[This study, which focuses on the 2020 protests after George
Floyds murder, offers, says reviewer Smith, "the first truly
comprehensive account of that summer."]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ABOLITION AFTER THE GEORGE FLOYD REBELLION  
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Jason E. Smith
January 4, 2023
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This study, which focuses on the 2020 protests after George Floyd's
murder, offers, says reviewer Smith, "the first truly comprehensive
account of that summer." _

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_States of Incarceration Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment
System_

Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti

Reaktion Books

ISBN: 9781789146660

THE MOST MOMENTOUS episodes of our lives we often know little about,
even years after they have taken place. There is a rule of scale at
work here: the bigger the event, the more enigmatic it appears. This
is true of individual experience; it applies equally in the field of
historical happenings. Since properly historical events are so few,
they rarely lend themselves to recognition, much less analysis.
Refusing forms they might have assumed in the past, they cannot be
prepared for; having taken place, they seem to leave only ghostly
traces. The events of early summer 2020 confirm this law of
experience. Well over two years after the eruption of the largest mass
movement in the United States since the late 1960s, the George Floyd
rebellion remains for many of us inscrutable, marking a clear before
and after in our lives, yet the meaning of which remains elusive. Even
the simple facts are not always so clear: Who was involved and how
many? How did those who participated understand what they were
struggling towards? Why did it happen when it did? What actors
conspired to bring it to an end?

Some of the groundwork for understanding this event has been done, by
journalists observing it from without, and by many who directly took
part in it. There are details that might take years to flesh out,
particularly when it comes to the response mounted by the forces of
order. It is natural for us to see in these actions the full flowering
of the Black Lives Matter movement that came together in 2014–15,
emblematically in Ferguson, Missouri. But we also know that this was
something different; its scale and intensity told us so. Yet the
echoless aftermath of the event casts a pall over it. If we sense that
it was less the reprise of recent eruptions than an overture to some
more dramatic confrontation, we worry that, if that confrontation
never comes, the obscure events of that summer will not really have
taken place.

Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti’s _States of Incarceration:
Rebellion, Reform and America’s Punishment System_ (Reaktion, 2022)
offers what seems to me the first truly comprehensive account of that
summer: comprehensive precisely because it places those weeks within a
much broader, but thoughtfully articulated, social and historical
landscape. The book’s long first chapter does the patient work of
reconstructing the George Floyd movement in its unfolding, reckoning
with its scope and novelty while underscoring the difficulties it
poses to easy analysis. The national reach of the rebellion, and the
multitudes it mobilized, make it hard to see what happened that summer
as just one thing; so too do its quicksilver nature and its inner
rifts. Sweeping the disorder of those weeks under the Black Lives
Matter moniker hardly resolves anything, since that name or slogan was
itself fractured, “at once a meme, a social movement, a tangled
nexus of formal organizations, and an abstract signifier that guided
autonomous organizing.”

The authors register the tactical “diversity” of the movement,
which ranged from direct and often physical clashes with what they
call “carceral infrastructure” to the inevitable “peaceful”
marches staged by often out-of-the-woodwork activist groups. Kurti and
Shanahan remind us that many demonstrations toppled statues of
Confederate generals and Spanish conquistadors, and they reflect on
the flaws of the “autonomous zones” briefly established in
Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, and other key cities. The
menu of countermeasures is carefully enumerated: the intervention of
federal agencies; the proliferation of social media­–fueled rumors;
the recycling of the outside-agitator trope (white anarchists or white
supremacists); and the surge to the front of “organized” groups
who quickly claimed leadership of the movement, only to steer it into
the confines of city halls, armed with pre-scripted “people’s”
budgets. Finally, the authors are especially lucid in their emphasis
on what distinguishes this revolt from the so-called “unfinished
business” of the riots of the late 1960s, which in many ways it
echoed. They point to the subsequent consolidation of Black political
power as street activists became mayors and police chiefs in many of
the nation’s major cities, for example, or the novel role played by
the “nonprofit industrial complex” in recuperating and unwinding
the movement. Above all, Shanahan and Kurti argue, what distinguished
this uprising from its precursors was an entire half-century of
economic crisis, fiscal austerity, and the concomitant rise of what
they and others call “the carceral state.”

As its title suggests, _States of Incarceration_’s fundamental wager
is that the movement of the summer of 2020, for all that remains
uncertain about it, should be understood — and was in fact
understood by those who participated in it — as a revolt against the
carceral state. The heart of the book is devoted to laying out what
Shanahan and Kurti mean by this notion, which over the past decade has
gained currency in both activist and academic circles. (The authors,
both veterans of the social struggles of this same decade, note that
they are also “employed as university professors tasked with
explaining the rise of the behemoth commonly referred to as ‘the
carceral state.’”) This concept was developed as an extension of
and corrective to a widespread understanding of the notion of mass
incarceration, whose baseline definition refers to the rapid expansion
of the US prison population over the past four decades.

By identifying mass incarceration with prisons and police, however, we
lose sight of what the authors describe as a more pervasive carceral
“web” through which the state administers forms of punishment that
shape the daily lives of the poor, and disproportionately Black and
Brown people: probation, parole, mandatory drug-treatment programs,
house arrest, and other forms of monitoring and supervision. The
“most common interface” between the carceral state and its
subjects is the traffic stop: an encounter that, as recent history
makes clear, can result in death, but more frequently in citations for
minor infractions that trigger punitive fines and court fees
frequently resulting in thousands of dollars of debt. If a media
spotlight has recently been trained on the injustice of the cash-bail
system, less attention has been paid to the way probation and parole
conditions entail “court fees, criminal fines, onetime fees, monthly
supervision fees, electronic monitoring costs, or some combination of
any of these, and/or restitution to alleged victims.” This widening
of the carceral web beyond prison walls requires that discipline be
administered not only by police and prison guards but also by
municipal courts, probation officers and, more generally, by civil and
administrative authorities. Indeed, _States of Incarceration_’s
analysis of the carceral state places special emphasis on the process
of carceral devolution, through which the administration of punishment
— such as the “rehabilitation” and supervision of formerly
incarcerated people — is transferred both to civil agencies and to
community, third-party, or nonprofit organizations.

Shanahan and Kurti’s rigorous depiction of the carceral state and
its penetration into the daily lives of tens of millions of Americans
— they speak of the “porous” border between prison and the
streets — forces us to ask what role such a system plays in the
reproduction of social relations, and why it is that Black and Brown
people are disproportionately caught up in its snares. Doing so
requires that we break the habit of imagining the carceral state as a
response to higher crime rates and see it instead as a way to compel
specific patterns of behavior among those with the most tenuous
relation to the labor market, “tightly regulating how they are
allowed to congregate, support themselves when consigned to informal
economies, shop, and even drive their cars.”

Drawing on a wide range of research on the history of policing and the
modern penal system, _States of Incarceration_ traces the rise of
these institutions to the establishment of the wages system in Europe
and the United States, in response to the need to control the movement
and comportment of “formally free” laborers once bound to rural
landlords, above all to ensure their availability for the labor
market. In contrast with the United Kingdom and Western Europe,
however, the wage-labor regime in the United States grew up alongside
a system of unfree labor. In the 19th century, the authors point out,
the primary form in which millions of Americans were held against
their will was not the prison system but the institution of chattel
slavery. Emancipation for Black workers after the Civil War was met
with a particularly vicious form of labor discipline, in the form of
the infamous Black Codes in the South and the racial segmentation of
the labor market in the North.

Yet the carceral system as we know it today did not take shape for
another century, long after the migration of millions of Black
Americans to industrial centers in the North and West. Following the
pioneering work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Shanahan and Kurti argue that
the explosion of the prison population since the 1970s was a response
not to urban crime waves, as tough-on-crime politicians had it, but to
a systemic crisis of the postwar welfare state. As northern industrial
cores were hollowed out, a crisis of profitability rocked the postwar
regime of accumulation. Unemployment soared, especially among Black
workers, as the manufacturing base of the economy collapsed, setting
in motion the long-term decline of the labor movement, and a breaking
down of the labor market itself. As a long period of stagnation set
in, with job growth confined to low-wage and low-skill occupations,
the foundations for the mid-century welfare state eroded. The
mediations that once stood between workers and the labor market were
replaced by an expansive, and comparably cheaper, regime of
punishment. Black workers, historically the group of workers most
affected by the ups and downs of the business cycle, were not alone in
their vulnerability to this discipline, which either removed them
entirely from the labor market or pinned them along its bottom edge.
But they felt — they feel — its coercions more broadly, and more
bluntly.

Shanahan and Kurti have written a polemical book, and much of its last
third is devoted to critically assessing the role played by advocates
of prison reform in, paradoxically, expanding the footprint of the
carceral state. Indeed, the book is keen to register a shocking
turnabout in the politics of punishment in the United States over the
past decade. Today, criticisms of the American carceral system have
broad bipartisan support: even Newt Gingrich now speaks the language
of “decarceration.” If the political Right sees mass incarceration
as too costly, progressive critics typically appeal to humanistic
language, like “care” (“care first, jail last” is one
particularly grim slogan). These bipartisan calls for reform represent
complementary responses to two crises: a fiscal crisis, on the one
hand, and a legitimation crisis on the other.

Yet, as _States of Incarceration’_s fourth chapter convincingly
demonstrates, most “alternatives” to incarceration proposed by
prison reform advocates function above all to shore up the punishment
system rather than replace it. Indeed, as the authors put it on more
than one occasion, reform advocates often play an “insidious” role
in the development of the carceral state, extending its reach and
offloading responsibility for reintegrating prisoners into social life
onto community-based organizations, who come to serve as the
“research and development arm guiding the state’s punishment
policy.” Shanahan and Kurti take great pains to distinguish these
initiatives from what they call “abolitionism,” an activist
movement and network whose most visible figures are Angela Davis and
the aforementioned Gilmore, and whose sophisticated analysis of the
carceral state the authors largely share.

The political horizon of abolitionism is not just the end of mass
incarceration; it is the abolition of “violent compulsion” as a
“central feature of social life.” Its conception of political
practice is rooted in the articulation of what Gilmore calls
“non-reformist reforms”: demands that do not directly target
broad-based social transformation — the overthrow of the wage
relation — but the patient “unraveling” of the carceral system.
Within this general strategic framework, a number of more concrete
demands and practices have been formulated. One orientation that had
particular resonance during the George Floyd rebellion is the
“defund” movement, which construes abolition as the demand to
reallocate funding for police and the criminal justice system toward
otherwise lacking or underresourced social services, be they schools,
food stamps, or public housing. Yet Shanahan and Kurti underline that
the simple replacement of carceral with non-carceral institutions
supposes too vivid a frontier between the “penal and welfare arms of
the state,” in particular the role these institutions play in
monitoring, shaping, and coercing the behavior of the poor, often
through stigmatization and shaming.

_States of Incarceration_ is that rare thing among books of its type:
openly militant, yet thoughtful and self-aware, opting for
even-handedness and sober self-assessment rather than the tired
sloganeering typical of left-wing activism, or the edifying lyricism
of defeat. The authors acknowledge their debt to the abolitionist
current, especially its expanded conception of the carceral state and
its unflinching criticisms of the insidious effects of liberal
projects of “decarceration.” Yet they are also quick to point to
the way the events of the summer of 2020 revealed mainstream
abolitionism’s limits.

If the work that abolitionists have done over the past two decades
“provid[ed] the political basis on which the participants [in the
George Floyd rebellion] could understand themselves,” Shanahan and
Kurti also describe the ways in which many in the abolitionist
movement were caught off-guard by the uprising’s most radical
aspects. Soon after the rioters set fire to the Minneapolis Third
Precinct headquarters, the “abolition” tag showed up on city
streets and social-media timelines; it was not long before the Floyd
movement was called to appear before city commissions, negotiating
with elected officials over the minutiae of municipal budgets. When
the authors observe in their concluding remarks that the “praxis of
mainstream abolitionism could not have produced the George Floyd
Rebellion,” I would add that their verdict applies equally to any
and every already-constituted political tendency or formal
organization.

One of the lessons of the summer of 2020 seems to be that militant
groups can play a vital role in social struggles in the intervals
between large-scale mass movements — doing the essential work of
harm mitigation and rolling back the frontiers of the carceral state,
for example — while providing a conceptual framework through which
these movements can name their enemies. But this very readiness for
such eruptions can work to undermine them, when existing groups and
tendencies designate themselves the rebellion’s mouthpieces and
decide to speak for it: often by addressing the enemy in its own
language, rather than patiently sounding the silence, and even
insolent mutism, of the rebellion’s most explosive expressions.
¤

Jason E. Smith lives in Los Angeles and writes primarily about art and
politics. He is the author of _Smart Machines and Service Work:
Automation in an Age of Stagnation_, and frequently contributes to the
Field Notes section of _The Brooklyn Rail_.

* abolition
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* George Floyd Protests
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* The carceral state
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* The Prison Industrial Complex
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