Foundational Antagonisms in Toxic Prison Environments

Keywords: environmental toxicity, US incarceration, carceral geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the relationship between environmental toxicity and incarceration in the United States as debilitating, destabilizing conditions for both people and place. It looks to the national landscape of prisons developed, and maintained, on or near hazardous sites to question the ways in which the microscale of toxic matter contributes to the production, and potential abolition, of carceral space. I argue that toxicity is a formative spatial scale to understand and conceptualize both bodily injury and the already-occurring physical decomposition of carceral buildings. Toxicity produces, and is remnant of, disposability logics that lay bare State practices of racial capitalism and ethnonationalism, yet I suggest it does so in a way that undermines the stability and border-making capacity of such power. Carceral borders are enactments of racist State settler colonial projects; toxicity disrupts and ruptures these exclusionary apparatuses by materially breaking prison infra/structures. This presentation will focus on the case study of NYC’s Rikers Island, a jail complex developed atop a City landfill, to highlight many infra/structural cracks, repair costs and labor, and grievances that proliferate at this toxic site. I draw on State administrative documents, legal records, and public testimony to follow the fine lines of environmental impacts on the Rikers’ jails. Utilizing theoretical frameworks from black geography, environmental racism, and abolitionist thought, I emphasize how capitalism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism do not go easy into place. Rather, toxicity is a spatial scale of, for, and towards political struggle.