Interchange – Debt’s Docile Subjects: On Carceral Capitalism with Jackie Wang

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Today’s show is a repeat from June 25, 2019.

In her book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The so-called ‘race-neutral’ technologies like credit scoring, data mining, and algorithmic policing provide a justifying veneer of scientific legitimacy so that criminality and poverty become self-fulfilling prophecies of capitalist rationality.

Guest
Jackie Wang is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. Her forthcoming book manuscript, tentatively titled Vectors of Control, examines how, during the postwar period, calls to reform the U.S. criminal legal system catalyzed experimentation in the realm of criminal procedure and led to the development of new technologies of control. Rather than focusing exclusively on the role of the state in pursuing the policy path now known as ‘mass incarceration,’ her recent research looks at the role of reformers, nonprofits, the Cold War university, and financiers in shaping the development of the carceral state.

RELATED
Prisonscape: The View from Any Window (Interchange with Brett Story)
Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety by Jackie Wang
Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present by Dan Nemser (book review)
The ‘Superpredator’ Scare (NYT video documentary)
The Cybernetic Cop: The Future of Policing (Music, text, voice & RoboCop collage by Jackie Wang, produced with assistance from Alexander.)
PALANTIR has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology (The Verge, Feb 27, 2018)

MUSIC
From Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues
“Attica Blues”
“Steam (Part 1)”
“Blues for Brother George Jackson”
“Ballad for a Child”
“Quiet Dawn”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young