Incarcerating the Crisis - (American Crossroads) by Jordan T Camp

About the Book

"The United States currently has the highest incarceration rate of any country: one in thirty-five adults are in jail, prison, immigrant detention, or on parole or probation. Over the last four decades, structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness have also become permanent features of the political economy. These developments are without historical precedent, but not without historical explanation. In this searing critique, Jordan T. Camp traces the roots of this explosive carceral crisis through a series of turning points in U.S. history including the Watts insurrection in 1965, the Detroit rebellion in 1967, the Attica uprising in 1971, the Los Angeles revolt in 1992, and post-katrina New Orleans in 2005. Incarcerating the Crisis argues that these dramatic events coincided with the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the state's attempts to crush radical social movements. Through an examination of poetic visions of social movements--including those by James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, June Jordan, Jose Ramirez, and Sunni Patterson--it also suggests that alternative outcomes have been and continue to be possible."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

The United States currently has the largest prison population on the planet. Over the last four decades, structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness have also become permanent features of the political economy. These developments are without historical precedent, but not without historical explanation. In this searing critique, Jordan T. Camp traces the rise of the neoliberal carceral state through a series of turning points in U.S. history including the Watts insurrection in 1965, the Detroit rebellion in 1967, the Attica uprising in 1971, the Los Angeles revolt in 1992, and events in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005. Incarcerating the Crisis argues that these dramatic events coincided with the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the state's attempts to crush radical social movements. Through an examination of the poetic visions of social movements--including those by James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, June Jordan, José Ramírez, and Sunni Patterson--it also suggests that alternative outcomes have been and continue to be possible.

From the Back Cover

"Incarcerating the Crisis offers carefully researched accounts of major historical conjunctures, elucidating how ideologies of race and criminalization have been central to the neoliberal expansion of policing and prisons. But at the same time, Camp attends to the poetic imaginaries that generate necessary hope and possible futures."--Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Incarcerating the Crisis is a work of staggering insight, bold imagination, and political urgency. In what may be described as a genealogy of neoliberal racial and security regimes, Jordan Camp skillfully demonstrates how moral panics are also racial panics, with the threat to social order displaced onto black and brown bodies either warehoused in prisons, colonized in ghettoes, or drowning in flood waters. Essential reading for anyone interested in race, neoliberalism, and social movements--mandatory for anyone interested in liberation."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Incarcerating the Crisis carefully delineates how political elites translated the crisis of Jim Crow capitalism into the neoliberal racial security state, the brutal regime that disavows racism while caging and killing the racially and economically marginalized. But the brilliance of Camp's work is in illuminating the contingencies within this history of the racialization of security. The path from plantation to prison was not inescapable. Along with the prose of repression there was also a poetics of resistance, an insurgent polyculturalism that created exit signs and even hope."--Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America

"Incarcerating the Crisis movingly resists the temptation to imagine that our plight results from social movements being so easily defeated. Again and again Camp shows with sober analysis and passionate care that popular creativity and resistance were the very stuff to which brutal neoliberal policies responded and have continued to respond. An eloquent, learned, and optimistic study by an important new voice in American Studies."--David Roediger, author of Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All

Review Quotes

"Incarcerating the Crisis persuasively enriches our understanding of the origins of mass incarceration in the U.S., providing compelling evidence that its emergence was a response to the freedom struggles of the twentieth century."

-- "Race and Class"

"A brilliant first book by Jordan T. Camp, a fast-rising young scholar and public intellectual."-- "Counterpunch"

"Camp draws on liberation movements' rise and fall to chart a bold sweep of postwar history. . . . The outline develops clearly over the chapters as Camp marshals his inspiring compendium of usable pasts."-- "American Quarterly"

"Insightful and important . . . A full understanding of the rise of the 'neoliberal carceral state' within 'neoliberal racial capitalism, ' requires a close, and dialectical, reading of the historical and geographic context, the prose of counterinsurgency, and the poetics of social movements. This is what Camp nicely achieves in each of his chapters."-- "Social Justice"

"Jordan Camp's Incarcerating the Crisis situates its examination of the carceral state firmly in the urban crisis and attendant freedom struggles that have rocked American cities over at least the past half century. These rebellions, led primarily by Black and Brown poor people, express the antagonisms between those rendered surplus and the security apparatus of the state in what Camp calls the carceral city. . . .Camp's point is that "criminality" is always the cover story the state uses as it cracks down on threats to the social order."-- "Verso Books Blog"

"Masterful . . . Incarcerating the Crisis is an urgent book for urgent times."-- "Punishment & Society"

"With case studies ranging from Attica to Los Angeles, Incarcerating the Crisis uncovers the expansive relationship among racialization, economic restructuring, and social movements to denaturalize the carceral state and to identify alternative futures through expressive culture."-- "Kalfou"

About the Author

Jordan T. Camp is a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Co-Director of the Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.