Insurgent safety: Theorizing alternatives to state protection

Abstract

In the United States, public safety is embraced as an unquestioned social good. Broadly speaking, the criminal justice system is tasked with administering and maintaining public safety through the use of law enforcement, the courts, and prisons. First, through a focus on racialized police violence, this article develops a critique of the dominant model of public safety practiced in the United States—identified herein as ‘carceral safety’. Second, through an analysis of findings from the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP), this article seeks to sketch out an alternative model and practice of safety that does not rely on banishment, policing, or mass criminalization. In contradistinction to the forms of state protection exercised under the seemingly innocuous rhetoric of ‘public safety’, RPSP participants conceptualized what I am calling ‘insurgent safety’: locally determined, anti-capitalist practices and ethics for reducing, and responding to harm.

Keywords

Penal abolition police violence safety

Introduction

Shortly after 2 in the morning on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 in Durham, North Carolina, the family of Jesus ‘Chuy’ Huerta called 911 to report him missing. Huerta’s sister Evelin later told reporters that they turned to the police for help after becoming concerned for Jesus’s safety.¹ Dispatch sent officers a brief description of Huerta that read: ‘Jesus Huerta, Hispanic Male, 17 years old. He does not have any medical or mental conditions and is not at risk’ (City of Durham, 2014). Within the hour, two officers with the Durham Police Department (DPD) ‘encountered’ Jesus walking with a friend, Jaime Perez. ‘All we asked’, Evelin Huerta would later recount, ‘was that [Jesus] be brought back home.’ Instead, the responding officers ran a background check on both teenagers that revealed an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for trespassing on Jesus, who was subsequently searched, handcuffed ‘behind his back’, and placed in a patrol car (City of Durham, 2014). In what would prove to be an especially jarring finding, the state’s final report declared: ‘Officer Duncan’s frisk [of Jesus] did not reveal any contraband’ (City of Durham, 2014: 2).

Officer Duncan then proceeded to drive one mile to DPD Headquarters to pick up the misdemeanor trespass warrant. Tragically, Huerta would never leave the back of Officer Duncan’s patrol car. Upon arrival, Huerta—whose hands were still cuffed behind his back—was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The only narrative we have of the incident is from the perspective of Officer Duncan and city and state officials. After locating Huerta and Perez, Officer Duncan ‘did not log back on to the camera system; consequently the camera was not recording during Huerta’s arrest and transport’ (City of Durham, 2014: 3). The State Bureau of Investigation concluded that Huerta died of ‘a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head’.

Weeks of unrest followed Huerta’s death, the third man of color in just four months to die during an encounter with Durham police officers (Clark, 2013). On the one-month anniversary of Huerta’s death, hundreds of people, including the author, gathered in downtown Durham for a vigil and march to protest police violence. The energy of the crowd was palpable; marked by a rhythm of attentive silence when Huerta’s family members took the bullhorn to express their grief, and then punctuated by righteous anger as Huerta’s friends roused the crowd with protest chants and unsparing theories of police violence: ‘[t]he police kill us youth of color, us young people, because they are afraid of us! They are afraid of things we think and the things we know!’

Upon marching to DPD headquarters, where the Huerta family wished to place a memorial to Jesus, we were confronted by law enforcement in full riot gear ordering us to leave the premises or risk arrest, citing our ‘illegal occupation of private property’. Ultimately, we marched on, back through the city returning to the public square where we had begun. At this point the crowd thinned considerably, and roughly 60 of us remained. A local organizer took the bullhorn to close out the protest with a call and response. ‘Do the police keep us safe?’ R asked us. ‘No’ we called back. ‘Can we take care of one another?’ ‘Yes!’ we exclaimed. Suddenly, riot police fired several smoke grenades into the crowd and aggressively moved in on us, shouting that our gathering had been deemed ‘unlawful’. Using their batons, officers began knocking signs out of protesters’ hands, including a 60-foot banner that read ‘Jesus Huerta Murdered by Police/Fue Matado por la Policia.’ As people fled the square for the streets, the police fired teargas into the crowd and made several arrests.²

I chose to open with this extended ethnographic reflection because it illustrates three core aspects of this article. First, Huerta’s death at the hands of the police is emblematic of the contemporary legitimation crisis facing law enforcement in the United States. ‘My mother believed her son would be safe in the hands of officers’, Evelin Huerta told the local press. ‘Next time she is going to doubt picking up the phone and calling a policeman.’³ In the three years since Huerta’s death, thousands of seeds of doubt have been sown, as racially gendered police killings continue unabated with 1146 deaths in 2015 and 1068 in 2016 respectively (Guardian, 2016).⁴ Those that die at the hands of law enforcement officers are disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous men in the prime of their lives, as well as people with mental health problems (Guardian, 2016). The weeks of unrest that followed Huerta’s death in Durham, anticipated the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown, and later Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Charlotte, following the deaths of Freddie Gray, Sylvie Smith, and Keith Lamont Scott respectively. The uprisings, in conjunction with the movement for Black lives, have made the epidemic of police violence virtually un-ignorable to those typically sheltered from quotidian racist state violence. Crucially, the twinned specter of uprisings and movement building has incited a serious legitimation crisis for law enforcement, as calls for police abolition have hit the mainstream (see Fox News, 2016).⁵

Second, the death of Jesus Huerta and the subsequent response by the Durham Police Department and the city of Durham should be considered instructive, insofar as it reveals that the hegemonic conceptualization and practice of safety in the United States assumes a carceral form. The idea that safety stems from banishment (via jail, prison, or deportation), mass criminalization, and policing is taken as common sense, despite its deadly consequences. Building on the work of activist-scholar Vikki Law, I introduce the term ‘carceral safety’ to describe these ideas and practices. In the first half of this article, I draw on the work of scholar-activists writing in diverse fields to examine how carceral safety works, focusing specifically on law enforcement.

The third reason I opened with Huerta’s death, is to call attention to the counter-hegemonic theorization of safety articulated at the vigil during our call and response: ‘[w]e don’t need the police to keep us safe. We can take care of one another.’ In the second half of this article, I build on this moment by analyzing the findings from the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP). Specifically, I examine the primary themes that emerged from 17 interviews with Durham residents directly impacted by the criminal justice system. The primary goal of this research is to contribute to a more robust theorization of safety that can provide abolitionist alternatives to the forms of carceral safety discussed herein. Through RPSP, I argue that participants developed such an alternative, what I term ‘insurgent safety’. Insurgent safety describes those locally determined practices and ethics that refuse the logics of the carceral state and instead reconceptualize safety as a mode of sociality built through interdependence, mutual aid, counter-carceral communication, and play.

Carceral safety

In this section, I marshal the work of scholar-activists who write critically about the concept of safety to synthesize this important body of scholarship and to outline the material, ideological, and affective dimensions of carceral safety. Building off activist-scholar Vikki Law’s (2014) generative definition of ‘carceral feminism’, carceral safety describes the use of state-organized banishment (via jail, prison, or deportation), mass criminalization, and law enforcement as the only legitimate forms of protection from, and solutions to, harm and violence in the United States. To narrow the focus of my inquiry, I examine how carceral safety operates within the law enforcement apparatus, beginning with President Obama’s efforts to respond to racialized police violence.

In May of 2015, President Obama used his keynote address at the annual meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), to announce his plan to ‘enhance public safety and reduce police misconduct’. The plan consolidated over 60 recommendations made by the ‘Task Force on 21st Century Policing’ into three objectives: (1) increased funding for police agencies; (2) a renewed commitment to community-oriented policing; and (3) ‘criminal justice reforms that will make the system smarter and fairer’ such as the use of body cameras, hiring officers from diverse backgrounds, and more transparent data collection (Office of the Press Secretary, 2014).

President Obama’s efforts to address police violence through reforms and increased funding for the police belie his commitment to what Jackson and Meiners (2011) identify as the United States’ ‘control-based’ model of public safety. A control-based approach to public safety focuses on the management of risk and the identification and removal of threats. Principally, safety through state protection and control requires a material and ideological commitment to punishment, security (i.e. police, military, surveillance), and self-defense. The material build-up alone—infrastructure, personnel, funding—of the United States’ carceral apparatus evidences this commitment. As the world’s leading incarcerator, the landscape is dotted with jails, prisons, and detention centers. The criminal justice system employs millions of people and receives billions in state and federal funding every year (The Sentencing Project, 2016). There is an abundance of excellent scholarship that explains how the United States became what critical criminologist Beth Richie (2012) aptly calls ‘a prison nation’ (see, for example, Camp, 2016; Gilmore, 2007; Gottschalk, 2015; Hinton, 2016). The former President’s reform package would spend an additional $263 million on policing, expanding rather than contracting the system as a whole, by adding to the already exorbitant $63 billion the USA spends each year on law enforcement alone (Prison Policy Initiative, 2017, emphasis added).

While carceral safety assumes a material form in the brick and mortar of various infrastructure projects ostensibly designed to protect people from harm, the ideological underpinnings that justify ‘the expansion and maintenance of’ the criminal justice system must not go unnamed. Under a control-based approach to public safety, ‘the definition of what makes a place or community safe’, write Jackson and Meiners (2011: 278, emphasis added), ‘is most often shaped by absence: absence of violence and intimidation, or in some cases the absence of discomfort’. Jackson and Meiners raise the question therefore, of who or what is to be made absent in order to ensure the protection of others. An important body of scholarship, discussed below, unpacks how our collective understanding of safety is ‘deeply distorted’ by the logics of white supremacy and the imperatives of racial capitalism (The Abolitionist, 2012).⁶

What sets the condition of possibility for racialized police violence in the present? Scholars who study contemporary police violence draw our attention to the inception of the racial order in the United States and the role of law enforcement in maintaining and enforcing that order. Racialization, Jodi Melamed (2011: 12, emphasis added) argues, creates ‘specific historical constructions of personhood’ that operate to ‘ensure a baseline for social possibility and legitimate violence’. Those racialized as non-white, Beth Richie (2012: 21) reminds us, are cast ‘outside the protective assumptions of state agencies [and have] virtually no right to safety, protections, or redress’.

The ideological project of rendering certain groups of people not only ineligible for state protection, but as targets of carceral safety’s imperative to identify and eliminate threats, is structured by the logics of anti-Blackness. In her decisive monograph Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman (1997: 80, emphasis added) argues that the US legal system ‘acknowledged the intentionality and agency of the slave, but only as it assumed the form of criminality’. This ‘stipulation of agency as criminality’, Hartman (1997: 80) concludes, ‘served to identify personhood with punishment’. Historian Khalil Muhammad (2010) builds on the work of Hartman to examine how state actors and academics used the law and social science to meticulously construct ‘the Black criminal’ post-Emancipation. The idea of the Black criminal, argues Muhammad (2010: 4, emphasis added), quickly became ‘one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, discriminatory treatment, and/or acceptance of racial violence as an instrument for public safety’ (see also Davis, 1998). Moreover, the fusion of slaveness (and therefore Blackness) to criminality has proved durable across various regimes of racial governance, from the state-sanctioned terror of Jim Crow to the so-called ‘colorblind’ multicultural democracy of the present (Melamed, 2011; Murakawa, 2014).

An expansive literature illustrates the important role of policing in the (re)production and maintenance of these white supremacist and racial capitalist relations of power (Brucato, 2014; Olson, 2004; Singh, 2014; Whitehouse, 2014; Williams, 2015). In the South, slave patrols were a precursor to the modern institution of law enforcement. Tasked explicitly with controlling the movement of slaves and preventing insurrection, the development of ‘racially focused law enforcement groups’, was a uniquely ‘American innovation’ (Hadden qtd in Williams, 2015: 75). This research suggests that anti-Black violence is a constitutive feature of, rather than a departure from, the US policing project (Durr, 2015; Hadden, 2003; Sexton, 2007).

Critical scholarship on policing and police power also reveals the ‘extra penological’ function of law enforcement violence enacted upon Black bodies in particular, and non-normative bodies in general (Davis, 1983; Noel and Perlow, 2014; Spade, 2011; Wilderson, 2003). For example, Brucato (2014: 48) explains that the routine surveillance, harassment, and physical violence carried out by law enforcement officers patrolling communities of color, operates, in part, symbolically to make the identity of the non-white criminal ‘functional, reliable, and durable’. Martinot and Sexton (2003: 174) also direct our attention to the social function of policing. The violence of the police, they argue, reproduces ‘the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world’, thereby creating a distinction ‘between those whose human being is put permanently in question and for those for whom it goes without saying’.

The official mandate of law enforcement—‘to protect and serve’—must be reread in light of these incisive theoretical and historical analyses. First, policing is racial violence and racial violence is ‘the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security’ (Wang, 2012: 20). Second, and relatedly, the police as an institution are a ‘strong blue thread that weaves together the white race and the state, forming a barrier to full political inclusion of non-whites’ (Brucato, 2014: 48). Third, to paraphrase Law (2014) when the police, and the criminal justice system more broadly, are cast as integral to safety, this obscures the fact that law enforcement, prisons, and courts are often sites of violence rather than its resolution for people who do not have the protection of whiteness, money, citizenship, gender conformity, and/or heteronormativity (see also Hong, 2006).

In addition to the material and ideological dimensions of carceral safety, scholars draw our attention to the role affect plays in both drumming up support for, and underwriting the demand to use, banishment, policing, and mass criminalization to prevent and respond to harm. Their primary claim is that public feelings like hate, disgust, fear, and sympathy ‘are central to the maintenance and expansion of the carceral state’ (Jackson and Meiners, 2011: 271; see also Agathangelou et al., 2008; Ioanide, 2015; Wang, 2012). Paula Ioanide (2015) applies the work of Fanon and Ahmed to examine what she calls ‘the emotional politics of racism’, particularly within the context of the US criminal justice system. When state actors and media outlets ‘repetitively link’ threats to public safety with the bodies of Black and Brown peoples, their actions ‘overdetermine the focal points around which hegemonic economies of emotion coalesce and accumulate’ (2015: 15).

Therefore, we might consider the ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed, 2004) that underwrites the criminal justice system as having two related purposes: (1) it provides a structure through which the state can readily teach people who to fear and who to hate, and then, to ‘identify with punishing, containing, or dissociating’ from those same groups as the primary means to stay safe (Ioanide, 2015: 15); (2) in doing so, state actors can later mobilize those very same racist and xenophobic sentiments under the seemingly innocuous banner of public safety in order to rally support for and consent to the expansion of the carceral state (Jackson and Meiners, 2011).

The work of Agathangelou et al. (2008) and Hanhardt (2013) demonstrates how the cultivation of positive public feelings toward the criminal justice system also plays a crucial role in (re)consolidating the hegemony of carceral safety. These positive emotions are typically fostered by offering aggrieved parties ‘feel good victories’, like the expansion of federal hate crimes coverage to include LGTBQ people or, requiring police officers to wear body cameras (Hanhardt, 2013; Jackson and Meiners, 2011). However, the positive feelings generated by these victories often mask the violence that makes them possible. In other words, because carceral safety coheres through the elimination of ‘bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt or even discomfort’ and those bodies are always already racialized, it functions as an insidious exchange whereby a previously aggrieved group receives some modicum of state protection by (re)affirming their allegiance to racial capitalism and white supremacy (Agathangelou et al., 2008; Wang, 2012: 9).

In this section, I have reviewed the extant scholarship on safety within the context of the United States criminal justice system. I have done so in order to develop an analysis of carceral safety, which I have argued best describes the dominant approach to public safety in the USA. Carceral safety describes the use of state-organized banishment (via jail, prison, or deportation), mass criminalization, and law enforcement as the only legitimate form of protection from, and response to, harm and violence. As a control-based model, carceral safety emphasizes the identification and removal of threats, and the management of risk (Jackson and Meiners, 2011). By historicizing carceral safety we can see that white supremacy and racially gendered violence is not a departure from, but rather constitutive of the criminal justice system. As sociologist Nancy Heitzeg (2014) argues, ‘the criminal legal system involves the protection of whiteness as both literal and figurative property and the repression of Blackness in particular’. Moreover, affective appeals to safety and security are deployed in ways that implicitly invoke the specter of a racialized threat or internal enemy against whom white citizens need state protection. These appeals enable the state to recuperate legitimacy during a crisis, like the one facing law enforcement now, by enticing people to accept ‘feel good victories’, like body cameras or civilian review boards, in exchange for their (re)newed allegiance to the white supremacist policing project (Jackson and Meiners, 2011). Consequently, the arrangements of power that produce racialized vulnerability to premature death remain intact and carceral safety remains the only conceivable approach to preventing harm and addressing violence (Gilmore, 2007; Kaba, 2014).

Jackson and Meiners (2011: 271) argue that in order to dismantle the paradigm of public safety as carceral control, people must engage with and reframe ‘what it means and feels like to be safe’. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this effort by analyzing the counter-hegemonic visions and practices of safety articulated by participants in the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP). In the following section, I outline the basic parameters of this project, including my epistemological and ethical commitments, and then discuss the primary methods I used.

The (Re)imagining Public Safety Project

Aligned with the principles of activist scholarship, RPSP was designed to alleviate power dynamics endemic to more conventionally structured academic research projects. This effort began with building structures of accountability and reciprocity into the project itself. I began by spending a year conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Durham, North Carolina. I attended hours of community and city council meetings addressing issues related to policing, inequality, and mass incarceration. I also became actively involved in various collectives organizing around these issues. My goal was to design a project that was collaborative, action-oriented, and responsive to the questions many people in Durham were already asking: how can we stop racially gendered police violence in our city? What are other ways to stay safe without relying on law enforcement? As a multiple outsider, activism was one way to demonstrate my commitment to act as a community-accountable researcher. To see myself as ‘embedded in a web of relationships [and as] part of a community of struggle, rather than an academic who occasionally drops in’ (Pulido, 2008: 351, emphases in original).

The purpose of the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP) was to generate, consider, and amplify counter-hegemonic conceptualizations and practices of safety. Toward this end, the study consisted of two primary methods: participant observation and participant-generated photo elicitation interviews (PEIs). While there are no perfect methods, scholars suggest that PEIs offer a sound compromise for those of us interested in democratizing the research process by engaging in a practice of ‘collective theorization’ (Shukaitis and Graeber, 2007). Moreover, when participants take the pictures it positions them as a collaborator and expert who, through photography and narrative, highlights what is meaningful in their lives (Clark-Ibanez, 2004; Frohmann, 2005).

In the spring of 2014, I conducted 17 PEIs with Durham residents who ranged in age from 18 to 50 and self-identified as Black, Asian, Brown, Latina, multi-racial, queer, low-income, middle-class, and alternatively, as mothers, fathers, young people, and ‘just ordinary folk’. Though I had come to know several of the people I interviewed, participants also recruited six new people to the project. Guided by feminist research ethics, I recruited people who self-identified as directly impacted by the practice of carceral safety in the United States, whether it was via police harassment, arrest, imprisonment, or all of the above. My purpose in doing so was to amplify what feminist methodologists term ‘situated’ or ‘embodied’ knowledge. Here, it is subjective, rather than objective experience that forms the ‘legitimate base for knowledge and political activity’ (Frohmann, 2005: 1398; see also Christian, 1988).

For the study itself, I asked participants to take a series of three to five photographs based on the following two prompts: (a) what does community safety look like to you? And (b) Durham County spent roughly $45 million dollars to build the downtown jail complex. What would you build in the city with that money instead? The framing of these prompts was influenced by three factors. First, I wanted the prompts to allow for creative interpretation, yet remain anchored to my primary research questions. Second, I wanted the prompts to underscore the public nature of the project itself, to think about safety as a collective, shared experience rather than as an individualistic, and/or interpersonal dynamic. Third, I wanted to emphasize the role of the imagination and underscore its potential utility in helping us re-theorize and practice safety differently, within and against banishment, policing, and mass criminalization. It is here, in the liminal space between the carceral present and the possibility of a non-carceral future that I asked RPSP participants to linger. Is safety a thing, or a relationship? Can we disimbricate safety from state protection? If so, what would that practice of safety look and feel like?

Following best practices, the interviews began by asking participants to describe the photographs they took and to discuss why they had chosen to take that particular picture (Harper, 2002). The remainder of the interview was semi-structured. Although I prepared questions in advance, I allowed the conversation to be directed as much as possible by the participants themselves. In the following section, I analyze the narrative findings that stem from one research question: what does community safety look like to you? To protect their anonymity, all participants have been given pseudonyms and I relay only limited identifying information.

Practicing insurgent safety

As I will describe below, three core themes emerged in response to my primary research question. RPSP participants identified: (1) counter-carceral communication; (2) interdependence and mutual aid; and (3) play as integral to community safety. Moreover, RPSP respondents identified racial capitalism as antithetical to the project of developing alternatives to carceral safety. This counter-hegemonic vision theorized by RPSP participants comprises what I have termed insurgent safety. My use of the word ‘insurgency’ is inspired by scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez’s (2007: 16) call for a ‘politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of resistance’. What our current political movements need, Rodriguez argues, are ‘grassroots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the state […] that reorients a progressive identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency’ (2007: 16, emphases in original). In contradistinction to carceral safety then, insurgent safety names locally determined anti-capitalist ethics and practices that work within and against the racist carceral state to build a world where safety is not predicated on banishment, mass criminalization, or policing in any form.

Communication as a ‘safety mechanism’

I interviewed Nina, a Black mother and organizer, on her front porch. At one point, she gestured to an old house across the street where her elderly neighbor ‘Miss H’ lives. Many neighborhood residents look after Miss H Nina explained to me, offering her rides and helping with her yard work. This reflection prompted Nina to pose a rhetorical question: ‘how do we communicate if someone has fallen in harm’s way?’ Pausing briefly, Nina went on to explain what she meant by ‘communication’ in this context:

When I say communication, it’s on all levels; it’s the modality of communication; it’s the open heart of communication; the ability to communicate without shame or judgment, and to be able to communicate when there is a harm… So communication is a huge safety mechanism for so many reasons. How does that work? We have to build relationships and that willingness.

Here, Nina identifies potential barriers that make dialogue difficult—fear, shame, lack of trust—as well as the generative potential of communication to work as a ‘safety mechanism’ across difference. Creating what Nina calls ‘an open heart of communication’ may very well be essential to devising new models of safety that do not rely on banishment, policing, or mass criminalization; however, as she also notes, it is a mistake to presume that a sense of community, or willingness to build relationships that could support non-punitive responses to harm, exist in the first place. Another interviewee Terrance shared Nina’s concerns:

In this day and age we don’t know how to respond to incidents that really don’t have any regard for the police. You don’t have to call the police, you know? And communication is very important, but we’ve lost that. How? Where? […] In this day and age we are taught ratchet-ness, so we don’t even get to a point of diffusing the situation, or neutralizing a situation. We are [amped] up too much already [so] somebody has to call the police.

Both Nina and Terrance call our attention to the ways in which the logics of carceral safety work to shape and delimit our responses to harm, often naturalizing punishment practices and racially gendered ideas about whose bodies are disposable. For example, when I asked interviewees for ideas about how we could respond to harm in a world without police, some rearticulated hegemonic conceptions of punishment. Depending on the type of harm that had occurred, Carlos advocated ‘public beatings’, Jonathan suggested ‘execution’, and Kwame supported life sentences in ‘some type of prison’. Likewise, while almost every participant had experienced routine police harassment, and some shared distressing stories of being beaten by law enforcement, these experiences did not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the police should be abolished. I often heard statements like: ‘we still need the police’ or ‘there is a time and a place for the police’.

In his ethnography detailing the politics of jail expansion in a liberal community, critical criminologist Judah Schept (2015) introduces the concept ‘carceral habitus’ to illustrate how people often reinforce and reproduce the hegemony of the neoliberal carceral state, regardless of whether they claim to support or resist it. Carlos, Jonathan, Kwame, and others I interviewed openly asserted leftist political positions; yet when it came to thinking about counter-hegemonic responses to harm, the carceral habitus structured their field of vision, often leaving only punitive possibilities in their sight lines. This complex, and at times contradictory interplay of power relations became animated during interviews, as participants openly wrestled with the tension of living within and against ‘the corporal and discursive inscription of carcerality’ on their bodies, in their actions, and in their efforts to imagine otherwise (Schept, 2013: 73).

The force of ‘hegemonic carcerality’ should not be understated. It impinges on the everyday lives of those I spoke with in both concrete and insidious ways, troubling their ability to imagine safety outside of a carceral framework (Schept, 2015). Yet respondents also recognized that communication, or learning ‘a new language’, to borrow Nina’s phrase, is integral to instigating a break in the carceral habitus. RPSP interviewees placed a great deal of emphasis on communication as a safety mechanism; suggesting that cultivating counter-carceral forms of communication is a prefigurative political project that can move us toward confronting the myriad ways we all internalize and reproduce the logics of carceral safety in our daily lives. In other words, if language structures the way we think and act, troubling the binaries carceral safety depends upon (i.e. guilty or innocent; criminal or law-abiding; violent or non-violent), centering meditation as a means of dispute resolution, and findings ways to express, and co-hold feelings of shame, trauma, and vulnerability are ways to build a communicative structure that can support community generated responses to harm that do not rely on the logic of carceral safety.

Interdependence and mutual aid

If carceral safety thrives on control and the identification and removal of always already racialized threats, what epistemologies and material practices might provide an antidote to these methodologies of elimination? In this section, I examine two themes, interdependence and mutual aid, that RPSP respondents theorized as inter-connected efforts to practice new ways of relating to one another and providing for people’s needs.

‘Interdependence’, Harriet told me ‘is the constant care of individuals and each other to the fullest degree and it is communal. [Everyone] has to agree to the fact that no one gets thrown away.’ Kendrick outlined a complementary understanding of interdependence:

If you care about the world [you] understand that the world isn’t just you and your family; it’s you and the person who lives right across the street from you; like it’s our world not just yours. So, if you care about the world you’re talking about the world that you walk every day and the world that you don’t walk every day.

Participants often used friend and kinship networks as a referent to elucidate their understanding of interdependence. This exchange between Chris and JP, young Black men who asked to be interviewed together, provides a good example:

Chris:

If you don’t have trust with your friends, then your relationship and your friendship is going to fall apart… [JP interrupts]

JP:

Yeah, on a big scale we can do that [build trust] with everybody. Those who push each other away need to still know as a community that we still have each other’s back.

Chris:

That’s what we need. Togetherness… [We] all need to realize that everything that’s going on in the community, [it] may not affect you directly, but it affects somebody directly.

These passages suggest ways that interdependence—an epistemological orientation grounded in trust, mutuality, and shared vulnerability—could bring into being an insurgent mode of community that counters the logics of carceral safety. What does interdependence look like in daily life? RPSP participants offered several examples of ways to generate insurgent safety through mutual aid.

Broadly conceived, mutual aid is a practice of ‘passionate reciprocity’ (Chen et al., 2011) and cooperative exchange, wherein people come together to share resources and offer one another practical, emotional, or monetary support (see also Kropotkin, 2012). Participants envisioned many forms and practices of mutual aid, including but not limited to: collective housing that turns no one away; neighborhood safety patrols; a free daycare collective staffed by a rotating group of neighbors; communal land projects; a community resource fund that covers expenses related to family emergencies, travel to see loved ones, health care, and ‘fun stuff’ like block parties. These examples suggest that mutual aid brings people together under the premise that the collective can take care of one another and that safety stems from our interconnectedness. What sets these practices apart is that people come together to look out for one another, but no one claims, ‘you owe me’ as one respondent put it. Some participants also framed mutual aid as a response to harm. For example, Robert suggested that when people experience traumatic events they need an organized network of care that can provide support, healing, and resources. ‘This is when we need a community safety net’, Robert explained, ‘meaning: what can we do to help our neighbors?’

However, Robert and others astutely recognized that interdependence and mutual aid run counter to the logics of neoliberal racial capitalism, posing both challenges and possibilities for efforts to theorize and practice alternative models of safety. For Harriet, the fact that we live in ‘a very individualistic society [is] strategic, [because] for capitalism to thrive it has to be this way’. In her opinion, the individualism endemic to racial capitalism encourages people to ‘reject the whole concept of communal thinking and living. People don’t want to hear that.’ Similarly, when I asked Kwame, an 18-year-old high school senior, if he could imagine a world where people respond to harm without the police, he did not hesitate to say, ‘[i]n a capitalist society I don’t think that’s possible… it’s a dog eat dog world where everybody needs to watch out for themselves’. One of the crucial points being made here is that the values endemic to racial capitalism fracture potential solidarities and inhibit people’s ability to imagine more liberatory forms of sociality. Listen to one respondent, Issa’s decisive analysis:

The whole system we’re in right now is really depressing, because it creates incomplete people. Those ethics that capitalism imposes on us like competition, and hierarchy, and putting the accumulation of money before everything else feel really damaging to trying to get at a counter ethics around like caring for one another, and communication, like listening to people when they talk.

Throughout the course of my fieldwork in Durham, it became clear that respondents were either explicitly or implicitly drawing connections between carceral safety and racial capitalism. The work of critical prison scholars helps to further illuminate this dynamic. As the scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) has shown, the growth and consolidation of the neoliberal carceral state was an organized geographical response to capitalism in crisis. Building prisons and then adopting punitive laws and repressive policing practices to fill them up, was a means for the state to renovate ‘its welfare-warfare capacities into something different by molding surplus finance, capital, land, and labor into the [carceral] state’ (Gilmore, 2007: 85). Consequently, jails, prisons, detention centers, and law enforcement serve as institutions of social control to contain and manage those hit hardest by the ‘racialized and classed displacements’ wrought by the state’s neoliberal turn (Rodriguez, 2007). Put simply, Gilmore (2015) concludes, ‘capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it’. This analysis underscores ‘the fatal link between racism, capitalist restructuring’, and the carceral state (Camp, 2016). Therefore, the logics, infrastructure, personnel, and practices that comprise carceral safety cannot be understood outside of racial capitalism.

Yet, as RPSP participants point out, interdependence and mutual aid have the potential to break open the ‘fatal link’ between racial capitalism and carceral safety, turning a crisis into an opportunity to envision more liberatory forms of safety. Interdependence and mutual aid are reparative insofar as they rebuild the informal social bonds—identified by participants here as ‘togetherness’ ‘communication’ or ‘trust’—that prisons, mass criminalization, and policing destroy, particularly in low-wealth Black and Latina/o neighborhoods where the material forces of carceral safety are disproportionately concentrated (Clear, 2009; Gilmore, 2007). Thus, by emphasizing reparative practices like mutual aid and counter-hegemonic epistemologies like interdependence, RPSP respondents (re)imagine safety as a form of insurgency, or a ‘counter-ethics’ to use Issa’s formulation, that attempts to reconstitute modes of sociality that are antithetical to ‘racial capitalist processes of spatial and social differentiation that truncate relationality for capital accumulation’ (Melamed, 2015: 79).

Play, joy, and communion

In an effort to build a multi-dimensional conceptualization of safety, I asked respondents to describe what safety sounds like to them:

It sounds like happy sounds, things like that. People having a good time, and people who don’t get the benefit of their humanity being seen, their happiness being seen.

It sounds like my grandmother’s house and the smell of something cooking on the stove. I smell cornbread and collard greens, black-eyed peas and stuff; the sounds of laughter, family, and loved ones—that’s safety for me.

In their responses, participants composed an acoustic register of safety that challenges us to expand our understanding of safety to include movement and improvisation; re-reading safety as a sensory experience embodied through play, laughter, and kinship. Moreover, sites of play—a basketball court, the skate park, a backyard, or a playground—became stages where respondents performed pre-figurative politics, most principally by devising and acting out harm reduction strategies that do not rely on local law enforcement.

For example, the skate park in Durham is located across the street from a police substation and sits at the epicenter of gentrification in the city. What were once tobacco warehouses, auto body shops, and textile mills are now yoga studios, restaurants, bars, and luxury apartments. For skaters, proximity to the substation intensifies police surveillance and harassment, particularly for youth of color; however, heightened vulnerability to police violence also encouraged them to determine other ways of handling conflict. Jonathan, skateboard in hand, described this dynamic to me at length:

Even though there is the police station right across from it [the skate park], it’s way different from the outside world, because people have freedom to say whatever they want, do whatever they want. It’s crazy, like the skaters police the skate park, so like if a kid is getting in the way or something like that it’s up to us, it’s not up to the police, to tell people ‘oh, you need to watch out’ or it’s up to us to say ‘dude you need to calm down’.

Performance studies scholar Ellen Kaplan (1995: 27) suggests that play can serve as a ‘rehearsal for social change’ insofar as through play people ‘set up alternate worlds; we create an artifice, a structure of rules that may mirror, invert, or negate the restrictions of everyday life’. Jonathan identifies the skate park as one such place, ‘way different from the outside world’, where young people, often led by youth of color, practice self-determination; what Jonathan articulates here as the freedom to decide collectively how to respond to harm and whether or not to involve law enforcement. The police, by treating youth of color at the skate park ‘like animals’, created the conditions that gave rise to their own obsolescence. In turn, the skate park became a site where Jonathan and others used play to build an alternative structure of safety.

Respondents also suggested that the affective and expressive dimensions associated with play, things like creativity, joy, spontaneity, and laughter are important to well-being. For example, Issa argues that play is crucial to alleviating stressors that can lead to interpersonal violence:

On a neighborhood level I feel like people should just do art together, like have more block parties and that sort of thing. That’s what life is about really, fun. Who the hell doesn’t want to do fun stuff? Like if you have fun all the time you are probably not going to get pissed off and go hurt somebody that you just were dancing around with, or something like that; you aren’t going to go rob that person.

Similarly, Mychal, who also took part in a community-wide mural project, saw art as a means to ‘build accountability’ between neighbors: ‘it made people stronger and therefore the community stronger by involving everybody and making it really inclusive, and just rad, like, it was so much fun’. Notably, respondents often juxtaposed the feelings engendered by play to those of work. For example, Jonathan suggested that ‘[i]f we had fun shit every day instead of everybody going to work, and stuff like that it would be good for everybody’s mental health. People would feel plugged in to other people, and connected to each other.’

Issa, Jonathan, and Mychal’s analysis suggests that play is integral to a practice of insurgent safety and a source of anti-capitalist ethics, insofar as it holds the potential to mitigate interpersonal harm by providing an outlet for stress, by reducing alienation, and reconnecting people to their creative passions. Play activates curiosity, requires improvisation and imagination, and centers a different source of knowledge that springs from the body. Play is subversive, JP elucidates, because ‘curiosity creates what the cops fear in the young people… the [desire] to do things a different way’. Forms of play considered ‘rebellious’ or ‘deviant’ by mainstream culture were valued by RPSP participants precisely because they cultivated alternative affective economies structured by laughter, kinship, and trust, rather than those engendered by carceral safety or what Melamed (2015) calls ‘technologies of anti-relationality’. This analysis reaffirms that the project of developing alternatives to carceral safety is simultaneously a struggle to devise ‘exit strategies’ to racial capitalism writ large (Bell, 2014).

(Re)imagining safety in a carceral state

While academics have understandably focused a good deal of attention on understanding the roots and consequences of the carceral state, we cannot overlook the ways that public safety is often deployed to justify the maintenance and expansion of the criminal justice apparatus (Jackson and Meiners, 2011). (Re)theorizing safety then, in both its hegemonic and dissident forms, is a necessary if not under-appreciated project for those of us interested in generating ‘alternatives to the penal status quo’ that are not tied to state and capitalist imaginaries (Bell, 2014; see also Cohen, 1988; Macharia, 2016; Mathiesen, 2014).

In this article, I have outlined a counter-hegemonic vision of safety—insurgent safety—that names those locally determined efforts to prevent and respond to harm that do not make use of banishment (via jail, prison, or deportation), policing, or mass criminalization. Conceptually, insurgent safety enriches our understanding of how people think about the meaning of safety in their daily lives, within and against common-sense ideas about safety stemming from punishment, control, and ‘absence from’ particular types of bodies and epistemologies. In contradistinction to carceral forms of state protection, RPSP respondents theorized safety as comprising a set of locally determined, anti-capitalist practices and ethics that, in this case, center counter-carceral communication, interdependence, mutual aid, and play as strategies for reducing and responding to harm. In this sense, insurgent safety is aligned with the broader projects of penal abolition and transformative justice that seek a world where no one is disposable and all systems of oppression have been dismantled. Politically, insurgent safety harnesses the generative energy of abolition’s imperative to build new democratic institutions and to constitute new modes of sociality by reimagining safety in ways that ‘push beyond’ the harmful and harm-inducing affects, ethics, and practices of the carceral state.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the participants for their time, commitment to this project, and brilliant theorizations - without which this piece would not have been possible. The author also wishes to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their instructive feedback on this piece.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Meghan McDowell is an Assistant Professor in the department of History, Politics, and Social Justice at Winston-Salem State University. Meghan’s research focuses on abolitionist alternatives to the carceral state. Meghan’s published work has appeared most recently in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order and Contemporary Justice Review. Currently, Meghan is at work on a book length manuscript tentatively titled, Block Parties Not Jails!’ (Re)imagining Public Safety in a Carceral State.

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