Social Text Reviews Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism

Dan Nemser delves into Jackie Wang's book Carceral Capitalism for readers of Social Text. Approaching the volume, Nemser asks: "From Occupy to the present, what have we learned, where have we failed, and how can we now intervene?" Picking up from there: 

I found myself thinking about these questions when reading Jackie Wang’s book Carceral Capitalism, which was published last year. The book is an accessible, wide-ranging, and often poetic account of the operations of contemporary racial capitalism that aims to “update” Cedric Robinson’s analytic for the conditions of the historical present. Turning away from the sphere of production and wage differentials, Wang explores the modalities of accumulation and governance that have become increasingly important against the backdrop of the restructuring of the global economy and the dismantling of the welfare state since the 1970s. Crucially, these mechanisms are racialized, and they have a predatory and parasitic character. The book’s chapters examine financialization and the debt economy, municipal finance and the use of police and courts to generate much needed revenues, mass incarceration and the construction of the “juvenile delinquent,” and algorithmic policing and predictive analytics in an age of uncertainty. Wang also shares moving experiences of having an incarcerated family member—her brother was locked up at age seventeen for life without parole.

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