily between the imprisoned and the free; but rather, da Cunha suggests, that the divide is most acute between those whose life includes prison as a day-to-day reality to be considered and feared and those for whom the cost of prison is erased.18

So too does Jeezy articulate this non-phenomenon of the globalized world. He opens the song “Soul Survivor” by stating, “tonight I can’t sleep—we livin in hell/ first they give us the work then they throw us in jail.”19 Jeezy’s usage of the “throwing-away” thematic is prescient for it reflects back on the way in which U.S. society also invisibilizes the environmental cost of its production of capital; in this way, the U.S. refuses to look at the phenomenon of global warming as linked with its production of material wealth. For, as many have pointed out, trash goes invisibilized to the dominant gaze; for it is taken away, thrown away, placed out of sight, and what one doesn’t see (in this society whose mode of sensory perception is centered around ocular/visual dominance) does not exist. From his ground whereby certain places and peoples are constituted as ontologically-undeserving, former Secretary of the Treasury and then Chief Economist at the World Bank, Larry Summers, suggested in a infamous memo that pollution from the so called “first world” should be dumped upon the so called “third world.” He maintained that the World Bank should encourage the “migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs”20 and that the “unpolluted countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.”21 Again, it is this type of symbolic and actual erasure from the dominant gaze that Jeezy is articulating as the dilemma of our contemporary society.

This type of erasure of costs can clearly be seen in the criminalization rates of Native Americans and Black Americans—those who are the embodiment of the horrible cost for this country’s extreme economic-evolution into a world power. In this way, Ann duCille points out, “the (B)lack male in particular, while positioned both outside of and essential to the American imaginary, remain at once the nation’s nightmare and its wet dream, site and symbol of its worst fears and its most forbidden pleasures.”22 Or, as Baldwin says, “no other country has ever made so successful and glamorous a romance out of genocide and slavery.”23 This can most acutely be on display by looking at American film genres with its hero-worship and deification of cowboys and cops whose behaviours are meant to embody the simultaneous and linked, though seemingly contradictory values of freedom and oppression. As duCille and Baldwin both make plain in the above quotes, the United States’ status as bio-economically-evolved carries a weighty ghost—that of the devolved, dehabilitated figure of the slave/criminal.

In order to position the country as the land of the free, there must be a mode put in place in order to perpetuate this articulation of “freedom” as a teleological goal to be evolved towards. This is displayed by what Jean-François Lyotard calls modernity’s “grand narrative of emancipation,” whereby this narrative serves to institute and condition modes of how we know our social reality.24 Despite Lyotard’s best efforts to question and challenge this narrative, it seems to remain firmly in place. For this goal is most fully embodied by the idea of rehabilitation and its parallel in the globalized economic conception, the idea of development.

As I alluded to above, the idea of rehabilitation premises one vital thing: a dehabilitation. In order to think about this, one must consider the rise of the nation-state and its ability to condition political subjects. For this condition of the dehabilitated subject must be thought of within the episteme of a post-Judeo-Christian mode of subject formation. An analogous mode to think about this conceptual category could be via the leper of feudal Christian Europe. As subjects at that moment were not primarily seen in relation to the nation state, the leper’s expulsion from the social order was primarily a decision of the church and God, as well as the king. As related by Saul Nathaniel Brody in his book, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature, a priest told a leper the following:

Demetrius Eudell quotes this in order to illuminate the striking parallels between the condition of the leper and that of Blacks in the United States under the segregation/apartheid system. As I see the current Prison Industrial Complex as the epistemological perpetuation of this country’s prior (?) apartheid system, there is also a clear parallel between the treatment of the leper and the treatment of the “criminal,” both within and outside of prison.

To display this within the prison, Manning Marable quotes graduates of the New York Theological Seminary’s program in the Sing Sing Penitentiary. Marable writes:

The parallel is especially striking with regard to the “leper’s costume.” For, as the quote above shows, the costume (both metaphorical and actual) is integral to the day-to-day functioning of the prison. For what is it that separates prisoners from guards, wardens, or college students leading poetry workshops? It is the costume. But as I notice each time I enter the prison as the embodiment of the conceptual good—a White college student whose identity is meant to be diametrically opposed to that of the figure of the “criminal,”—there is a way of looking at me by those non-incarcerated (wardens, guards, teachers) that is not the same way of looking at the prisoner. We are, in this way, costumed Beings. But as Raymond Patterson tells us about these “ways of looking” in his masterpiece “Twenty-six Ways of Looking at a Blackman,”

While it is easy to make the leprosy comparison with various disciplinary practices of oppression as they relate to one’s role in the prison, it might be more difficult to see how this relates to the post-prison experience. Recently, many states including Iowa have attempted to place restrictions similar to those of the leper upon people who have been convicted as “sexual offenders.” A new state law in Iowa has banned people convicted of sex crimes from living within two-thousand feet of a school or day-care center. In addition, this law has also initiated a veritable race among neighboring states to enact more stringent legislation addressing people formerly convicted as “sex offenders.” These states do not want to become a place where people formerly convicted of sex crimes reside. To reflect back on the Young Jeezy quote, and this country’s environmental practices, Tom Brusch, the mayor of Galena, Illinois said, “(w)e don't want to be the dumping ground for their sex offenders.”28 Though the New York Times article detailing this new law has erased race from its formulation, the conceptual category of the “criminal” is a racializing category in its mode of placing one outside the bounds of symbolic kinship structures. Also, the article described in its title (“Time Served: Iowa's Residency Rules Drive Sex Offenders Underground”) what happens to these ontologically negated people: they are put “underground.” This thematic of being compelled underground as a place of ontological consignment is most acutely described in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.29

In this way, one should see the mode in which the “criminal” is treated as ontologically deviant and negated and thus compelled towards the underground as a reflection back on similar processes to those enacted upon the leper and those who were marked as Black and enslaved. As such, this new law has rendered many formerly incarcerated individuals homeless. On these grounds, Patricia J. Williams has said of the category of the homeless:

Such is the status of the “criminal.” We must see the way this “category of Being” has been invented and how this is interwoven with the institution of slavery in this country, as well as with the United States’s environmental practices. As Williams says, this is the legacy of a psychology of denial and erasure. Under this regime of truth, as Foucault would say, the problems that our society has created are visually, symbolically, and epistemologically banished to the underground, to the land fills, to the rural prisons, to Larry Summers’ imaginary “third world.” All of these, I maintain, must be seen as linked in the process of cost-erasure whereby our grand-narrative of the underdeveloped/dehabilitated obfuscates the actions our society enacts on a daily basis to perpetually consign the conceptual lepers to their roles via the rules.

Rehabilitation Without Dehabilitation?

Although the Bureau of Prisons halted their espousal of the belief in the idea of rehabilitation in 1975, just as the extreme growth of the Prison Industrial Complex was beginning, much of the logic of prison as a place of “positive” change has remained in place. In this way, while the official goal of “rehabilitation” has been rescinded, the underlying motive of the prison—to discipline and create docile subjects acquiescent to state violence—is still very much entrenched in the prison. Prison historian John Roberts details this in the following way,

However, as many have noted, policies can change much easier than epistemologies. In this way, I contend that the knowledge about the “criminal” is still very much medicalized in a “biological” and “cultural” mode of thought which considers the “criminal” as bio-culturally lacking; it should be stated that I formulate this based on many of our contemporary ideas about race, ethnicity, and class as they have been mapped onto the body by a supposed type of cultural hereditability. In this mode of thought, saying “culture” can become a way to conflate and equate various constructs and stereotypes of race, ethnicity, and class. Such rhetoric can clearly be seen, as Wahneema Lubiano has pointed out, in the phrase, “culture of poverty.”33 Such a formulation is important because it positions those who deviate from hegemonic modes of Being as part of the category of ontologically dehabilitated peoples who need “treatment” or development of some form.

So while the Bureau of Prisons began to officially distance itself from the idea of rehabilitation in the seventies, many of the ideas about prison and its work remain entrenched in the intellectual paradigm that situates rehabilitation and integration into dominant society as the goal of prison. Many ostensibly anti-prison scholars, writers, and journalists have taken up this stance and thus bemoaned the lack of programming in prison that serves to “rehabilitate” rather than punish. While lack of programming in prison is very much a dilemma, I do not see the death of the rehabilitation paradigm as a problem in the way most of these scholars do. For as I have said, there can be no rehabilitation without a presumed dehabilitation. And it is this presumption that I am unwilling to make.

In his book, The Use of Drama in the Rehabilitation of Violent Male Offenders, Michael Balfour details much of the ideology behind rehabilitation. He says one approach, “to rehabilitation work is to view the criminal on a parallel with the neurotic or psychotic individual, except his personal pathology is expressed in an illegal fashion.”34 In relation to my discussion of “crime” and what is considered illegality, the law is never about behaviors but about the situation (the who/where), and thus this idea of the “criminal” as psychotic can’t hold the weight it is meant to.35 It is these types of attitudes that I was referring to when I wrote above about the medicalization of the “criminal” as a diseased body whose behavior has left them as “fallen” as the leper. When the argument is couched in these terms of the fallen/diseased sinner, the only way in which to solve the so-called problems would be some mode of treatment, or a conceptual exorcism. This all comes hand-in-hand with the way in which even crimes discussed in this language of disease as “epidemics” are most often still addressed on the individualized level of the body of the person who is supposedly responsible for the “crime.”

This type of formulation of the “criminal” as diseased is also present in a quote that Balfour utilizes from The Guardian newspaper of London. The author formulates the need for rehabilitation in this way, “the stark fact is, inside every man, there is a violent infant . . . Violence is a disease. Disease, however, can be cured.”36 What the author overlooks in his statement is that there are very few places in society where violence is a more frequent articulation than the prison. At the core of the prison is a base of violence and terror—similar to Fanon’s formulations about the colonial situation. Mumia Abu-Jamal puts it this way:

The writings of George Jackson also refute The Guardian quote about the “criminal” as inherently violent. Jackson states simply that “to determine how men will behave once they enter the prison it is of first importance to know that prison. Men are brutalized by their environment—not the reverse.”38 As both of these authors, victims of untold amounts state violence, can attest, if violence is in fact a condition of ‘every man,’ then it is enabled by the circumstances in which one finds oneself. As such, the violence that the state enacts is erased from view and considered as a warranted way to address social ills. Paul Wright puts like so:

This can also be seen with regard to who are considered “victims.” Following his discussion of the fact that both Ohio and Arkansas deny victim compensation to anyone who has been convicted of a crime, Wright states poignantly, “people can’t become a ‘victim’ (not a worthy victim anyway) unless the social and political decision is first made by the ruling class to have a ‘criminal.’’40 In this way, the point should be clear about the process of rule-following as it is most closely linked to role-following.

The role of the “criminal” and the positioning of the “criminal” as dehabilitated is posited by Balfour in his discussion of rehabilitation; Balfour considers what he calls “social skills deficit,” but one could also conceive of this as a process of failed indoctrination or failed interpellation into the epistemological order of the state. Balfour writes that the “notion of social skills deficit suggests that a process of social education has not transpired ‘properly’ in an individual, and that rehabilitation seeks to redress the balance and enable an offender to adapt or re-adapt more successfully to society.”41 The logical extension of this claim is that those who are dehabilitated lack this certain knowledge that enacts the state as the sovereign force for which all violence committed in its name is seen as legitimate. George Jackson articulates it thusly, “we have been ‘educated’ into an acceptance of our positions as national scapegraces . . . the school systems are gauged to teach youth what to think, not how to think ”42 As such, it is so important when discussing crime, as Young Jeezy, Foucault, and Joy James do, to invert the gaze of the state as to what is considered “violent.”43 For it is crucial to recognize that there are few more violent ways of addressing problems than the course that the United States has chosen.44

To elucidate this point, Manning Marable describes the account of Ted Conover, a former guard at Sing Sing and author of the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Marable writes:

As I have pointed out, the real purpose of rehabilitation is just this negation of self-respect. The role of the prison is, as Foucault formulated, to reactivate power; any form of assertion of such self-respect is a revolutionary act within that space whereby the efforts towards ontological dominance are so immense. George Jackson writes of this in the following way with regard to the Chino facility in California:

Or as Ida B. Wells pointed out, reflecting on another era of biocentric and thus White supremacist terror: “the more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”47

As Jackson and Wells both show, this is the meaning of rehabilitation: an acquiescence to the violence of the state; in addition to this violence is the violence that is the condition of the state’s interpellation: taking up the prescribed goals of the state, even if those goals are one’s own destruction. Again, Jackson makes this point most acerbically stating, “I know that they will not be satisfied until they’ve pushed me out of this existence altogether.”48 This is also the point that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr makes brilliantly in his classic text Moral Man, Immoral Society. He points out that individuals are often asked to act selflessly in the name of the state, which then leads to the state’s actions as egoistic. As such, this sort of enactment of the prescribed goals of the state has created a system whereby the economic well being of those who are made to embody the figure of the good subject is placed above the survival of those who are placed outside the symbolic kinship structure, as it is enacted and replicated by both the state and the ruling epistemology.

To this end, Jackson articulates the problem of ascribing to this particular mode of being rooted in White supremacy. From the perspective of the Black prisoner, he addresses “the folly of one of us attempting to make himself acceptable to the established standard so that he will be tolerated.” Further, he questioned, “what do I lose by allowing myself to be programmed, regimented, and assimilated.”49 This is one of the difficulties in dealing in a system whose focus is the idea of treatment and rehabilitation. This model is linked with the notion of modernity and progress (and correspondingly economic development) as well as behavior control.50 Whereby the prison was once a site for punitive measures only, the advent of treatment modalities allowed for the prison to be viewed as a site to develop behaviors and, thus, indeterminate sentencing and parole boards were incorporated into the prison’s functioning apparatus.51

When Jackson was writing from various California prisons, one of the dominant modes in which the idea of rehabilitation manifested itself was with the notion of bibliotherapy. Herman Spector most frequently propagated bibliotherapy during his tenure as senior librarian at San Quentin from 1947-1968.52 In fact, Spector had turned down positions offered to him as warden and assistant warden in order to be involved in the prison libraries to test his theories of bibliotherapy. This notion of the rehabilitative power of books can also traced back to early prison theorist and medical doctor Benjamin Rush. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Rush “had a strong belief that criminality must have a physical, biological cause and that eventually a physical cure for the disease would be found.” But for the time being, Rush asserted the best cure was the Bible.53 Similarly, Spector, who was also appointed supervising librarian for all of California’s department of corrections in 1955, saw books as a mode of inducing treatment; Spector ran a “Great Books” class and counseling session where the “classics” were taught. In addition, it should be pointed out that as per the penal code at the time, Spector was an ardent practitioner of censorship; so though he considered his library to be a “hospital of the mind” and thought reading to be a “civilizing influence,” only certain types of things could be read and written.54 Of course, this formulation is also reminiscent of much of the process of colonization, as Fanon articulates, in addition to the logocentric ideal of reading and writing that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. discusses when he formulates that “writing stood as a complex ‘certificate of humanity.’”55 It should be seen clearly how bibliotherapy, as with its prescription of dominant knowledge and positing of particular books as “great,” coincides with much of Carter G. Woodson’s determinations in his classic work, The Miseducation of the Negro where he writes,

This is the goal of rehabilitation: to situate a subject in his or her narratively instituted “place,” and to keep him or her there.

This background discussion of the rise of the rehabilitative model is necessary, for it shows some of the many ways it can function so perniciously. However, in our present intellectual moment the rehabilitative model is less dominant than it was when Jackson was critiquing it up until his assassination in 1971. In the post-1975 era the Bureau of Prisons began to distance itself from rehabilitation as the main goal of imprisonment and included deterrence, punishment, and incapacitation as purposes for imprisonment. Still, the idea of rehabilitation is very much in place in terms of its political and rhetorical utilization by both opponents and apologists for the Prison-Industrial-Complex. The California Department of Corrections, which is one of the largest prison systems in the world, for example, recently changed their name to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Nevertheless, the post 1995-era is epitomized by a stance whereby the “criminal”—as their crime is situated as ontological—is not even seen as rehabilitatable. Manning Marable makes this point in the following way by drawing on the increased propagation of locking people in Special Housing Units. Even a relatively pro-prison group such as Amnesty International has condemned SHUs as torturous.57 Marable writes,

This bill and its decision to eliminate Pell grant funding to people that have been convicted of crimes displays the increasingly vindictive mode that the site of prison has become.

Similarly, Robert Gangi, the Director of the Correctional Association of New York, commented that, “(g)iven the practice of the parole board, there are more and more long-termers that no matter how well they behave, no matter how many programs they complete, the parole board is not going to let them out.”59 The parole board is one of the most acute methods to see how the discourse of rehabilitation functions. Gangi’s comments represent a shift in the mentality of addressing the “criminal” that took place in the mid-nineties. This shift is evident in the passage of Iowa’s law against people who have been convicted of sex crimes; the law positions the person as outside the bounds of any sort of redemptive grace, forever. In addition, one can also see this shift clearly in relation to New York’s parole decisions. So too does Marable detail this:

One of the chief problems as I see it is that many scholars, intellectuals, and journalists who wish to critique the Prison-Industrial-Complex (P.I.C.) are still attempting to hold onto the idea of rehabilitation as the best method to address our society’s problems. It is in this vein of thought that Marable laments the death of the rehabilitative model.61 Although currently the P.I.C. is epitomized by extreme punishment and oppression, I maintain that it is the epistemological trap of the rehabilitative model that those who want to counter the P.I.C must beware of. By holding onto the rehabilitative/treatment ideal, one acknowledges the assertion that the state formulates that certain subjects are metaphysically lacking. It is this epistemology that must be rethought. Rehabilitation paradigms perpetuate rather than challenge the epistemological foundations of many of the domineering relationships in the world. In this way, in order to, as Marable puts it, “face the demon head on,” one must take heed of the epistemological roots of many of these problems, and see the prison as the ghost of a colonial and imperial haunting that has yet to be displaced.62 Without confrontation of this regime of truth, there can only be debate regarding what sort of mode of rehabilitation is necessary. But, be it bibliotherapy, individual psychoanalysis, or studying the innate criminality of the XYY sex chromosome,63 the fact of the “criminal’s” dehabilitation and abject status, like Fanon’s fact of Blackness,64 remains posited as undoubtable under our present organization of reality.

Notes and References

4 Throughout this piece, I will use this term. It is meant to call into question the notion that humans pre-exist the narratives that institute them as specific models of Being human. Sylvia Wynter utilizes it by stating, “the biocentric premise of our present epistemology represents the individual human subject as a genetically defined (and therefore acultural) agent who, in accord with its ‘natural’ feelings, only and therefore arbitrarily decides how to feel, desire, prefer, choose, and therefore how both to know and act upon its social and physical reality.” In this way, it should be noted that White supremacy and patriarchy are symptomatic of a larger problem: our biocentric epistemology. See Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse and the Origins of the Americas: A New World View. Edited by Vera Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 44.

5 Hortense Spillers reveals something lurking in the metaphysics of “conditions” in her discussion of the maternity under the slave system. She poses the questions: “what is the ‘condition’ of the mother? Is it the ‘condition’ of enslavement . . . or . . . the ‘mark’ and the ‘knowledge’ of the mother upon the child that translates into the culturally forbidden and impure?” Hortense J. Spillers. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Summer 1987), 79. Michel Foucault would also discuss this relationship between metaphysics and the body. Integral to any sort of individualized sense of punishment, Foucault describes this notion of mapping a crime onto the ontological status of the “criminal” in the following way: “there may be a ‘knowledge’ of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be called the political technology of the body.” Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books), 26.

11 John Hope Franklin describes the Black Codes by quoting professor John Burgess who in 1902 stated that “almost every act, word or gesture of the Negro, not consonant with good taste and good manners as well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor.” As quoted in John Hope Franklin. Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 49. Additionally, Demetrius Eudell describes The Black Codes as laws created to “maintain order in a society emerging from a war” and that the “air of legality only served to maintain an imbalance between privileges of the ex-slaves and those of the ex-slaveholders.” Also Eudell writes that the key issue was “the instituting of a set of behavioral norms that were designed not only to confine the ex-slaves to the plantation but also to control the behaviors of those who remained on them as part of the reaffirmation of a specific conception of order and what it means to be fully human.” It should be seen with the Prison-Industrial-Complex how this is still very much the issue at stake. Demetrius Eudell. The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 53-55.

16 I say that this is a founding narrative because the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” ethos of the 1776 moment has been intertwined with a capitalist ethos whereby symbolic life and happiness are determined by one’s achievement within the liberty of the free market. This can be clearly seen in our present moment of neoliberal economic reform, the logic of which corresponds to the American Dream ideal as it also weaves into the rhetoric of “development” and consumption.

17 The parallel phenomenon is that of the postcolonial “underdeveloped” whose “structured technological lag” (as Sam Han would put it) marks the economy of these systemically amorphous conglomerations of nation-states (also sometimes referred to as the “third world”) as ontologically deficient.

29 Ellison writes of the protagonist’s ontological consignment in the epilogue to Invisible Man. “I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact. What else could I have done? Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint.” Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man, from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Second Edition. General editors: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 1565.

33 “The welfare queen represents moral aberration and an economic drain, but the figure’s problematic status becomes all the more threatening once responsibility for destruction of the ‘American way of life’ is attributed to it. Demonic is not too strong a word to describe the politics of that narrative . . . welfare queens are held responsible for the crack trade and crack babies . . . (within the economy of this narrative the crack dealer is also demonized, but he is the creation of his pathological ‘nurturer’ because it is she who reproduces the culture.) . . . she is the agent of destruction, the creator of the pathological, black, urban, poor family from which all ills flow; a monster creating crack dealers, addicts, muggers, and rapists—men who become those things because of being immersed in her culture of poverty.” Wahneema Lubiano. “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means.” in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Social Construction of Reality. Edited by Toni Morrison. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 339. It should also be pointed out how this relates to what I call rehabilitation’s parallel in the globalized world: the culture-specific and teleological goal of “development.”

35 Troy Duster articulates this notion in the following way : “the very definition of what constitutes a crime is highly socially variable, depending upon the passage of law, on policing practices and the judicial system of a society, on the point in history, etc . . . even in a single culture, at a given moment, the social status of the offender is central to the process of determining whether a ‘crime’ has been committed.” In Troy Duster. Backdoor to Eugenics. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 97.

43 Joy James has reversed the logic of labeling by stating: “the state is a manifestation of organized criminality.” The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Edited by Joy James. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), xl.

44 This is also very important for refuting the designations of “violent” and “non-violent” “criminals” which tends to mark certain “criminals” as alternatively deserving and undeserving of the immense violence perpetrated against them. This, is an immense barrier to the fight for prison abolition.

51 One can look towards California’s model of imprisonment beginning in 1917 when it enacted the indeterminate sentencing provision of its penal code. This allowed for extremely flexible minimum and maximum sentences. For example, robbery could bring about a sentence of anywhere from five years to life. Towards this end, it should be clear that contemporary battles against mandatory minimums cannot be separated from the idea of minimum sentencing. For a discussion of this, see Stephan Chorover’s From Genesis to Genocide, especially the chapter entitled, “Crime: Prisoners of Psychotechnology.” 175-205.

55 Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Editor’s Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes.” In“Race,” Writing, and Difference. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 12. See as well Fanon’s detailing of this phenomenon in the colonial situation in Black Skin, White Masks.

63 The XYY karyotype has been thought to genetically predispose individuals to antisocial, “criminal” behavior. For further discussion see Stephan Chorover’s From Genesis to Genocide, especially the chapter entitled, “Crime: Prisoners of Psychotechnology.”

64 Fanon describes what he calls “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks where he says, “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139. So too does Jean Genet express this fact of debasement of the Black prisoner in the introduction to Soledad Brother when he says: “we have known for a long time now that the black man is, from the start, natively, the guilty man.” Jackson, Soledad Brother, 8.

David Stein. “Conceptual Exorcism and the Idea of Rehabilitation,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 5, 2007.