Custody and Power

We dive into the vital importance of developing an adequate analysis of the network of actors, institutions, and conditions that make the work of incarceration possible in particular places. We tackle questions of methodology for power research, identifying the many decision-making bodies that have some level of authority over whether and how carceral construction projects will take place, highlighting how institutional landscapes are dynamic and shot through with contradiction—points where campaigns can intervene. As we consider organizing communities against carceral expansion, we discuss ways to get oriented in the formal and informal map of power in a region, and how to ensure that hard-won insights from decades of struggles do not harden into taken-for-granted blocks on the curiosity we need to maintain about the changing conditions we face.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Today we’re returning to our discussion of carceral geography to focus on custody—specifically, how the various powerful forces that hold people against their will organize themselves to be able to do that. Rather than take for granted that, for example, counties can build jails and hold people in them, we should ask how: Where does the revenue come from? How do they get it? What are the vulnerabilities and liabilities? What can we do about them? Who gives authority to do what? In short, how do we organize our curiosity and maintain our astonishment toward developing concrete research for strategy and action?

Here’s an example: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, recently rebranded as CoreCivic), one of the big private security firms, built a prison to California state spec in the early 2000s because they bet that the California state prison system would eventually rent it from the firm. But it wasn’t easy to get that contract because their business plan didn’t factor in the complexities of the public sector guard union’s claim to closed-shop employment and a few other impediments. In the interim, before California eventually did rent the cages, CCA thought, Well, we’ll just rent the prison to federal authorities, because the feds had embarked on a regional prison-building rampage starting in 1997 to lock up so-called “criminal aliens.” But CCA could not just fire up its cages and hire some guards without having a law enforcement agency delegate to CCA the legal authority to hold people against their will. A diligent researcher tried to get a copy of the documents that delegated authority to CCA, and found neither the firm nor the county sheriff would disclose how that worked because—wait for it—it was a “trade secret.” When California eventually did rent the facility, all the guards played central roles as campaign donors and project promoters in the growth of the California prison system in the preceding decades. The newer arrangement meant that delegated authority was no longer an issue. Then eventually, as the number of people in prison shrank, due to years and years of effective abolitionist organizing, California ended the contract. Presently, CoreCivic plans to rent the facility to ICE.

This example illustrates why we have to ask questions like: Who has the capacity to make money move for some purposes and not others? Who has the capacity to change land use from one purpose to another? Who has the capacity, from the ground up or from the top down, to organize the political economic geography of unfreedom?

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: When Louisiana was trying to find places for new prisons in the 1970s, they went searching for surplus state property. In Shreveport they found this shuttered segregated Black high school that had recently been made surplus due to desegregation. Because it had been a school, the property was still under the jurisdiction of the local school board, which had final say on allotting the land and buildings to the Department of Corrections. Residents succeeded in getting the school board to say, “No, we don’t want this to be a prison.”

Among the lessons there, it is so important to always pinpoint who has the relevant decision-making power. It might be something like a school board that you would never have considered that you now need to campaign around. Because so many institutions need to align to make a prison or jail happen, there’s often more than one place to intervene to stop it, and it’s important to know how to look for and think about what to prioritize.

Craig Gilmore: Pinpointing who has power locally is crucial, but not always straightforward. There are dozens of meetings of local authorities that you could start going to if you want to oppose a new jail or prison plan. How does an organizer who’s new to this kind of work find out who actually has the power to stop a project, or delay it, or demand changes? Is it hit or miss, or can you go somewhere to get a map? Who do you call?

In our case in California, we had the advantage of Ruthie’s research. Ruthie had been researching what city councils and county boards and elected and un-elected county and city officials had been doing, and we had good friends in the Center for Biological Diversity, who had worked across the state, and we scrambled to connect to EJ organizers who had been doing grassroots organizing in Prison Alley. So we had these two sources of information about how decisions are made, who has power to make things happen, who has power to block, who has power to demand change, etc. And then we built out our campaigns and target lists from a pretty strong base.

But the idea of starting from scratch is hard. Often in the course of organizing I would go into a town and I would say, “Who’s on your city council?” They’d go, “Well, you know, our local guy is Joe. I don’t know the other people.” That was the level of what they knew about local decision making.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: My answer for the quickest orientation is you go to the journalists—if you are lucky enough that the place still has a small-town or real city newspaper.

Judah Schept: Your comment made me laugh, Craig, but I think it’s exactly right. This is one of those questions where geography and difference matter.

When I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, I was part of an organization fighting the construction of a “justice campus.” In Monroe County, the county commissioners are the executive branch and the county council controls the purse strings, so when you’re trying to stop a carceral project and you want to intervene on the money side, you go to the council. If your study of the local conditions leads you to believe there is leverage in swaying the executive political calculus on the matter, you might target the commissioners.

In Eastern Kentucky, the political terrain is less clear. There is the judge executive, who is the political head of a given county. There are quasi-public formations, such as the Letcher Planning Commission, which is basically just the petty bourgeoisie of the county and which holds a lot of political, economic, and narrative power. Then there are these development districts, often composed of coal and other business executives, local politicians, and clergy, which actually have a lot of influence, at least when it comes to planning and development. And then of course you have the sitting congressperson, Hal Rogers. It’s difficult to determine whose political power matters the most in a given fight.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: And it might shift.

Judah Schept: And it shifts, yes, exactly.

Craig Gilmore: And you haven’t even touched on the local chamber of commerce and other local bodies, such as religious groups, who’ve got the ear of the mayor or the head of the planning commission and whatever else.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: In this context, it might be helpful to mention the work Patrick DeDauw was doing with the late great Jane McAlevey on what they call “Power Structure Analysis.” For example, in a particular jurisdiction, which faith leaders show up to testify at a hearing and win? Go to that house of faith and talk with the congregation. Which faith leaders get named to important commissions? Or which houses of faith do politicians never miss when campaigning or staging a photo op? Those are just a few clues to how to figure out the dynamics of the power structure in a locality.

When we were organizing the fight to stop the Delano II prison, we showed Tracy Huling’s Yes in My Backyard and two people came. More of us went to present the film than showed up to see it. Well, one of the two attendees held forth about the need to do outreach to Christians. I responded by talking about our solidarity with a parish priest in a nearby Catholic church. The guy looked me straight in the eye and said: “I’m not talking about Catholics. I’m talking about Christians.” My point here is not to get anxious about splitting hairs concerning denominations, but rather to ask how people imagine themselves in the world as part of already existing groups, and how we can respectfully get a hearing. I was yelled at some years ago when I discussed how consultants who specialize in siting locally unwanted land uses look for certain kinds of communities because of assumptions about cohesiveness, hierarchy, and so forth. Why was I scolded? Because in describing what I learned the consultants looked for in particular faith communities, some members of my audience thought I was blaming their faith for the proliferation of toxic waste and prisons. The larger point is that people make such assessments of power all the time, and it’s worth our while to pay attention to them and figure out how such assessments might be mobilized in fresh directions.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: That makes me think of the school superintendent in Letcher County, Kentucky, who, before the Bureau of Prisons public meeting last year, emailed all of the faculty and staff in the school district—every single employee—encouraging them: Come speak out in favor of the prison so that we have a future for our school district. When I saw her at the hearing she was there with a crew, an immediately visible, credible community leader. This is part of the importance of going to these sorts of hearings: not just speaking in opposition but also as research. You learn not only who is in favor of or against a prison or a jail or more money for cops, but also who they are with, who they’re able to move. Who’s talking to whom? A lot of this work is really just being a nerd and a good ethnographer.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Melissa Burch, who organized the Critical Resistance South conference (CR South), said on a panel that reflected on that effort fifteen years after the founding meeting that, if there was one thing she wished she had done differently, it’s that “I wouldn’t have left. I should have stayed.” Why? Because of all she had learned about the region over her time organizing CR’s work in the South. The knowledge didn’t have to leave with her, but I suppose what left was specific situated energy and commitment. One person who had been a very young member of the CR South central committee said, “Oh, I wish there had been more documentation.” This remark, by a smart and resourceful person, compelled me to think about how so much of our campaigns and conferences and other movement practices have actually been very well documented, but we haven’t been as disciplined about helping people be aware of and use them. As another more senior organizer said at the retrospective panel, it takes a certain kind of intentionality to crack the folders or watch the videos or listen to the recordings or read articles, pamphlets, books. What Lenin called professional revolutionaries actually matter, which is not the same as thinking that what stands between us and a cascade of victories is paychecks.

Judah Schept: That kind of long-term and local movement memory is so important and can also shape our sense of the politics of a place. Abolitionist organizing in Central Appalachia has a much longer history than the fight against the prison in Letcher County. When Sylvia Ryerson and I were writing the final chapter of Coal, Cages, Crisis, we found the notes from a meeting in 2002 between Melissa Burch, Ashley Hunt (who also helped organized CR South), and local organizers in Letcher County. Longtime organizer and cultural worker Amelia Kirby had connected with CR in 2001 and had arranged their visit as part of the lead up to the conference. So the documentation is there to be found and to help us make sense of our present.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: That also makes me think about the difference of not just places, but also time. What have we learned over time? What immediately jumps to mind is all the “conditions of confinement” lawsuits during the 1960s and 1970s, where people inside and out felt that was the horizon of what struggle was: that the courts were a space of reform or an important site of leverage, all before the massive buildup really occurred. Then organizers witnessed governors, departments of correction officials, sheriffs, district attorneys, etc., leverage so many “conditions of confinement” lawsuits to expand out carceral infrastructures, as we discussed in our first conversation in this series. Learning what has and hasn’t worked previously both allows people to sharpen their analysis of actions that may have unintended consequences, as well as to realize that, actually, conditions have shifted, and we may need to reassess strategies. For instance, the courts’ responses aren’t static either. Time also matters. We’re not in 1970 in the year 2025. We’re not in 1980. We’re not in 1990. We’re not in 2000. And then we’re not in 2020 either. How are we also attending to that as well?

Circling back a bit to our original question of how do you know who is making the decisions, I feel like we’d be remiss to not say that people often have this misconception that departments of correction information (plans, budgets, etc.) is hidden or, if it’s public, it’s not accurate—as if there’s a secret ledger somewhere. This bears repeating: They are proud of what they are doing! It is actually not hard to go to the local or state archives, or email or call up state bureaucrats in the department of correction. Most of the time these bureaucrats are happy to answer questions and be taken seriously (even if we have opposing goals!).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: In the summer of 1998, when we were starting to form The Prison Moratorium Project, an organization that would eventually instigate the campaign to stop the Delano II prison, we were trying to figure out what our target was going to be. I knew from having read all of the official statements for bond issues that Delano was one of only two or three possible next sites. And people asked “Wow, how do you know that?” “I read it. I’m not actually clairvoyant, I’m just a nerd.” Similarly, in the New York City fight against the new skyscraper jails there, one of the “promises” that former mayor Bill de Blasio made was, “Don’t worry, we’re not only going to close Rikers: we’re going to zone the island as a park so it can never be a jail again.” Well, I got a couple of my students to read all the zoning and land use documents for all of the sites for the proposed new jails. Wouldn’t you know, the new Queens jail is slated for a site that had been zoned exclusively for a park. So much for the protection that promise provided. It took my students two days, without supervision, to find this. No FOIA. Just reading.

Judah Schept: To return to the theme of the political geography of custody, I wanted to add two points from the Eastern Kentucky context.

The first was this prison in Floyd County called Southeastern Correctional Complex. It was formerly known as Otter Creek Correctional Center and was built by a private prison company in the early 1990s and then sold to CoreCivic (then CCA), which operated it for twenty years. There were a lot of scandals and abuses during those decades and the prison had a variety of different kinds of custody arrangements. At one point, it imprisoned women from Hawaii 5,000 miles away from home. I raise it here just to make the point that you all have made for many years, which is that the focus on custody within private prisons, as though their profit motive drives mass incarceration, is a bit of a ruse. Kentucky ended its contract with CoreCivic in 2012 and closed Otter Creek. And yet, of course, the prison just remained in the community. And in fact, Kentucky reopened, repurposed, and renamed it as a state prison seven years later. There are now 800 Kentuckians incarcerated within it. In other words, the issue is the prison itself, rather than the company or agency that owns it. In fact, the expansive carceral geography of Kentucky is thoroughly a question of the state.

Second, I wanted to raise an issue about how organizers talk about and frame questions of geography and difference. As I mentioned before, fighting a federal prison may require different kinds of language and analyses than fighting a local jail. So, in the campaign against FCI Letcher, organizers are attuned to the fact that most of the people who would be incarcerated at that prison come from communities outside of the region. Eastern Kentucky falls within the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) “Mid-Atlantic” region, which means people from as far west as Memphis and as far east as Delaware could be imprisoned in Letcher County. The phrase that the coalition has been using to refer to the places from which people might come to be locked up is “sending communities” and a place like Letcher County is a “receiving community.” The goal in naming these communities is to identify the hardships but also to forge solidarities across communities 700 miles apart who would be brought into relationship through this prison.

And it’s been successful. There were ten guys who had been incarcerated in federal prisons in Central Appalachia who drove from Washington, D.C., to a crucial meeting with the BOP in Letcher County in July 2024 and testified against the prison. They spoke about their own experiences, but also offered these incredible gestures of solidarity to the people from Letcher County who were there. So organizing based on this reframing has been very powerful and working groups have emerged in the coalition to forge and sustain and nurture those relationships.

At the same time, it’s one of those framing devices that we may wish to rethink both because there may be better ways to name what Ruthie has called “energetically stretched solidarities” and because, in other contexts or simply at other scales of the carceral state, those named distinctions actually collapse into one another. Letcher County can be both home to a federal prison and incarcerate many of its own residents in the local jail.

Craig Gilmore: As you were talking I was thinking about the differences in the jail populations and the federal prison populations. They’re located very close to each other. But the political geography of carcerality doesn’t simply make a distinction between the innocent and the guilty; it also divides the guilty into various groups and incarcerates them and surveils them differently, which makes movement building more difficult. It’s like, “These people deserve treatment. These people deserve to be locked up forever. These people are our neighbors. These people are not our neighbors.” It plays people against each other across a bunch of different divides. It’s something we and our readers need to be aware of, both as opportunities to organize and as traps not to fall into.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: We’ve all thought about institutions, including carceral institutions, as sorting and stacking machines. It’s useful to think this way without presuming the sorting and stacking is predetermined and fixed—or mechanistic. Rather, the hierarchies produced by the sorting and stacking, arising as they do as (not just “in”) highly differentiated geographies, resolve into new geographies of power and difference, opening opportunities in the context of the very crises that provoke establishment or renovation of institutional forces in the first place. And if those geographies remain carceral, emancipation remains unfinished. All the more reason to study well, with precision and curiosity, to advance our movement.

_{Image: Moritz Karst / Unsplash}

Contributors

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an assistant professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky and the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy.

Judah Schept Judah Schept is professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University and the author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia.

Craig Gilmore Craig Gilmore is a cofounder of California Prison Moratorium Project and was an editor at Prison Focus. Among his publications is the comic book Prison Town: Paying the Price, cowritten with Kevin Pyle.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation.

Topics

• Futures

Tags

• abolition
• carceral economy
• Carceral Geographies
• community organizing
• law and political economy
• organizing