WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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In her new 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.
What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral Capitalism
Guest
JACKIE WANG is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, a PhD student at Harvard University, and author of Carceral Capitalism, published by MIT Press in their Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series.
RELATED
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: Wes Martin
