Session 9:

Abolish Carceral Imaginations

Saturday 17 April 2021 ~ 8:00 - 9:15am Pacific

Recording available here (86 mins)

The Predatory Photography of Indian Jail: Towards an Abolition of Gaze Violence

Aatika Singh

Indian carceral system is the hierarchical afterlife of its legal justice edifice- centered on caste divide. The photo essay aims to document the unfolding spatiality and historicity of one jail in Delhi and another in Kolkata. It intends to decenter photographic construction as a predatory form of apparatus on the lives of marginalized bodies.

There is a defiance of central gaze in the photos as they resist consumption of ritualistic emotions. The effect is to propel thought and care towards the documentation of lives at the periphery of normative institutions of incarceration. They are about desires and put together constitute a guideline for the Indian jail as a site of aspiration and solidarity. The photography escapes a deconstruction in order for the spectator to peek within the interiority and intellectuality of the inmates. Classical photography’s central pillar in projecting the jail is victim image. However in these photos taken at undisclosed jails, the purpose of photographic gesture is negated. What emerges is the renunciation of design and materialization of the texture of atmosphere. The photographs emit the appeal to be seen or taken home, therefore are liberatory- alike the goal of abolition and coming together of a beloved community. They also deny direct engagement as does the Law that treats Dalits, Adivasis and Women with contempt and predisposes bias in the jails.

Aatika Singh is a Delhi based artist. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her primary research is about the intersections of art history and the anti Caste movement. Her previous projects were based on gender, mental health and marginality. She has been working on a series of protest art at the ongoing farmers protest at Tikri Kalan. She finished her law graduation from National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2018 after which she was employed with Navayana Publishing briefly. She is passionate about alternative cinema, language, and rural activism traditions.

Data Devices: Digital Horizons of the Carceral State

Darien Acero

As the fiscal and social unsustainability of our behemoth prison system becomes more blatant and visceral, the coronavirus recession strains budgets, and mass movements against police brutality pressure legislators, we are increasingly confronted with various technological “alternatives.” Electronic monitoring, algorithmic risk assessment, and predictive policing technologies are all designed and marketed to appear to solve the problems of mass incarceration and police brutality.

Responding to the urgency and immediacy of these trends and patterns, my proposed paper will consider the ways in which the expansion of these carceral technologies extend the surveillance and punitive apparatus into communities, displacing the cost of punishment further onto those communities and mutating the means of social control from beat cops and jails cells to data mining and ankle monitors. My proposed paper will consider the public/private partnerships between investors, tech companies, universities, and police and correctional departments to develop and deploy new technologies to track and collect, store, and analyze data on targeted populations, turning the infamous “million dollar blocks” into digital prisons of their own while making millions for private enterprise capitalizing on calls for “reform.”

As the state deploys these technologies to surveil and channel racialized and gendered subjects through digitally-secured landscapes and coded spaces, this paper hopes to inquire as to how we might see the next iteration of the carceral state as synonymous with gentrification and apartheid. Considering these patterns of social control as part of the legacy of enclosures, this paper may then posit the commons as a potential basis for transnational abolitionist praxis.

Poem

Abolition is not primarily a lack, an absence, a void, an ending, a destroying//Abolition is primarily an abundance, a presence, a fullness, a beginning, a birthing.

Abolition does not gesture towards this same world but with no prisons//Abolition is a struggle for a fundamentally different world in which all cages, physical or other, are unimaginable.

Abolition is not an event; it is a process, or weaving of processes.

Abolition is not in the future; it is now and every day.

Abolition is repairing the harm of 500 years of white supremacist, settler colonial, cis-hetero-patriarchal, capitalist exploitation, destruction, theft, exclusion, murder, rape, injustice, dispossession, ecocide, imperialism, warfare, expropriation, disenfranchisement, disinvestment, cheating, pettiness, harassment, extraction, torture, inhumanity, and genocide.

Abolition is what love looks like in public (and in private, and everywhere, all the time).

Abolition is a fundamental transformation of the social, political, and economic organization of our territory and our world.

Abolition means no military.

Abolition means no state.

Abolition is anti-capitalist.

Abolition is a transnational process of mutual liberation.

Abolition is about justice and decolonization.

Abolition is reclaiming the commons.

Abolition is an uprooting, a redistribution, and a foundational re-conception and reconfiguration of power.

Abolition is community autonomy and self-determination.

Abolition is based in generational accountability and radical truth.

Abolition is personal and structural and diverse in its realization.

Abolition is about how we care for one another.

Abolition is tender and gentle and fierce and vulnerable and joyous and filled with tears and dance and song and food.

Abolition means healing.

Abolition is not primarily a lack, an absence, a void, an ending, a destroying//Abolition is primarily an abundance, a presence, a fullness, a beginning, a birthing.

Abolition does not gesture towards this same world but with no prisons//Abolition is a struggle for a fundamentally different world in which all cages, physical or other, are unimaginable.

Darien Acero teaches with a self-directed learning center in Massachusetts, translates and interprets with various comradely organizations including Critical Resistance and the Autonomous University of Political Education, contributes to a weekly radio broadcast based in Mexico City called Noticias de Abajo, works to get people housed with House the Bay, writes and researches independently, and a is perpetual student. They live in Oakland, California.

Criminal Law decostraction to abolish prison

Giuseppe Mosconi

Presentation slides available here

My presentation aims to focus tha tight connection between the artificial construction of the crime made by the criminal law and the concretely cruel reality of the prison as main means of punishment. In the general frame of tle deep distance between law definitions and the real facts under it. It displays two levels of discrepancy; between the abstract definition of crime and the concreteness of facts and social actors implied in it, ; and between the official goals and functions of the detention punishment and the concrete structure and experience of the prison. Since it's evident the tight relationship between two levels of discrepancy, we can't avoid, as natural consequence for overcoming the barbarism of the prison, to deconstruct the abstract constructions of criminal law. So a radical shift of paradigm in analysing, defining and dealing with the "crimes" is necessary, for changing from a repressive approach to a new inclusive one, in the perspective of solidarity. to assume the radical difference and incompatibility between retributive justice and restorative justice gives an indispensable guide lines, managing the latter out from the frame of criminal trial.

Giuseppe Mosconi has been full professor in Sociology of Law By the FISPPA dpt. of the University of Padua, now retired , because his age, since 2016. He has been president of the master degree in Sociology, and director of the post-degree master course in "Critical Criminology and Social Security". He has also been Coordinator of the Sociology section of FISPPA Dpt, and director of the Review "Studi sulla questione criminale". He is also member of the scientific board of the review "Antigone" and "Sociologia del Diritto"- He has been twice by the Berkeley University for some months, as visiting fellow, and also by the university of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. He also gave courses and master classes in Mexico City, Tlaxcala, Bogotà, Helsinky, Barcelona, Onati, Kaunas, Brisbane. He took part as speaker to a huge number of conferences around the world, also as a member of the Steering Committee of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. He also is member of The council of the "No Prison" association, in Italy.