 Hi, everyone. I'm super happy to be gathered here tonight to share and talk about Pads to Prison on the Architectures of Cursorality. It's super weird to be speaking to you all without actually seeing you, but I trust you're out there and so welcome. A huge thanks to Columbia GESAP for hosting tonight and to Lila Coutilier for doing the actual hard work of bringing us all online together. Just so we have a sense of where we're going, other than Sable Elise Smith, who is actually stuck teaching a class at Columbia right now, we're going to be hearing from all of the contributors for roughly five minutes. The plan is to then break for a discussion about halfway through before picking up again and ending the night with one last discussion. We're going to be joined by my colleague Joanna Joseph, and thank you all so much for showing up. Okay. Nobody writes alone, so I'd like to start this evening by acknowledging this collective effort. This book is indebted to all the folks whose writing and thinking has inspired this project and whose work is in this volume and the actual essays, the excerpts, the footnotes, the sentiments, and all of those who have been fighting as a matter of life and death every day for the end of prisons, the end of police, the end of racialized and sexualized and gendered violence, the end of settler colonialism. This project contends that a society that cages human beings is a society whose consciousness is itself engaged in a systemic and personal politics of domination. And I think the same can be said about architectural consciousness. So I'm going to propose that we sit for a few moments with our feet on unceded land to give some space to all of the continued struggles past and present against the sanctioned and unsanctioned policies of today's racial carceral state. Thank you. All right. So to kick us off, I'm going to be sort of walking through my own very messy map of the book. In many ways, I see myself occupying a funny space between editor and contributor, two roles that have become quite inseparable for me over the course of this project, and two positions that have directed my own approach to this book. My own intervention sits somewhere between introduction and contribution. It's between a very specific historical thread that I've been personally following for years, and the larger questions it poses to the discipline of architecture. In fact, I think this in-betweenness is one of the ways this project proposes architecture rethink not only its relationship to the carceral state, but also its pedagogy of the prison and the very limited politics that emerges from it. It's a pedagogy and a politics that still doesn't see beyond the criminal justice system or beyond the prison itself as a discrete typology. And this doesn't extend towards the total abolition of prisons as a system of enclosure or of the architectural belief systems that sustain the prison. Betweenness offers a way of resisting stable categories and determined oppositions. As a method, it requires movement, holding things in mutual relation, thinking with both and, avoiding either or, looking across, behind, and forward all at once. So what follows from me is a narrative that moves between material and discursive sites that slips between past and present and that strings together a set of starting points, which evidence in this case how the state moves and restructures and expands itself across the built environment according to its coercive functions. In the story that I'm going to tell you, there is a motel, a prison farm, a plantation, a Supreme Court case, a tax exemption, a landlord, and a developer all behind today's Houston Processing Center. In November 1983, the Corrections Corporation of America received its first federal contract from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to build an immigrant detention center in Houston, Texas. Five months later, it opened the Houston Processing Center. But between those five months and what was celebrated as a scrappy origin story of one of today's largest for-profit prison corporations, the CCA rented and opened an interim facility at the Olympic Motel along Interstate 45. According to the co-founders, Tidon Hudo and Tom Beasley, all it took was a cyclone fence, some barbed wire, some bamboo to quote, throat, thwart the curious, the pool was filled in with sand, rooms were secured, windows outfitted with iron bars. These architectural slights of hand modeled the ease with which motels slipped into detention site, living quarters into cells, hostility, into site of captivity. Paths to prison is concerned with these slippages. This instance of urban carceral transformation speaks to certain architectural characteristics, but it also speaks to long-standing social beliefs about what kinds of places and spaces contain, support, enable, or are needed by certain kinds of people in certain ways of life. The Olympic Motel might not be in use anymore, but that it was put to use or misuse by the CCA on behalf of the INS offers a way of thinking about where and how the expansion of carceral state power is justified, but also conceivable. It speaks to a myth that the use of force and state violence in the bill environment or even the misuse of buildings is a betrayal of American values. I think more fundamentally though, perhaps this narrative also offers evidence of the mobility of carcerality, how the prison as is a social and political economy of confinement that extends well beyond the institution's walls, pervading with various degrees of intensity and duration, the everyday terrain between distinct spaces of containment, all of the typologies, histories, and lived experiences assumed to be outside of the sphere of traditional incarceration. In April 1969, prisoners at the Cummins Prison Farm at the Arkansas State Penitentiary filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions of their confinement. The case sparked an almost decade-long series of litigations against the Arkansas Department of Corrections, culminating in a 1978 Supreme Court case called Hudo v. Finney. No matter how incremental the change ultimately was as a result of these cases, these cases marked the first successful lawsuit filed by incarcerated people against a correctional institution and the first large-scale attack on the system itself by folks inside the system. The Hudo named in this final Supreme Court case was Teedon Hudo, the head of the Arkansas Department of Corrections between 1971 and 1976 and, remember, the future co-founder of CCA, the man responsible for the Olympic motel. Speaking about the entire state penal system, Judge Henley, who was ruling on one of the earlier iterations of the case, wrote that, quote, a sentence to the Arkansas Penitentiary today amounts to banishment to a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world, a world governed by rules and customs completely foreign to free world culture. To the prisoners bringing the case, unfreedom at Cummins was anything but alien. It extended a familiar political economic system of power, violence, and exploitation rooted in the nation's history of slavery. The prison farm reeked of the plantation. And in fact, like Ramsey in Texas and Angola and Louisiana, Cummins prison used to become its plantation, the same land being tilled, the same land and the same soil being tilled over and over and over again. Pass to prison addresses itself to these material and spatial exchanges, to the spaces and forms that mark some kind of institutional evolution across time and across status quotes, no matter how unfinished or inconsistent these evolutions are. The more things change, the more they apparently remain the same, warned a past superintendent of Arkansas's Department of Corrections. The task then seems to be to think about typology diachronically and to account for the time of slavery of the world, but to do this work without reproducing the neo-slavery narrative. This book is an invitation to consider how the logic of the plantation attempts to reconfigure itself in post-slave context. Notions of freedom are always shadowed by the ways we are made unfree by design. Pass to prison brings together architectural narratives than an addition to looking at the ways architecture in prisons looks at the ways that apparently does not. And so I ask what other loopholes, legal, spatial, financial or otherwise, blur the distinction between freedom and unfreedom and enable the carceral state to annex that which is supposedly free from its grips. In 2013, the CCA successfully converted its corporate structure to a real estate investment trust, otherwise known as a REIT, which is a financial instrument that incentivizes building and leasing, not managing or operating. For a company to qualify for REIT designation, it has to derive at least 75% of its income from rents and real property. That is, the CCA had to convince the IRS that the money it receives from federal agencies to incarcerate and house people is rent, opening up a redefinition of carceral space that labeled the state as the tenant and not the individual sanctioned there. In 2016, CCA transitioned or became core civic. Words like inmate services and security were replaced with safety, community and property. Core civic now declares itself as the so-called government solutions, diversified government solutions company, or what we might call detainer, landlord and developer all in one. 35 years after the Olympic motel, the company owns and operates roughly 15 million square feet across the country. Not only does core civic control almost 60% of all privately owned prison beds in the U.S., but it sees itself more generally as the largest private owner of real estate used by U.S. government agencies. Agencies which are crucially and nominally in non-correction spaces. This diversification in sprawl was surely tactical. It was intended to make the company critical to the immediate and the future needs of government partners, policymakers and bureaucracies. Reassuring stakeholders of this futurity and executive at core civic offered the following statement which we've heard before. The more things change, the more they apparently remain the same. Paths to prison traces how the punishing regime and thus the prison gets folded into other regimes like ownership and infrastructure. What core civic calls its robust pipeline of acquisition opportunities manifests a long legacy of state-sanctioned white possession. It aims to lay claim to an even greater territory, spanning corrections and non-correction spaces, the prison and the community, already quartered markets and new markets. This book is concerned with pipelines but only insofar as they can be disrupted. It is not a relentless, unchanging explanation or metaphor for the way things are. Pipelines clog, they leak, they can be rerouted, subverted, blocked by official and unofficial means. Opposition is both expressed in loud acts of resistance and in the quiet persistence of seeking out ways to survive to access resources either at risk of being stolen or not otherwise available and to live fully. The goal then is to elucidate the physical and social contraptions that attempt to circumscribe or enclose certain lives, places and communities and the insurgent social formations that emerge against these contraptions. Admits the sprawling historical landscape of immigrant detention, the motel has resurfaced over and over again as a site reinforced and consolidated at the level of enclosure and rendered spatially expansive at the level of an urban system of circulation and capture. It is a site of immobility and mobility. Take for instance the 2018 lawsuit brought against Motel 6 for its role in collaborating with ICE to arrest guests. Over two and a half years, 80,000 names were disclosed by the motel chain and countless individuals arrested, detained and deported as a result of warrantless searches. Motel 6 shared its guest data with police by choice. As a Supreme Court case in 2015 ruled that motel and hotel operators are not obliged to turn this information over without a warrant. This cooperation turned once again the supposedly protected bed space of the motel room into the captive bed space of another, finagling actual thresholds between the right to be secure in one's own room, not to mention in one's body, home and life, and the interests of the state. But while the motel has been a useful agent of social death for Corsivic, for ICE, for the Supreme Court, it has also been a space for a certain collective life. Other motels across the Southwest are being repurposed as migrant shelters, as waste stations on longer paths towards asylum. One finds sanctuary, shelter and freedom, not always via routes leading somewhere else supposedly free or somewhere else supposedly different, but via practices that carve out space for mobility, even in the most restricted of environments and circumstances. What is a death trap to some is a lifeline to others and endlessly vice versa. So paths to prison as a book moves because it understands that the mobility of a system that attempts to immobilize people challenges how we see, understand and visualize the prison. How the prison has been is and could be represented is a political project. This is a book then that shifts the frame away from what we've come to know and imagine as the prison as such. The paths of paths to prison lead us at times so far away from or so far into the prison or the institution that we lose sight of it all together. The paths offer ways to locate architecture along other disciplinary paths, or they write new disciplinary paths into histories of architecture. They crucially re-circuit our own assumptions, making the familiar unfamiliar, un-congealing the congealed, denaturalizing everything that has been naturalized for us. Together they are just a set of invitations for re-seeing the architectural or carceral society and for hopefully undoing it all together. And what follows from everyone else I think is just the first round of invitations, provocations and questions to our field. Thank you. Okay, I was gonna try to share my screen but I think my internet's a little unstable so maybe I'll just go ahead and chat. So my essay in the volume approaches the carceral through the form of the rent party. By sitting with moments in the rent party scant material archive, there aren't many, we don't have any actual real-life representations of the rent parties, too sweaty, too crowded, the people were too poor to represent through the means available in the 20s and the 30s. So we don't have much actual material about the rent party but we do have representations, we have testimonials, we have the music of the jazz musicians that cut their teeth in the rent party. So using that archive, my essay approaches the crowded and often dilapidated conditions of red line, black urban housing in the early 20th century as both on the one hand propagating conditions of constriction and exploitation, but also to invoke Harriet Jacobs, which Isabelle just underscored, to understand these geographies as sites for pioneering loopholes of not exactly retreat, given their boisterousness, but we could call them maybe loopholes of raucousness that refuse to tether civil rights or conceptions of freedom to the ability to access and maintain private property. So in the piece I first recount the spatial trap the many blacks found themselves in in the late 19th and early 20th century caught between the carceral logics of the emerging Jim Crow regime in the south and vagrancy statutes nationwide, making black motion and mobility a crime. So kind of unable to dispossess from the land or threatened with the menace of dispossession, but unable to keep moving. Blacks in this period found themselves squeezed not just spatially and legally but also financially, given that blacks often paid close to double double to rent in red line cities compared to white residents and often for much worse housing. I'm in that story of kind of vagrancy and not being able to stay put is what I very much build on. I'm building on the work of Sadiah Hartman and so many others to tell that story. So peaking in the popularity in popularity in the 20s and 30s, red parties helped working class residents afford the inflated rents and crowded black enclaves. Tenants advertise these gatherings on printed cards. Links and Hughes famously collected these cards and you can see them in his archive in the by the key. These little cards will get printed on the street inviting locals and passerbys to eat, dance and drink the night away for a small entry fee to the party which would go towards the occupants rent, hence a rent party. Alongside their practical function of keeping residents housed, rent parties also facilitated the sensory dispossession of their guests in crowded spaces whereas one type quote bedlam rained. Known for good music, sweaty, loud, occasionally violent incidences often violence that came out of the desire for one person to own someone else's body so that the violence itself and the rent party is often coded as a kind of a violence that comes out of the attempt to own. Rent parties were places for attendees to let loose and rub against just about anybody while assisting their neighbors and avoiding dispossession for one more month. And so what I really am interested in this piece is in some ways to rethink the opposition between the rent strike as something that's real, real politics, useful, organized, legitimate as a means of resistance and the party, the rent party on the other hand which like the riot today is often described as being opposed to the strike as something that's chaotic, a distraction from the political rather than actually political in its own way. So what I do in this piece is try to rent party and think about the ways the kinds of public feeling, the practices of dispossession in the kind of logics of the choreography of the party and the kind of literal choreograph movement between attendees encouraged and maybe helped shape eviction resistance actions that were also happening in Harlem and other places in the 20s and 30s that similarly relied on improvisatory gatherings and choreographed bodies to resist eviction on behalf of the anonymous dispossessed. So rent eviction resistance often took the form of crowds either preplanned to gather or gathering on the spot when someone had been evicted and their things were thrown on the street and this kind of gathering to push people back literally back into their homes after they've been kicked out. And so I'm interested in kind of teasing out the way that this form of eviction resistance is entangled with the practices of dancing and improvisation that are also part of the rent party scene. Okay, so I'll stop there, thanks. Hey everyone, I'm James, super happy to be spending some time with you all this afternoon and so many thanks to Isabel for convening this group of authors for the book and for pushing us all along with such urgency and thoughtfulness. I'm going to share some slides. Okay, I hope this is working. So as you already know from the work of Brett's story and so many others, the past quarter century has seen a boom in rural prison construction. In Appalachia, one such region of carceral inflation, the prison is positioned as something of an antidote to a declining coal economy, an inflow of state funding to replace the outflow of carbon. So here's a pairing of images from Pocahontas, Virginia, on the left is an exhibition coal mine that's open to tourists and on the right a recently built state prison. A pairing of images that I hope sort of gestures at the triangulation of settler colonial land politics, geological and extractivism and the late capitalist carceral economy. But so what I wanted to try to do with this piece is to take up some of Catherine Yousaf's thinking on white geology and ask how extraction and incarceration have been wrapped up in longer histories of racial capitalism. And in fact the first state prison in the United States was an exhausted copper mine in Connecticut, which came to be known as Old New Gate. Old New Gate was a sort of testing ground for a particular 19th century sensibility about incarceration that would become very widespread, which was that imprisonment should pay for itself through the extraction of the prisoner's labor. And this remarkable etching of life at Old New Gate was made by one of the prisoners on copper that he had mined during his own imprisonment in the Caverns. Or after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment's provision of penal servitude, you could think about the Virginia State Penitentiary designed by the architect of the US Capitol. This is a building that Mabel Wilson has also written about in this in this book. The Virginia State Penitentiary was in its own way a site of geological extraction as its prisoners legally understood to be slaves of the state. This is a phrase from a court ruling of the period released to the CNO Railroad in the name of constructing coal wealth. Or in the coal fields of Alabama you could look at the coal prisons built by corporations making use of the convict lease system and a newly racialized population of post emancipation laborers. So one of my questions here has been to, you know, how to think of Latrobe's well-known penitentiary and abandoned sites like these marked primarily by the anonymous gravestones of the prisoners who died in the mines together as sites of architectural history. These dynamics come to a head in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee, which is the main site for my essay in this book. And here the state of Tennessee responded to the end of the convict leasing era by building and running its own coal mining prison. Coal production continued here into the 1960s until a prisoner strike raised awareness of the practice alongside of course declining coal profits. So this is a history that's peppered with moments of solidarity but also moments of conflict between labor struggles and ideas about prison justice. So you could argue that these coal prisons are comparatively minor or sort of archaic sites whether in terms of the American carceral system today or the history of coal production. This is how Brushy is often rendered in its sort of touristic guise today as an idiosyncratic holdover from the 19th century. But I think these sites are also perhaps crucial as evidence of the long-standing and ongoing relationship between extraction in its many forms and carceral dispossession in its many forms. So to wrap up I mean I think this essay and I take this to be the project of the book is an effort one among many at rising to the really incredible and important challenge offered by Ruth Wilson-Gilmore and others which is that we use our research to imagine abolition geographies abolition geographies that take stock of the human environmental impacts of prison and plantation logics in the context of racial capitalism. So what I've tried to do in this essay is to ask how these very particular historical sites whose meanings are contested and can be further contested might offer vantage points into that entwined history of extraction and incarceration which are two of the foundational devices of racial capitalism and which demand mutual abolition. So thanks I think Brett is up next. Hi everyone. Great to be here in this virtual sphere with you all and wonderful to hold the book in my hands. It's really fantastic and it's been I've been learning so much as I've worked my way through it. So congratulations to everyone. I'll talk a little bit about my piece and I'm really glad James went ahead of me because I referenced some of the places and themes that he mentioned. In my piece I consider a set of the prison's external geographies with the aim of mapping out both the conditions and consequences of the carceral state as they're manifested in seemingly ordinary space and by ordinary I simply mean where life is lived and reproduced and by space I mean the co-constitutive production of our environment and our social relations. So space is a relation as well as the instantiation of place. I'm a filmmaker and a scholar and this particular chapter builds off of research that I did for a film that came out a few years ago called The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and the point of that film was as James just mentioned to map out some of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has famously called and importantly called abolition geographies. I also have a toddler who really doesn't want to go to sleep so I apologize for the noise in the background. So when we think about the prison we tend to imagine a building or most people tend to imagine a building and that that makes sense right? The earliest penitentiaries first conceived and constructed some two centuries ago were built primarily to move state punishment out of the public square and into a space hidden behind high walls and locked cell doors. These penal architectures have exemplified the contemporary prison system in our imaginations ever since but I think as the whole project of this book makes clear architecture necessarily also exists within something we call infrastructure what Brian Larkin describes as matter that enables the movement of other matter. The peculiarity of infrastructure's stem he suggests from the fact that they are things and they're also the relation between things and I think this is a useful way to think about prisons and also the spaces that condition them. So prisons are buildings yes but they are also manifestations of a society's organization of social relations and power relations and abolitionist scholars and activists both inside and out have especially and importantly pressed this point. So in my piece I look at three sites the prison fire camp the long distance highway and the buses that traverse these highways and the coal mine the abolition coal mine. Each in their own way represents expresses and folds back on the contemporary situation of mass incarceration and racial capitalism in the United States. So I'll start to follow up from James in the Appalachian coal fields of eastern Kentucky. So here over the past 20 years or so there's been a massive building prison building spree and abandoned coal mines in this region have literally and physically been repurposed as sites for new prison construction. One was actually nicknamed sink sink because the floor of the prison began sinking into the hollowed out mine beneath it. As per the want of a capitalist economy land is swapped out from one extractive industry to another and I think we can and should think of incarceration as a form of resource extraction. So coal mines become prison sites and former miners prison guards or at least they hope to become prison guards. The carceral state animates a very narrow and cynical form of futurity in this region by praying on gutted economically devastated communities and dangling the promise of a purposeful work in prison development. It says there's no future here unless you let a prison be built in your town on your coal mine. Here and I think this is where the abolitionist geography really comes in here wage labor not necessarily law and order is what organizes and motivates the production of carceral space and thus can be and must be thought about as central to an abolitionist reimagining of this space. So a second site that I talk about is in the news a lot right now and that is the site of the wildfires that are I mean raging all over the place but especially in California. So in California state prisoners are deployed to fight raging and increasingly common wildfires often for pennies on the dollar but we must be careful not to read into this landscape a simple narrative about exploited prison labor. The contradictions that mark the prison fire camp pose I think hard and important questions about ideology and subject formation. Here we see the very category of the criminal lose its ideological veil as people working these fire camps find themselves you know occupying the status of a hero criminals become heroes in landscapes that are once workplaces and carceral outposts. We also see here how labor can operate as both an exploitative practice yes as it always is and also a desired alternative to the coerced idleness that marks most life in the contemporary carceral machine. And meanwhile right now tonight tomorrow night the night after visitors and loved ones mostly women of color are traversing New York state's interstate highways en route to one of the state's 54 penal institutions. The majority of New York's penitentiaries are built in remote areas where land is cheap and where communities are hurting far from the year far from the urban neighborhoods where most incarcerated people come from. The highway is thus a space of circulation between two poles of the contemporary prison regime expensive state penitentiaries in poor towns and disinvested and criminalized neighborhoods in urban centers. So I describe how the prison bus is its own kind of holding space where the riders are worn out before they even get on. They're worn out by precarious housing by poor health care by low wages all those conditions that racial capitalism produces for those at the lowest echelons of the social order alongside its production of the prison regime. But on these buses we also see how intimate relations of care intersect with public infrastructure to produce connection as well as isolation. These visitors are literally doing the work of social reproduction they more than anyone know how visiting is a form of keeping incarcerated people alive. The prison isolates but it also collectivizes. Thus the visitors riding the bus form bonds and share strategies for survival and endurance and solidarity even if it's only just you know in the form of bringing an extra change of clothes for anyone who might find themselves at risk of being turned away at the prison gates. Together I think these spaces and many many other kinds of spaces manifest a set of contradictions failed promises intimate dramas and structural constraints and as such they they also stage the conditions for contestation and social struggle. Infrastructure is what makes things possible but of course it's struggle that determines what those things are and what we might do with them. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today. I am just thrilled to be here with an incredible array of thinkers and artists and writers celebrating this wonderful volume. The chapter that I contributed to this book is called Backward to Wayward. Listening to Archives of Disciplinary Education in Philadelphia and thinking through the name of this chapter I'd hope to point to the absence of archives and policy devoted specifically to spaces of public disciplinary education as well as to this archival absence of narrative perspectives on their own terms of the students who have been a part of these institutions as well as the pathologizing of so-called waywardness into municipal codes and laws. Most especially through clinical psychology which found its way into public education in the form of disciplinary education in the early 20th century in the Philadelphia School District. In this piece I also posit listening as perhaps a method for hearing both this perceived absence of an archive and the lower but by no means absent sonic frequency of these student voices framed through exchanges with architectural space and material. I also wanted to think about the sonic resonance of photographic images thinking with Tina Camp. In this instance these images proliferated through local newspapers and really they were how sort of student subjectivities were popularly formed through the way these images were widely read as passive. But conversely in this piece I argued that these images themselves talk back through refusal to be categorized as somehow outside of normalcy and resist that very subject formation. Thinking with City of Hartman as well, with Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In this piece I also trace the long history of disciplinary education in Philadelphia, a city where I was a high school teacher for a number of years. And the school that formed the case study for this essay is called Camelot Academy at Boone, first a public disciplinary school in the 1920s and now an alternative charter school and whose history I traced from the 1920s through to the present day. Philadelphia, the relationship with public education like New York and Boston has had a really strong influence on the formation of American public education on the whole. And as we think through the origins of the carceral state we must inevitably think about public education and most specifically disciplinary education. And when we think of you know American educational reform, American educational reformers, the well-known reformers like Henry Barnard and Horace Mann, names you know, many folks do know, it's actually quite impossible to disentangle their efforts toward educational reform from spatial and even architectural ideas in many of the 19th and 20th century ideas about education reform and what constituted this reform. Controlling space itself including the design and the material classroom objects like desks, windows and chalkboards as well as tightly controlling the way students move through space in specific ways was the substance of ed reform. In fact this thinking sort of paralleled the way that late 19th century architects and engineers thought about airflow and the ways in which air moves through a home to promote healthy domestic space. So did these education reformers think of students as the elements that move through this space in either healthy or non-healthy ways? And sort of taking cue from early clinical psychology, healthy or non-healthy transformed to sort of become normative and then non-normative and school spaces and the students who moved through it were thus public health concerns and something to be socially reformed much like these concerns over airflow and domestic environments. Moving forward through the 20th century still thinking with Camelot Academy we see the increasing racialization of students. School space is one mechanism by which to normalize and even produce this idea of whiteness and a normal student a normative student especially through evolving racially charged language around special education and clinical psychology at that time which I discussed in this piece from the foundation for disciplinary education in Philly. No longer solely an issue of public health in the same way it once was. This non-normative student was a subject of much concern whether it was in terms of behavior, health, perceived learning ability, propensity toward the supposed waywardness and race and certain spaces and ways of crafting these spaces also became synonymous with reforming these students and this resulted in a lot of the disciplinary education spatial conventions that are still with us today in these disciplinary spaces. For instance, removal, separation, limited access to free play, preparing the room to accommodate silence and a lack of student-on-student interaction are all ways of spatially organizing students in disciplinary environments. Tracing the history of this particular school first as a public school and then as an alternative charter school run through a public-private partnership with the school district allowed an examination of the way space upholds and perpetuates normativity and separation in schools. Obviously I wrote this piece before the current education crisis that's been brought to light through the pandemic but the implications of these questions of representation, sufficient educational space, schools and public health and the creation of non-normative students are highlighted through this current pandemic in which school spaces themselves are inadequate for the this current crisis and student inequality is laid bare. Without the spatial element of school for some students, those with special needs differently abled, those lacking internet access and those students who are now caring for their siblings instead of going to school, those with ongoing behavioral concerns, etc. School itself is now an insufficient educational mechanism and it might not serve its function when this spatial component is removed which really forces questions about the purpose of the school building and the purpose of school in our society at large. Yet how might this also be an opportunity to rethink the kinds of spaces we put our children in as well as specifically disciplinary education? How can we hold these spatial strategies accountable while listening and imagining another future for educational space? Thank you very much. As mentioned earlier, Sable Lee Smith could not make the event tonight so we're going to show a slide show of her work as it moves through the book and then afterwards we're going to start the first discussion where all panelists are invited to contribute and we'll also be taking audience questions so make sure to send them in to the Q&A. Thank you. All right, I think we're convening for the first discussion so if everyone wants to turn on their cameras and their microphones that would be great. Jared is actually going to go in the next section. He should be here soon. I'm happy to kick this off but I'd also love to not hear myself talk so if anyone has any thought that comes to mind after this I know that was a lot and we move super quickly. Feel free to cut me off. Otherwise I'll just jump in with I think a question that I have on my mind. So I think that this first presentation or this first grouping of presentations starts to make clear some of the actual material physical sites that we can begin to think through and reconsidering how we understand the prison operating rates so we have Appalachia, we have the fire camp, we have highways, we have the charter school or the orthogenic school that developed in the 19th century, we have Harlem and the rent party and in this way I think that these sites actually reveal something much deeper about methodology and I think again it's become quite clear or if it isn't clear I'm going to say it again which is that this book is I think really an extension of Brett's film in many ways, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and which is to suggest that we can we can learn more about the prison by looking elsewhere right by not looking at it directly and by considering the other sites or it sort of expanded geography so the film never actually shows us a prison. So I think I'd like to ask you all about how you see your own work maybe offering architecture some different methodologies or epistemologies or ways of seeing or making sense of the prison and I don't want to like give answers to anyone but I can't help but think that you know for James something that you sort of picked up on in this presentation but you didn't fully articulate was this idea of reading a legal ruling architecturally and so what it means to read a legal ruling and the question of Visinich architecturally and Leslie it's the sort of impossible task of writing like an incredibly long spatial history of one site. It's the idea of approaching an archive differently which I think also Adrienne your work touches on too with the rent parties like you know scant archive because of how dark and how sweaty it was I don't know so I think there are some things that you all are proposing to architecture beyond the sites themselves in this first group they have to do more of making sense and registering some of the sort of violences and resistances. Sorry that was long but hopefully kicks it off. I don't mind going first since mine you sort of answered the question which I appreciate because the idea of Visinich that Isabel is referring to it comes from Supreme Court ruling sorry Virginia Supreme Court ruling that revolved around the Virginia State Penitentiary which was the the ruling that articulated this idea of the slave of the state the idea that the 13th amendment of course gave the state this sort of rights over the labor of its slaves and this this court case came about because one of the laborers who was building the coal railroad for the CNO in another county in Virginia tried to escape and in the process ended up killing the guard who tried to apprehend him and so there is a sort of a court case about this and the sort of interesting quirk of the ruling was that he appealed it on the grounds that the crime didn't happen in Richmond in the Penitentiary but it happened on the site on on the CNO site in another county of Virginia and the court ruled that he could be tried in Richmond as a resident of the Penitentiary because as a prisoner he is always within Penitentiary which is sort of a kind of mystifying legal concept that that means that incarceration is in that sense a sort of mobile phenomenon that it follows you wherever you are which I think is both a sort of deeply a kind of sinister and evocative idea of incarceration but I think it's also one that has important effects for how we think about architecture and its participation that if we no longer confine it to the sort of familiar bounded object and bounded discipline of architecture but understand it as a sort of connective tissue where the the work of incarceration is ongoing elsewhere all the time I think this idea of viscinage ends up being a sort of 19th century concept with some very provocative ideas for how we think about these objects in the 21st. I mean if I could just follow up on James's really great fantastic example that is fascinating I would just maybe add to to what you're saying and maybe thinking is it's really the logic of captivity and the enclosure you know that the the metaphor of blackness always serves to enclose and create the black body that is you know that is that is captive you know kind of always already by its designation of black and then there are architectures from the plantation you know the quotes that Isabella was showing at the beginning to the ghetto to the favela you know I mean all of these spaces serve to enclose in order to extract you know whatever is whether it's labor capital and so forth and I think that example sort of really points to how it's operative still I think there's some to follow up on that is kind of interesting to think about the work that architecture is doing in terms of categorization both the material architecture but also the legal architecture of creating and reinforcing these categories and that through that categorization is how differently embodied folks differently positioned folks kind of get marked for different kinds of extraction in different kinds of control and like that's so that that labor of doing that marking out is fundamental I might ask another question to sort of follow up on this idea of establishing certain categories which was also brought up in your presentation but this idea that understanding carceral society through a set of contradictions or that the carceral state produces and is produced by a set of binaries and so some of these have come up already like freedom unfreedom ability immobility but I'd be curious to hear about how you all see your contributions evidencing some of these contradictions very specifically or providing a different set of extremes to account for and I don't know I think a lot about this again and Adrienne in your piece this idea of the impossibility of both of or the power of staying put in a discriminatory rental regime that makes staying put very difficult and which is also coupled with again like a system of policing that renders mobile black Americans at this moment immobile and so again the sort of impossibility of these two conditions um yeah maybe I'd be happy to jump in with some some thoughts on this um yeah I mean I listening to all of you talk about architecture I couldn't help but think about geography which is the discipline I come from and especially the sort of notion of placemaking um placemaking really you know geography is a kind of radical prompt to think about placemaking as a human activity right the the mobilization and the amalgamation of resources power people put space and I feel like there's something at least in sort of the the thinking I've done around my own work part of the problem with for me about gazing too directly at the prison as an architecture is that it it in in just being manifest it presents itself as always having existed right and so so the sort of abolitionist call is to imagine the possibility of something else anything else um and I think that there's a way in which um that can be true along a set of a set of sites you know there's a way in which the thing at first glance disguises its own contradictions and disguises um and disables the possibility of of thinking differently about it so I think for example of the example of a prison firefighters right because this is you know again the prison prison fire camps in california especially are so much in the news right now and and again at immediate glance this is a group of people who are incarcerated and who are forced to fight wildfires they're not given a choice and are paid you know less than two dollars a day so at first glance it is absolutely an example of exploited labor and yet something about that um that that thing that it appears to be and in some ways is disguises the contradiction so if you talk to anyone who actually um or most people that that are incarcerated and who work in these fire camps it's a really coveted position people want to be out for the most part uh fighting wildfires they don't want to be incarcerated of course um but there is the sort of forced immobility the the idling of people's capacity um what that does to one's psyche and and sense of self-worth all of these are part of the degradations of the prison system so there's a there's a kind a way in which um at least the people I've spoken to find is uh that there's a there's a form of freedom in a situation of un profound unfreedom in fighting these wildfires so should that you know make us think that this is not exploited labor or that exploitation isn't part and parcel of how the the prison system functions no but it is a contradiction that I think being able to see and see differently helps us think think differently about um how to direct action um towards transformation I guess Brett you could also add I was thinking as you were talking that um even beyond the position of the sort of like the criminalizing the valorized position of incarcerated firefighters but it's also that in your piece you also do talk about you know the that with climate change extraordinary crises like this are made ordinary or the new norm and so they're sort of recurring frequency of these moments of crisis um again become establish a sort of normalized and naturalized condition um so that might be another also way into some of the questions you're talking about I mean I also think like just thinking about that that that this is why you know the sort of the tradition um of prison abolition is so useful not just for people critical of of the carceral state and racial capitalism but really like as a as a method for thinking about all sorts of crises so the crises of climate change you know I like to adopt the abolitionist formulation of thinking about climate change which is not this why does climate change exist or how can we you know have it be different but also what kind of what kinds of ways of organizing human relations social relations produce the possibility of climate change in the in the first place what needs to be transformed so that climate change isn't a possibility anyone else have any questions or thoughts that might tie to the next set of or your own presentation in the next round otherwise I do get the cue from Lila that we're kind of on schedule and we could move into the next round if we want um unless anyone has other thoughts doesn't have to be super um relevant to what's been said already I have a question from the audience that maybe we can bring in and maybe this um can be directed at Leslie but um this uh member from the audience would like to understand the concept of silence and how do you read through your inquiries silence of architecture with power um and all the prison chain chain there is a silence as a power as a territory or geography and social life and building inclusion and exclusion um it's about fight against group and against reality so maybe you guys can address how you see silence as a form of resistance yeah so I think in this piece I'm thinking a lot about um the way that student silence in school spaces is often used to judge the efficacy of a classroom space so silence means compliance and so thinking about the representation of student subjectivities um and the way that they're framed by architectural space um how do we how can we rethink what it means to be supposedly silent um and how might that not be how might silence have a lower sonic frequency uh that when we call it silence we're we're actually missing something we're missing something else and a refusal to be categorized um in this piece I look at images of uh students from boon uh throughout the the 50s 60s in the 70s boon school is a public school the disciplinary school that I talk about um and they appear in these in these uh newspaper archives as um a tough kids uh constantly sort of uh being imaged as as uh or written about rather as being tough but yet uh in these images they present themselves in a very different way um and I think that it's important to sort of make sure that we're not reading these images as as as completely silent and really sort of understanding the nuance of what these students are saying about themselves in their own sort of um capacity to to to exist um in educational spaces I think we should just jump right in because we we uh had fewer folks in the first first round I think it'll be good to keep some momentum going but thank you everyone it's so difficult this the every piece in this book is so sprawling and it seems impossible to present something in five minutes but um hi everyone my name is Steve um I just wanted to thank Isabelle for um all her work on this project she began by saying no one writes alone and I really felt that throughout this project um I was sharing some of this research right before the pandemic hit and after my talk about which I'll tell you about in this moment but after my talk a chemist came up to me and said I wear protective equipment in my lab to protect me protect me from my research what do you do to protect yourself from your research and I didn't have an answer at that moment but in the in the subsequent months I thought that actually other people are about my production and kind of Isabelle's way of editing really made me feel that and I'm very grateful for it and excited to be here um so I'm going to do just keep it simple I'm just going to quickly tell you the kind of context of my piece and then read two quotes from it that get to the kind of heart of what I'm trying to think about overall I'm trying to think about in a new project about how the prison targets feelings and so in this project I look at a prison control unit that was built in Lexington Kentucky in 1987 to hold revolutionary women um Susan Rosenberg and Alejandra Torres were arrested for their involvement in the Black Liberation Puerto Rican Liberation and anti-imperialist movements in the 1970s and 80s and they were put in an underground prison in Lexington Kentucky the prison was designed specifically to destroy their ability to feel and sense the world and so my piece tries to think about how this new form of architecture emerges to destroy feelings but also that its attempt to destroy feelings always fails and so I just want to read two quick passages one from Rosenberg and a second from a poem from a different political prisoner about how the how the architecture fails to regulate feelings but the first passage is about the power of this new unit and what it does to Rosenberg's body and to her senses and to her affects and to her feelings so here's the first passage from Susan Rosenberg a white lesbian anti-imperialist held in this underground prison in Lexington Kentucky we stood at the electronically controlled metal gate under the eye of one of 11 security cameras surrounded by unidentified men in business suits we were wearing newly issued beige short sleeve shirts culottes and plastic slippers we were in handcuffs an unidentified man had ordered us placed in restraints while walking from one end of the basement to the other the lights were neon fluorescent burning and bright and everything was snow white floors walls and ceilings there was no sound except the humming of the lights and nothing stirred in the air being there at the gate looking down the cell block made my ears ring and my breath quicken so one of the things the architectural design of this unit did was it it it actually attempted to numb the women's ability to feel and so over time they slowly developed temporary blindness panic attacks some few of them lost hearing kind of their senses were just completely disassembled by the architectural design of this control unit prison um nevertheless they fought it uh through a uh lawsuit and also through writing and my my essay focuses on and on what writing did effectively to kind of combat combat the violence of this unit um so I just want to end um by thinking about that kind of one dynamic of the prison's attempt to kind of capture and destroy people's feelings and um quickly I want to say I just realized I meant to say that um the warden of the unit explicitly said the goal of the unit was to make the women renounce their revolutionary beliefs so he explicitly said like he explicitly said to them if you renounced your beliefs if you change your feelings you can go to the general population and so there's this also relationship the essay looks at between architecture and not just the kind of controlling of feelings in general but particularly of insurgent and revolutionary and rebellious feelings um but I just want to end by reading a poem from Katya Kamisarek who was a political prisoner also in the 1980s the poem is called They Are Searching and she was arrested after destroying a nav star computer designed a nav star computer which was designed to guide nuclear missiles she broke into an air base and destroyed the computer in the late 1980s and was imprisoned for five years for that action um and I'm going to read a poem she wrote about the architecture of the prison she was in but also and what it was trying to do to her beliefs and to her feelings but also that um the architecture fundamentally failed and it's objective to to um to capture her desires and her feelings so here's the poem um They Are Searching the officer puts out his hand as I leave building C I give him my jacket and he checks the pockets the walk to my housing unit is 100 yards I keep my back straight in my head high cameras mounted on poles and walls relay my progress to monitoring screens and building A more guards watch through the mirrored windows of building B as I approach at the door another cop awaits to explore my jacket again finishing she gestures with on hand indicating that I should turn my back to her now I stand with feet apart arms stretched horizontally as she as she explores my thighs I stare into the distance demanding that my feet stay dis dis interested and undisturbed do they think it is so easy to find do they imagine I will surrender it simply because they simply because they force me to spread my legs while they investigate fools I've never hidden it I care I carry it sorry fools I've never hidden it I carry it openly all the time and their kind attentions simply make it larger thank you um I want to start by also just acknowledging all of the work that Isabelle has put into this and to talk a little bit also about the the context of my piece and of the the writing and republishing of of this piece so when when Isabelle first contacted me I was in the bush working and supporting an indigenous land defense space in so-called northern British Columbia um and at the time I was considering writing an entirely new piece specifically on the criminalization of indigenous land defense but was so actively criminalized as I was out there that I was unable to write something new so what we did is republish the piece that Isabelle first came to and published it with a bit of an addendum updating the situation on what sewed in territories as as I was sort of finishing up the piece so the the original piece on invasive infrastructures follows up on Patrick Wolfe's consideration of settler colonialism as a structure not an event and then draws that thread to think about the environment and to think about oil and gas infrastructures as infrastructures of invasion and so I'm trying to think about uh the material sort of impacts of oil and gas infrastructure and of resource extraction and how these create spaces of unfreedom for indigenous people on our territories um and also contribute to the criminalization and continued criminalization of indigenous land defenders who are reoccupying territories in the face of oil and gas exploitation so I sort of take up this idea of infrastructure and I think that's where it kind of connects more to architecture which I don't have any formal connection to as a discipline that when we again when we when we return to to protect the land and water as indigenous peoples that were cast as criminals and so not only do we have oil and gas infrastructures functioning as infrastructures of invasion then indigenous land defense becomes a kind of pipeline to prison as our actions are criminalized and indigenous life is criminalized on on indigenous territories um so I want to to share a few images which I'll try to do now I don't know if it'll get to get to that because it's not really my computer's not well set up zoom doesn't want to do it for me right now but so what I'll point people to is the um short film called invasion uh which details what's happening on what's in territory over the past couple of years um and so I've been thinking a lot about the the infrastructures that indigenous people are turning to in response to the invasions of oil and gas and what we build in terms of the relations with the land and water and and what the infrastructures are that that we are attending to and moving into to build futures that are livable on our territories and so um there there's a kind of response to these invasive infrastructures uh in the built environment on what's out in territory and so I was thinking specifically uh of showing images and you can see some of these in the in the short film invasion of the gates that protect access to the territory and insist that people entering gain consent from indigenous people before they enter of the the infrastructures of blockade that are meant to um sort of prevent oil and gas invasion um an invasion of police and then the infrastructure of the healing center where Frida Houston and her family um New Stoughton people have built up um a space for recovery on indigenous territories where people can return to the land um and be with the land and water as they are recovering from all forms of colonial trauma uh and additionally I wanted to show an image of a recently built smokehouse uh where we smoke fish and and meat and moose and all sorts of things that were are pulled from the land for indigenous survival and there is an image that shows a police officer patrolling the area near the smokehouse with a semi-automatic weapon and so there's this this a shift from um sort of pulling indigenous peoples onto reservations and creating that as a space and then when we return to the territories of our ancestors those territories are then patrolled and policed um and we're surveilled and so it creates more spaces of unfreedom um so I wanted to sort of draw attention to the ongoing uh effects of that on what's out in territory um which I point to at the beginning of the piece um where I talk about my own experience of criminalization on what's out in territory uh in the early months of this year um with police raids and continued invasion of that space so I had invited anyone who's interested to um look up the what's out in struggle if you aren't already paying attention to it and to check out the film invasion to help bring you up to the speed on what's happening on the territory thank you hi everybody this is Dylan um I apologize for being late I was coming from another from another uh meeting uh so I'll talk um I'll try to crystallize some of the points that I try to make in my in my in my contribution to the collection and then end with some some thoughts um that maybe we can collectively consider in this historical moment that we're having uh so my collection my contribution to the book departs from really two uh inseparable problems that have to do with the canonization of the phrase the rhetoric if you want to call it a paradigm uh of mass incarceration over the last decade or so I think it's probably mostly due to the circulation of Michelle Alexander's widely read though deeply flawed book uh the new Jim Crow uh and but but I think that there's roots to the rise and ascendancy of this phrase mass incarceration that precede publication of that book um on the one hand the the thing I'm I'm trying to engage with is how the rhetoric and paradigm of mass incarceration actually re-inscribes amplifies you know in deepens the cultural political logics of what I've recently been calling the laugh half the ongoing half century that we're inhabiting of of white reconstruction um the the way in which this phrase subsumes the mass of all incarcerated people under an undifferentiated notion of mass is in in a really bizarre way um a kind of liberal progressive attempt to sneak in all lives matter rubric through the back door and that is that is conceding the fact that many folks when they say mass incarceration really mean mass black incarceration right they mean targeted incarceration but I just want to challenge the institutionalization and canonization of that phrase in particular um the second thing that this is tied to as well uh is this liberal progressive reformist discourse that has really emerged with eagerness and enthusiasm through the mass incarceration paradigm that actively ignores obscures and erases the complexities of what I want to call carceral domestic war um including in especially what we have come to name as anti-black policing and criminalization and and especially in the constant production of asymmetrical casualties I mean that's what warfare is right it's asymmetrical casualties that are normalized through protocols of criminal justice so those are the two things I'm trying to address in the in the um critique polemic analysis whatever you want to call it of the chapter that I contribute to this book so let me just say a word about domestic war when I when I use that phrase I'm talking about the ensemble of state technologies uh that that that traverse the militarized to the cultural I'm talking about the various ways that um targeted populations are disciplined contain socially neutralized politically disciplined and so forth particularly when when when those targeted populations meaning meaning liberation oriented abolitionist oriented uprising black populations um anti-colonial and decolonizing sovereignty and self-determination oriented indigenous and native populations um you know people engage with the work of queer liberation trans liberation so forth radical feminism so forth right uh that that that against the compartmentalized notion of mass incarceration I'm trying to think about US carceral domestic war as a historical continuity as something that that that that traverses institutions geographies um and histories of deindustrialization and racial capitalism um and also I think links the historically consistent resurgence of white nationalism including respectable liberal variations of white nationalism including post-racial variations of white nationalism um and which then speaks to the persistence of of the creative human praxis that that seeks abolitionist forms of liberation um so what I'm arguing in the chapter is that the rhetoric and paradigm of mass incarceration not only fraudulently universalizes the fallout of asymmetrical carceral domestic war but but also serves to label a complex totality um in the most reductive possible terms um I'm late to this call because I was on another call where I was talking about how the problem with sound bite analysis is that it's actually dangerous that that that it that it radically reduces and simplifies um complex formations of state violence and um and kind of preempts the kind of robust analysis that we need especially especially if we're going to be engaged in abolition of struggle uh the last thing I want to say is that I have to always emphasize that um everything I do and a lot of what I'm hearing y'all doing is really indebted to um the collective work that we do um especially I want to thank the way that Isabel has led us in doing this collective work uh to me it's one of the best I think most most generous and graceful indications of what abolitionist praxis can be is this kind of collective thinking and collective sharing uh collective struggle and I want to say I'm honored to be in communion with y'all um especially those y'all that are that are thinking about yourselves as part of this abolitionist tradition that are trying to show how uh the the conventions of reform of U.S. criminal justice and in carceral war are actually part of the expansion and multiplication of carceral institutions um and so I'm here with you because I um am enjoying being part of this I think rapidly emerging struggle that we're undertaking together um to actually completely abolish and transform this carceral form that we're in and this this book is one small but significant contribution to that I'll stop there thank you goody good evening everyone my name is Jared Martin Drake and uh I am happy to be here for this launch tonight I am currently in New Orleans where I just landed and it is pitch black I am in the dark um but I really wanted to be here and um and participate in this in this event so um I'll start just by sharing briefly how my essay came together then I'll say a little bit about where I think my work is headed next and lastly I'll finish with how and why any of this matters for architecture a field that I barely have any knowledge of if we're being honest but I have a good friend who studied it in college so uh and he's black by the way so I've got a black friend who studied architecture in college can't be races at all um I'm black by the way y'all can't see me but uh it wasn't clear um okay so roughly two years ago the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women reached out to me and invited me to get the keynote address at the college's annual scholar and feminist conference whose theme that year was entitled the politics and ethics of the archive I first thought her email was spam then after realizing it wasn't I almost declined the invite for the simple reason that I thought this opportunity to speak as such a story plays should be offered to someone other than a cisgender heterosexual man but my collaborator in all things Karina Barris disagreed she said they would they wouldn't have asked me if they didn't think I had something worth saying so I want to say to her Karina thank you for affirming me then and now so my chapter in this book is derived from the keynote address but if you were to watch the address or read this text you would notice a big difference between that talk in my chapter here and my address at Barnard in February of 2019 I make no mention of anything about the museum at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola hell I didn't even know that the museum existed but after my address a woman by the name of Charlie Eagle approached me in the auditorium and asked for my thoughts about the museum at the largest prison in the United States I incredulously thought there's a museum at the largest prison in the US I probably didn't say that aloud to Charlotte but I for sure thought it but what I do want to say aloud is a thank you to Charlotte because ever since she brought this museum to my attention I haven't been able to stop thinking about how the past gets activated into the present and to what end I haven't been able to stop thinking about how memory is marshaled into service for subjugation or how claims about yesterday are always claims about tomorrow so be clear my chapter in this volume doesn't speak exactly to those to those points instead processing power makes a case for seeing how and where the prison presents itself beyond the bars and barbed wire that ported them but I wouldn't be where I am now without having had the chance to think so deeply about these issues for which I owe another set of thanks to Isabel for inviting me to try some of their thinking in this book so where I am right now yeah just landed in New Orleans an hour ago and I'm here ostensibly to begin building relationships with people and organizers as I set out to do my dissertation which tentatively will situate Angola's past as a slave plantation alongside Angola's present as a prison but because of hurricane just hit here two days ago and because my ass is even sitting in the dark I'm probably going to spend most of the next four days helping folks out wherever I can I imagine I might be giving people rides cleaning up debris and assistant folks as they try to build again what was destroyed it's on that point of building again that I want to finish with concluding thought for architecture remember I have a black friend who studied architecture in college so I am definitely not racist but anyway from January until June I read over a hundred books about artists in articles about prisons jails detention centers and all sorts of crossroads space I even learned the definition of that term crossroads space from breast stories book prison land which I encourage everyone to read if you haven't I also read stuff from two more contributors to this book Dylan Rodriguez and Stefan Devin my bad if I mispronounce their name Dylan um but your first name but if I had to name one text that influenced me the most um in that process it would probably be Ruth Wilson Gilmour's golden gulag everybody told me that it was a profound book but they didn't tell me why so let me tell you people in architecture why it's a profound book and how it relates to your work Gilmore makes it painstakingly clear that as much as anything the prison bone in California was a project of planning in other words it wasn't just Governor Ronald Reagan being the rank and file racist that he was as true as that may be nor was it the case that people living in rural communities woke up and one day wrote their elected officials asking for a prison to bring them jobs the prisons rarely actually delivered anyway prisons Gilmore helps us see must be planned for they are beats of project management as much as they might be anything else prisons in this sense don't plan themselves they don't design themselves and they certainly don't build themselves and prisons sure still won't abolish themselves but again to reference Gilmore abolition is about presence it's about creating the news it's about building up as well as building out those are the stakes for people in architecture to charge to imagine your work and further into the world without prisons without policing and the logic that propelled them I of course have no clue how you're going to do it but I believe in you to figure it out because I trust you you can do this my black friend told me so and I'm telling you all right thank you um and I'm sorry I won't be able to participate in the discussion I have to figure out where I'm gonna sleep tonight all right hi I'm Wendy um before I jump in I just want to echo statements here I am incredibly thankful and humbled to be included this with within this book amongst people whose work I both teach and cite regularly regularly so thank you to my co-authors for teaching me so much and a special thanks to Isabel for both for including me in the book but also for being a generous and profoundly adept editor and helping me get my chapter to where I needed it to be um I don't start with a few questions um first what does it mean to become data uh what kind of people are data people if we're all becoming data what does it mean to be differently positioned differently erased differently criminalized data and what does it mean if our primary agent of data extraction is the state or capital uh in writing this chapter in thinking about how architecture might confront the carceral I got sort of stuck on the transformation of space itself by a technologies of surveillance deployed both by the state in new forms of e-carceration but also by private capital as data becomes the surplus value most constantly extracted and I want to pose that the logic of the prison is at the heart of the logic of surveillance even as that surveillance spins out over different forms in different people and becomes somewhat unrecognizable thus to understand the politics of the prison will also be to understand the politics of surveillance even as those forms appear differently in the data economy human experience preferences are bodily responses are extracted and transformed into data commodities the person is made invisible behind the data extracted while 20th century capitalist industrialization maximized the extractive possibilities of market consumption 21st century data capitalism transforms all human activity into raw material to be extracted processed and rendered for profit activity as subtle as which direction your eye flicks when something comes across your field has the feedback loop of surveillance extraction and further surveillance intensifies I suggest that the control of this loop by both private and public entities reaches towards becoming a totalizing space an inescapable place wherein choice step choice sets and outcomes are predetermined by the needs of racial state capitalism rather than the self-determining individual all the while reorganizing and transfiguring racial and colonial orders so as to maintain and reimpose the different extractive demands across positionalities simultaneously however in the private sphere the extraction process appears both invisible and agentless invisible as to show how data is collected by us closed circuit cameras applying ever more intensive algorithms agentless as we unlock our phones with our fingerprints and faces and resisting doing so is just pretending right however when we re-center the prisoner the miasma character of surveillance becomes solid again the mass experience is intensified in the facticity of the active extractive violent state slash corporate agent is made apparent the historical forms cannot escape view as the vice of iron is still felt thus the embodied locale of the prisoner becomes a central site of political clarity and also an essential sorts of political knowledge the state discloses itself in the brutal and bodily force of its surveillance even as it replicates the softer data extractive practices of the private sphere this disclosure is a crack in the total scheme and it's identifiable in the experiences of those targeted most intensively by the state in the chapter i quote james bainbridge on his experience of being subjected to electronics surveillance quote even in prison i didn't feel so overwhelmed with worry about doing something wrong when i'm doing something doing everything right and quote the contradiction is in the felt experience the felt experience declared is resistance and creates the foundations for a politics of rebellion to back to my first questions here i'm going to answer a little bit perhaps as data we do not exist humanity is ever more reduced to the value that can be extracted gleaned and scraped data people are apolitical but in the differentiation of experience in romantic terms by recentering uh the kind of crux of violence hope becomes against the total becomes again possible thank you thank you um windy um and i just want to say um thank you to isabel for making you know what i think is a really remarkable timely volume um that i i think the i i think the profession really needs to be attentive to um and all you know just architects but all of those who are stewards of the built environment um so my contribution um to the volume um is about an encounter in the archive um where scholars typically seek evidence of architectural genius but instead i found a historical drawing that for me was a sobering unearthing of the tent and that was that the the captivity of black bodies to render them fungible had always been by design and so i start um with um um an event in in 2014 um when the organization called architects designers planners for social responsibility uh based in san francisco requested that the american institute of architects the aida adopt a role for prohibiting architects from designing buildings specifically for the purpose of execution torture in in solitary confinement and back then the the professional organization declined and so i think that that history can clue us into the privileges the wealth the freedom that spaces of incarceration um and spaces of institutional violence make uh possible and so i want to um just share an excerpt from the um from my essay a proponent of natural rights that all men are born free thomas jefferson had advocated for the incremental emancipation of slaves and for the elimination of the international slave trade early in his career political career but emancipation could only be successful as a national enterprise if blacks he claimed once free left the united states and immigrated to the colonies in the west indies or africa he asked in a notes of a state of virginia quote why not retain and incorporate blacks into the state and his response was quote deep root of prejudice entertained by whites 10 000 recollections by blacks of the injuries they have sustained new provocations the real distinctions which nature has made in quote jefferson's proposition which paralleled similar movements in english that established the era sierra leone in 1787 would become the foundation for the colonization movement in the united states the american colonization society was founded in 1816 whose members included architects way important who uh uh was an architect for the u.s capital and also the son of the british architect benjamin henry litrope also an architect for the capital with the foundation of liberia in 1821 by the united states integration of blacks into the fabric of of the nation was not a desired course of action the colonization movement which formed an alliance between white northern abolitionists and mid-atlantic slaveholders who held similar views to jefferson's tassily agreed that there was no place for the freed negro in america's democratic society or within its national boundaries so we can now return to jefferson's 1823 design for the county prison and unpack the significance of his cells reserved on the right middle and rear for as identified in the drawing black men and women it is notable that jefferson did not include the labels of debtor or criminal on these cells rather they were most likely designed to hold captured slaves who had escaped either from their masters or while in transit westward for sale and the uh to till in the frontier territories created from jefferson's purchase of the louisiana territory in other words these prison cells served as holding cells for private property authorities rarely incarcerated enslaved men and women for criminal activity but instead implemented harsh measures beatings or death from proper or unlawful behavior unless the public prosecution of a slave's criminal deeds such as the plotting of insurrection murder or violence against a white person could function as a deterrent to slave disobedience disciplining the slave body fell into jurisdiction of their owners who mediated up various forms of punishment for minor infractions the fabrication and use of iron shackles collars bridles and regular display of punitive justice at the whipping post within the slave quarters where regimes of violence deployed by owners slavers overseers and slave patrols to subdue a person and maintain lawful submissive behavior the black enslaved body became the site of what's idea heartman calls quote rootinized violence of slavery and quote through these means southerners made the disciplining of slave populations a private rather than public matter which was also an attempt to keep the dispute over slavery's inhumanity out of the public space of political debate but the two black cells would also have held free black men and women who had committed crimes fearing freed slaves would become a financial burden undermine the wages of white workers pose a criminal threat or incite slave rebellions virginian 1793 restricted the migration of freed blacks to the state and required that manumitted men or women either register with local authorities or leave the state of virginia within a year of their liberation failure to migrate would entail forfeiture of their freedom any freed black person caught committing a crime would be arrested and depending on the severity of the crime possibly sold black back into slavery freed blacks were given higher penalties and longer sentences for criminal acts despite a lack of civil civil liberties civil liberties freedom of movement higher taxes and the threat of violence and enslavement many freed blacks chose to remain near enslaved family members by 1820 some 30 000 free people resided in virginia virginia like other southern states refused to recognize the humanity and equality of black people to be of african descent in antebellum virginia meant one could only live as property in the system of chattel slavery certainly to be free and black was an anomaly lacking rights and citizenship and reduced to the status of a possession blacks were dehumanized under virginia's law the very laws which constituted the spaces of everyday life jefferson like many of the ruling planter class had defended his entire life enslaved enslaved blacks to take care of his family's personal needs wherever he traveled and to work his various plantations in virginia through his prison plan for nearby cumberland and nelson counties jefferson had designed a racialized apparatus of modern incarceration a topology of captivity and violence that has continued to evolve through the 21st century that was so rich i was distracted just looking up mabel's forthcoming book i'm so thrilled to be a part of this uh publication part of this uh book launch um just huge amounts of thanks to isabel and to the other contributors likewise um citing you all uh teaching you all and um just really inspired to see the ways that prison studies is growing in all of these deeply intersectional interdisciplinary ways um because of the ways as uh steven dylan again i'm also unsure of how to pronounce first name um speaks of in uh his essay in uh captive genders the carceral logics of the prison industrial complex are much more robust than the brick and mortar prisons um that we study and so being able to trace and track the imprint of those logics and that carceral power particularly in domestic space is uh what i focused on in my essay i'm really curious about how people you know beginning with the first time i read malcolm x like how do people uh within captive spaces imagine freedom how do they move towards freedom like what are the imaginations um of freedom that come from the places in which they call home so part of what i was doing is just thinking through kind of how has this particular moment uh really limited our imagination of freedom by limiting the spaces that we can call home and so many of us now during covid are experiencing exactly how confining um lack of affordable housing lack of affordable space to live for our families and teach our children and house our elders really is in this moment um without that space uh how do we begin to build the kinds of futures that we imagine for future generations so of course what i do is always look to the very limited spaces of um our current political climate and those who are most directly impacted by the prison industrial complex those who are most highly policed those who are most likely to be um criminalized just for their presence um and so looking to uh the poverty scholars i met the poverty scholars when i was uh just out of undergrad in san francisco looking to get involved in different kinds of radical action and movement and thought i was such a little badass and they checked me they checked me and checked my privilege and um it was a you know um the poverty scholars uh lisa tiny gray garcia and her mom d started poor news network poor magazine which is a poor led media journalism advocacy that uh institution that grew and grew and now they do education and now they're creating homelessness um which is a poor people solution to homelessness and the first essay that i wrote for them as part of their poverty scholars uh poverty school program was about gentrification in san francisco and so in the course of that you know i wrote up my little essay turned it in and was like hey i did my great you know student job and they were like actually no we need you to redo this um where are you in this you're a black person you just moved here you have an education in college how do you see yourself as part of the landscape of gentrification in san francisco and so i had to actually go back and rewrite it and account for myself and i feel like that is the contribution that tiny indeed really made for me in terms of thinking about fugitive home making and what does it mean for us to have an abolitionist praxis as professor roger you guys were saying that doesn't leave us out right who doesn't leave the academy out that doesn't leave academia out right what is our place within this work it really holds us accountable and so beginning to think with um my own kind of teacher spirit guide harry at jacob's about the relationship of accountability to abolition in these landscapes of carceral power became really really important and i'm really curious about fugitive home making and how we create spaces we call home in spaces that are deeply entrenched deeply constrained deeply conscripted by carceral power um so i'm just going to share a little bit i just really want to lift up the activism and visionary leadership of the poverty scholars in this work um and so i'm just going to share my screen and show you a little bit of what they're doing out in the west coast i am a poverty scholar that houses mama that houses daughter i'm a poverty scholar all those people you don't want to see never want to be look away from me what you're going to do arrest me or in your city i say i rock my jail house a target me and my po mama did jail time for the poverty crime of being housed in this occupied indigenous holler hopefulness is a homeless people solution a homelessness that me and ma came up with or sleeping in our car sleeping on the street sleeping in cardboard motels and shelter beds through what we call poverty scholarship we have built the solution that is homefulness that we're standing in right now poverty scholar here four magazine the homefulness project what you see right now the last five hundred and twenty five years that we as indigenous people have been dreaming the place like this and you're also found a community feeling uh what we call breaking break with our community sharing medicine sharing people used to say as i was an older teenager young adult you could leave your mama and be okay and i said that's funny what would happen to my mama then oh that doesn't matter at least you okay that's the cult of independence that they teach in america because they want you to see uh aloneness as normal i'll stop it there just to give you a taste i'm going to drop um the link to more information about poor news network and poor magazine and homefulness in the in the chat but mostly i just wanted to lift them up and show how folks in fugitive space are still creating the conditions of possibility for homefulness and um those are insurgent and emergent and um collaborative very deeply collaborative spaces where they're having to work through conflict and of course there's a critique of of carceral logics and carceral power and through that critique of carceral power as it moves through individuals there also has to be a kind of uh culture of accountability and being able to hold each other accountable through trauma through hardship um through uh grief is a praxis it's a praxis of uh of really reimagining what justice looks like and could look like in the future for all of us and so um i got inspiration for this project uh doing the work on harry jacob's and thinking about the kind of fugitive space that she creates first in the garret space through which she is uh you know looking through her little peep holes to keep a eye on her children where it is seven by nine foot crawl space where she is uh fugitive from slavery for seven years and she is a really uh great uh representation to me of how you have to keep fighting for freedom even once you are fugitive because of course for many of us there is no kind of legal recognition that will guarantee you protection under the law and so uh just wanting to lift up the legacies of abolitionist praxis that have their roots in 19th century abolition but continue into 21st century visions of it thanks so much thank you all so much um i and i was told that if i don't ask specific i that i need to ask specific questions but it's so antagonistic to how i think because i'm i really want us to start seeing across a lot of the work in this book um so i'm going to try to just do a question that i'm hoping you all can chime in on and if it doesn't work then i'll start calling people out um so jasmine uh jasmine i i want to thank you for something you said just now which is accounting for yourself and your writing um because this is something that i actually feel like um this has come up actually in a lot of the presentations today and and i think a lot of the work that we've been doing over the course of the year and as we were sort of gathering this book um and so i want to sort of talk really quickly on writing um and this is a question i think that touches many pieces um but i'll say ann and steve yours as well um so ann you also had mentioned that you know we just republished a piece of yours and i and i actually think what is really striking about your contribution is its form which of course we didn't intend which you spoke about um so you did write a letter which or at least we're calling it sort of a letter or an upfront post script to the piece that we ended up republishing um which a lot in a lot of ways records um the quality of your life as you are fighting the coastal gas link and the rcmp for with suicide sovereignty um and it functioned as a functioned as a record i think of a lot of things um of course that's sort of the a racial of racial colonial violence um but i think for me it also functions um as a record of sort of what is at stake in sort of daily intellectual academic life under territorial occupation and how that you know with so much energy going towards fighting against the sort of brutalization the lynching the killing and destruction of black brown and native life this question of exhaustion and burnout um is really felt and so um i don't know i i think that this is maybe a long way of just saying i'd love to hear everyone sees sort of questions of writing um and the sort of emotional intellectual toll that um that we find sort of happening um under sort of carceral state violence um how that might be understood sort of as a tactic and um how we might also have to turn to other forms of writing so you were you wrote a letter that that was that accounted for yourself and your world over the course of a year um and so again jasmine it's this idea that you're bringing in accounting for yourself in your writing and you have to find new ways of writing um in a lot of ways and with steve too you sort of brought in the you read a poem and you included you know again uh writing as a way to sort of like escape the the sort of constraints of the prison and so i don't know i guess this is just a way of asking everyone to sort of comment on um the ways that we the ways that we write in this moment and how we might sort of build um new forms of sort of knowledge and counter knowledge archives counter archives things like that that makes sense can comment on that i um what what i think is interesting about how uh the the original piece and then um the sort of prescript postscript is is laid out um this piece was the the last academic piece that i wrote before i entered the field um and then i i sort of been out in the bush for about three years um and uh the the piece the letter that i wrote um was after my arrest uh at at the what so would in checkpoint and was the sort of the first piece of writing that i really sort of put out in the world after after that so um i think during my time out there um i it didn't feel possible to write something in the same form anymore the the kinds of citation the kinds of research that i that i needed to do to pull together the the original piece um just felt impossible and kind of irrelevant in that space um and what what felt necessary was to uh to respond and to update um and to to kind of provide a report from from the emotional space as well of that um and i'm actually surprised i got you anything in that moment i you know i'm still working through the the trauma of being in a space that's uh sort of subject to a tactical raid um by police and uh sort of working through you know what it means to to be working in that space um and the the really sort of dead eyed logistical uh violence um that were subject to uh as they came to dismantle and this is something that i didn't really talk about as much as they came to dismantle the architectures that we had set up to protect the territory um so the gates and uh the that we had a a a watch tower um that we were on and the sort of like uh yeah just the the real really sort of planned logistical dismantling of of those spaces i think it's something that um it's hard hard to write about it but also i think it's important to write from write from a personal position in that place because it's something that not many people actually witness um and then the continued surveillance and harassment of police on the territory in spaces where you're not used to seeing them and that's the kind of like update to the update is you know the we've got armed police officers showing up in the middle of the bush in places that you can only walk to um when they're out at the smoke houses and spaces by the river um it's a really jarring thing to think that you could encounter um an armed police officer on a on a sort of remote trail um out hunting and so they're inserting themselves in these spaces in in a way to i think control the our emotional lives and to make us feel unsafe um and to make us feel like we're not meant to be in the spaces we're in doing the activities we're doing um so i think there's there's an element to that that uh i'm thinking about the ways that that works as as a kind of carceral geography i'm thinking about the ways that they're um you know they kind of get their fingers into spaces that they weren't before um and into our into our heads to be honest um as we sort of second guess where the spaces that we thought were safe or not are no longer safe um and and we're being watched as sort of all time so i'm thinking more about how that works in ways that are architectural in ways that maybe aren't um as as this fight continues steve can i push you to talk a little bit about the role of writing um yes i was just about specifically about also to the um this came up again but the sort of the archive and its relationship to producing forms of accountability yeah one of the things i get into in in uh the last half of the essay and i this is actually just a thread through all my work is how do you essentially the women held in the the the women held in the unit said they were sexually assaulted said the walls were white said the lights were on all night and in the court case the federal bureau of prisons responded you were not sexually assaulted the walls are actually earth toned the um the cells are the women said the cells were nine by ten and the federal bureau of prisons said no they're ten by ten so there was this ongoing struggle about what the truth is and how to categorize it and susan rozenberg's lawyer tells her to write down her experiences not necessarily for the legal record because the legal record will not recognize the truth they're experiencing but for her own record and so her memoir and the memoirs of of other um imprisoned revolutionary women become a kind of alternative archive of state violence that actually the state cannot and will not recognize as violence and this is something i think like uh during professor wilson's talk i was just wondering about like we don't have the histories of the people who may who are held inside um all sorts of spaces of captivity inside of slavery and so this is where like tony morrison's work becomes in surely and williams work becomes so important in terms of recovering histories through the imagination and through the novel and i guess how does plug sarah hailey's absolutely incredible book no mercy here where she recovers the histories of black women in the comic lee system but she also keeps saying throughout the book perhaps perhaps perhaps perhaps she felt this way perhaps this thing happened perhaps this happened to her perhaps the judge said this and perhaps she responded in this way because the record just does not exist and so in recovering a kind of absolutely a history that cannot be recovered uh hailey and so many black feminist historians turn to the imagination and so that's the kind of place my my piece ends is what is writing due in relation to how the state archives violence and actually violence it cannot archive yeah just to kind of piggyback on that one of the things that we were just reading in uh the class that i'm teaching right now called policing the planet inspired by uh the work in the field that's been happening so recently um is uh we were reading uh rashad shabazz's spatializing blackness and it's a chapter on the kitchenettes in the black belt in chicago in the interwar period and the fact that he uses literature um richard rights native sun in order to think through uh a site that again like delin was saying like is obscured by the archive in some ways like what was it like to be contained within those uh kitchenette spaces which within those small living spaces what kinds of uh feelings did that uh space create um he's able to map that out through bigger thomas's narrative arc in a way that he wouldn't otherwise be able to do and so again being able to draw from different uh inspirations in science fiction and literature the magical realism that is part of of so many of those uh of those pieces really does help us think with the past and think again towards a different kind of future instead of taking for granted what we've been inheriting. Thank you all that was um really um inspiring to hear what you say um and I have sort of a separate question that is a bit more it sort of changes the gear but it also picks up a question that was I just noticed in the chat that I think is worth addressing um and it's a bit of a roundabout way of answering this question um but delin um I'm actually wondering if you could speak a bit more um about reform um as a sort of a false promise and tactic of maintaining the sort of structure of racial colonial violence thinking through sort of the limits and reality of reform as a project of renovation and ref and refurbishment I think is still a really powerful um is still really powerful in the context of architecture which really clings to the idea that architecture can reform um folks through good design or better design and can reform um or better bodies behaviors and systems and so the question in the chat was actually it also ties in a bit to what Mabel where Mabel starts her piece um which is the um the AIA's most recent statement um I think the question asks how do we take that into account which and I think the most recent statement was put into the chat but it essentially takes the first step to saying um acknowledging sort of acknowledging um that we um that architects can't perhaps reform this system the criminal justice system and this is actually the first moment I think that the AIA has started to to um hold itself accountable a tiny bit but again I really I think it's worth really um hammering in the point about reform and I'm hoping you can do that for us oh yeah absolutely so this is this is where everybody seems to be this is what everyone seems to be navigating and I mean when I say everyone I'm talking about academic scholars people engaged with different forms of community and social movement that are trying to address um the present iteration of domestic war um it's folks are folks a lot of folks are struggling around whether into what extent they can throw their energy and for lack of a better term their promises their promises to themselves to their communities to their loved ones and so forth behind reform um so I think we need to clarify first of all that reform is a logic of institutional reproduction um it doesn't mean it's inherently horrible but it does mean we need to be honest about what it is we are actually doing when we engage in a reform campaign we're actually sustaining the institution now that's not to say there is not completely principled abolitionist reasons to support particular focused kinds of reform in moments that it will minimize casualties right so so at its best reform is casualty management right and this is because I mean if I'm going to take my own analytics seriously of of the carceral form that we live in being a form of asymmetrical war that is proto genocidal if not genocidal in its logic then that shit just has to go right like then then the only principled position I can take is abolitionist at the very same time I need to also be engaged with other people in the immediate defense of of lives of bodies of and so that's casualty management now there's a difference between that and the political dogma of reformism that that reformism is a criminalizing dogma what what it says is that anything that pushes past the horizon of institutional reform is some combination of unfeasible adventurous you know irresponsible hyper ultra radical whatever whatever you would dangerous whatever you might want to call it right and what it does is is it disciplines imagination which is one of the primary forms of counterinsurgency right so that's my way of really addressing your question is to say that I would actually I would actually somewhat push at the premises of the question I don't think the problem is that reform is insufficient or that it's frozen I actually think that reform is entirely effective in what it's supposed to do as counterinsurgency reform is the violence y'all like this is the thing right we want to talk about oh you know there's reform curb the buy no no no no if we if we look at the modern forms of carceral domestic work reform has always been central to the violence we wouldn't be where we are right now there wouldn't be the the accelerated levels of anti-black policing unapologetic anti-black violence and murder right in the street and elsewhere in sites of incarceration if it wasn't for reform right reform actually produces those things which is also to say then that um if we if we're gonna take if we're gonna take the counters the counterinsurgency of reform seriously now we have to have an analysis of the architecture we have to have analysis of the built environment how is it that and it's be it's it's surveillance of course right that's where folks usually go first as they talk about surveillance right but but let's think about how it is that all of these different architectural forms um are are actually from from from the blueprint accounting for ways that state power asymmetrical targeted state power state violence is what I'm really saying right policing in particular can be deployed on the anticipated insurgents um and and so in different spaces that's going to be a different kind of kind of demography of people different targeted imagined targeted group but it is always that it is constitutive of the built environment and so um that's to say that you know there's the architecture and then there's also how one inhabits the architecture um which is which is also to say then that there's that I think there's there's interesting ways that that that the built environment architecture can be inhabited against itself and and can be turned into radical abolitionist liberationist anti-colonial decolonial forms feminist queer trans liberationist forms of self-defense right and there's complicated ways that happen some of the texts that y'all have just cited actually speak to that both in direct ways and indirect ways um so so I think I think I try to answer your question Isabel but I'm but but really it's just kind of to kind of situate how we even frame the premises of what reform is within within an analysis of you know the long the long archival history of what reforms actually do in relation to what we're talking about here and what the book is talking about no that's fantastic thank you um I think that was needed and actually I wonder to maybe if for folks who haven't read your chapter yet um could you just say like a little bit more about um reforms relationship or how you how you understand how it fits into the concept of white reconstruction because I think this might be a term that for especially an architect sure is is not super legible yeah what I'm trying to think about is how it is that that uh the kind of misnamed post civil rights period um meaning the period that's followed the formal abolition of Jim Crow apartheid in the United States has yielded to these these layer dense sequences of institutional and policy reform that have that have actually contributed to expanding the scope of um anti-black and racial colonial institutions and and violences in ways that are desegregated in ways that are diverse in ways that invite personnel participation and even kind of identification from the same populations that have historically been targeted for neutralization and destruction right that's the reconstruction the reconstruction is the diversity the reconstruction is the reform and that's why I keep saying that's that's the that's kind of the the the temporary genius of this of this of this counter insurgency um is is and you know there's ways that it particularly happens at the site of the university and this thing we call the academy as well um I see it happening I see tendencies of that happening all the time in the field of radical and abolitionist carceral studies right that there's that there's ways that that this gets kind of sucked into the same kind of kind of logic and and um in the work in our thinking gets interrupted or interrupted I should say it gets erupted it gets it gets kind of its foundations get get alienated from actual accountability to historical movements um so that's that's all part of this logic of what what I call white reconstruction so so so that's so the the notion itself is kind of deceptive because the notion that the idea is that white reconstructions actually profoundly uh uh selectively but profoundly diverse it invites you know I mean the non-normative subjects of the white world into participation and even leadership at times and so forth and so on so that's that's what I'm getting at that's what I mean when I say violence is uh reform is part of the counter insurgency can I oh no Mabel you go ahead I mean I was just going to say I mean you're um Dylan you're making me think about um because I've been thinking about this period post civil rights where you know there's a kind of logic we're all going to be integrated we're you know and I call myself a child if they're right that ain't happen and in fact there's just a whole other regime of genocide it wasn't for you know went from slavery and a certain kind of violence to Jim Crow with a certain kind of violence now we see a whole other regime of violence but I do think the trick was this idea of a kind of a return that the withering of the state and the privileging of the individual right so the neo liberal right is precisely the return because liberalism anyway wasn't you know it's always it was always imagined in relationship to that captive black body right that is exactly what the liberal was you were free and you were white right and so it might be that's why I say like the to be free and black was just it's not possible you cannot exist you have to be to be black is to always already be captive so like that return of the neo liberal is a kind of return back it's a it's it's like when they say originalism they really mean it if I can just jump in on that note let Amy Quinney Barrett in one of her essays on originalism um references the potentially illegitimate 14th amendment um it's a it's a striking quote uh it's about um the ratification and the ratification before the return of the Confederacy um I just wanted to quickly chime in on this and say it it makes me very happy that there are architecture students in the Q&A asking these kind of questions and it seems crucial to me that um from the perspective of designers in the disfund that there there are levels to how we sort of operate within this the first level has to be refusal I mean I think Dylan's absolutely right it's like we can't imagine not refusing certain forms of commission certain kind of projects and we will not build your prison we will not be able to your wall and these are sort of phrases that have um I think had some real strength within our field but then sort of the level below that I think it's also crucial that um as architects we have to chase these concepts down into their more uh sort of naturalized less visible registers we have to find the carceral in public spaces we have to find it in the suburbs we have to find it in infrastructures we have to find it in landscapes we have to find it in all those places where where refusal it becomes difficult or you find ways to refuse certain ways of making uh these kinds of spaces or certain ways of allowing them to be deployed in certain ways and so I I hope that um all of the the architects who are here um feeling somebody galvanized to understand the carceral not simply as a kind of a type of commission uh that one can sort of opt in or out of but rather a sort of way of structuring urbanity at large that we have to be working on together in very nuanced but committed ways I just wanted to say really quickly that this question about building nicer prisons actually came up in the the third but what was the second presidential debate when Donald Trump said that he put little children in nice prisons or nice cages that the cages he put little children in were nice and even commentators even on the far right were just absolutely horrified and thought that the the logic of building a nice cage for a child is just absolutely repugnant um the reasons they thought that was a repugnant were about public relations it wasn't actually about caring for um children of color but nevertheless the that that kind of logic of reform that we will build a nicer prettier more modern jail is what my essay is about but also there was this kind of dominant rupturing of that logic during the last presidential debate where just every commentator on across the political spectrum just kind of their minds minds blew up it's also you know it's happened in this kind of a temp reform is in this moment but it's also emergent from the very moment prisons come into being as these structural moment like things you know Charles Dickens in 1842 is kind of making this very stringent critique of the of the new form of the penitentiary and like as soon as these the as soon as this structure is built conceptualized it's being called for to be reformed um there's no moment at which it can be reformed um I might also just want to chime in really quickly on this on this note which is again going back to the the a quote at the beginning that I had on a slide which was um in 2019 now so it's you know it's a little while ago but the idea that the misuse of detention centers or the misuse of a detention facility and its impact on certain occupants is contrary to values as architects and as Americans right and that I feel like actually is the point and in many ways of this project in which many of these pieces get to which is that you know um that in fact like this violence and and these architectures are um not an aberration um among American values or our foundations but representative of them and so this like dangerous slippage in the in the in the aia statement about the misuse of buildings as as the um as the thing that is un-American um is it's maybe it's like greatest fallacy um so we're sort of nearing um the end but I also I have sort of two things I want to first ask if I think this has been wonderful because everyone's already been asking each other questions but just again to encourage uh if you do have a question for someone else on the panel like I really would love for you to ask it so it's not just me that's the first thing and the second thing um is I also want to go around before we end tonight um to sort of mimic the last part of this book which is a bibliography um and I think it's um super important that the bibliography I think in at least in this book sort of contains every source every reference every text um every piece of evidence named in this book as a way of sort of inviting future research um for those working and thinking about uh histories of architecture and the role of architecture in the carceral state um but I think it would be cool to go around quickly and we've already sort of been doing this um and sharing both the people who both who have inspired our own work but I think it'd be cool to to say who you're reading now or what would be a crucial text for architects to consider um in the vein of sort of continuing this sort of building up of an archive of um of uh or continuing this sort of citational chain and building this sort of archive of of text that perhaps we in the discipline of architecture we don't consider architectural at all um and I think hopefully the point of this event is also showing the ways that the work you're all doing is incredibly valuable to the field of architecture and in fact you're saying more about architecture um you've taught me more about architecture than I think with some of my education in architecture um so maybe we can go around and also share what we're reading but again any other questions before we close from you all would be great I kind of want to ask uh Dylan a question that might be too big for this last couple moments um but I I you know I think this conversation about reform and it's um um and it's falsities and it's violence is really important and I heard you recently Dylan during a large meeting talk about the potential dangers of the language of abolition being appropriated and emptied out into a kind of liberal you know liberal hollowed out version of itself and how I want I'm curious how how you're seeing that play out um and and what we can do to make sure that abolition is means it contains its its transformative um I don't think that's too big a question at all actually and and and I don't mean this as in any way a flip and a reductive response so take it as a complex and dense response the the ways I'm seeing um people who are formerly very recently adversaries of abolitionist thinking and practice very eagerly and I would venture to say opportunistically embracing the term um it's and it's not just academics right it's it's a lot of public facing type people right um pundits and wannabe pundits like that crowd right or kind of trying to embrace the term the problem I see is that there's no study involved right I mean I mean it's that's that's not study means a lot of different things right study might mean watching a series of the videos that critical resistance posted of different people talking about you know these complexities that are involved with feminist abolition with black radical traditions and I mean there's all different ways to do the study right so I'm not saying that there's some bibliography everybody needs to go read um but but I'm saying that that folks are not being thoughtful about it um and and by doing so there's a kind of dismissal of of the deep sense of obligation that comes from that kind of identification right you're identifying as a revolutionary when you say that all right in in in in in other historical moments in other venues when people identify as revolutionaries they're embracing a sense of a certainly a sense of risk of vulnerability and all that stuff but it's also beautiful right you get to you're embracing a sense of community with people who you're going to learn from and argue with and struggle with and create things with right um so so the problem that I see is there there are folks who are kind of grabbing onto the the traction that this concept has without thinking through it um and thinking through it is really it's it's not hard to do these days right um I think there was one thing that I did recently where I like I can just send my email out to everybody on the cause like if you can't find a community of people to think through this shit with just hit me up like I can either find somebody who's probably near you or I can just talk to you you don't like I enjoy this is like I this is why I live for this right now I'm like so privileged to be alive and fighting like this right now um so so it's people who don't want to embrace the fight that comes alongside it of it right and the fight can mean lots of different things right and it's a creative fight that's what I really mean um I don't know I don't know if that answers your question Brett but that's that's kind of what I see and it's and it's it stands out to me because I think my bullshit meter is pretty good um and a lot of the folks who are who are grabbing on to that label are people who not very long ago would like be completely dismissive if not trivializing about even talking to people about about abolitionist anything analysis vision practice anything yeah I mean I think I ask because I do think it's so tricky I think it's I think I certainly feel this desire to feel like the movement isn't small that the movement is growing right to feel like there's there's energy and there is there's energy on the ground deep on the police movements are real um and in some places effective and so it's just also necessary to hold as a warning you know a long history of this of as you say you know people jumping on a bandwagon without doing the work without doing the study without doing the groundwork and emptying out this this this these revolutionary terms and movements of their of their meaning and their traction you know what I think that was a pretty awesome place to end fuck the citations right now let's um I just I uh I'm so deeply honored to have been in conversation with you all um for some time now and to finally talk seeing your faces is pretty incredible and uh let's continue this fight this is really deeply awesome thank you to all of you for your work it's it's work it's rigorous work it's thoughtful work and it's meaningful what matters and it's um I'm very grateful for it thank you everyone yeah thanks for inviting us coming take care everyone take care of yourselves folks take care everyone