From Criminal Man to Carceral Body: An Ethnography of Intake in the New York City Jails

Abstract

This article calls for an abolitionist turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to engage with mass incarceration and the carceral-industrial-complex. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in New York City jails, this article sets out to (1) argue for an abolitionist STS that intervenes in the racialized logics of “criminal man”; (2) offer the carceral body as arising from this abolitionist intervention into mass incarceration; and (3) illustrate how ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology might be deployed as abolitionist STS tools. The premise is that ending mass incarceration requires philosophical interventions that resist the current racist, capitalist framework of the carceral-industrial-complex by disrupting the very foundations of reality. Abolitionist STS arises out of feminist and critical race STS as an intervention not only into criminology, but also into social theory’s ontological turn by attending to the interplay of carceral epistemologies and ontologies. When multiplicities, experientialities, complexities, contradictions, and power dynamics are drawn out, abolition is no longer an undoing but a proliferation that disinvests and contravenes carceral logics.