American Globality and the US Prison Regime: State Violence and White Supremacy from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to Bagong Diwa

Abstract

What do we make of the abiding significance of state-sanctioned human captivity and imprisonment on a massive, unprecedented scale as a primary American modality of civilization? Democracy? Modernity and (postmodern) Nation-building? The American prison intertwines as it animates two structural logics: 1) white supremacy as a historical modality of social (dis)organization, and 2) the circulation, militarization, and mobilization of allegedly local or domestic US social formations across global geographies, including and beyond the Philippines. This paper considers the formation of the United States prison industrial complex as an epochal global regime that is integral to the fabric of an incipient world ordering.