From Criminal Man to Carceral Body: An Ethnography of Intake in New York City Jails

This article calls for an abolitionist turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to engage with mass incarceration and the carceral-industrial-complex. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in New York City jails, this article sets out to (1) argue for an abolitionist STS that intervenes in the racialized logics of “criminal man”; (2) offer the carceral body as arising from this abolitionist intervention into mass incarceration; and (3) illustrate how ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology might be deployed as abolitionist STS tools. The premise is that ending mass incarceration requires philosophical interventions that resist the current racist, capitalist framework of the carceral-industrial-complex by disrupting the very foundations of reality. Abolitionist STS arises out of feminist and critical race STS as an intervention not only into criminology, but also into social theory’s ontological turn by attending to the interplay of carceral epistemologies and ontologies. When multiplicities, experientialities, complexities, contradictions, and power dynamics are drawn out, abolition is no longer an undoing but a proliferation that disinvests and contravenes carceral logics.

carceral body, feminist science and technology studies, abolition, ontology, criminology, critical phenomenology, jail

I write this article in a moment of pandemic and protest against police violence and the carceral-industrial-complex (CIC). Mass incarceration in the United States (US) has increasingly been recognized as an apparatus of the state that cannot be extricated from the legacies of slavery (Alexander 2017; Childs 2015; Saleh-Hanna 2017) and colonialism (Stone-Mediatore 2019). There are nearly 6.5 million people incarcerated or under correctional supervision in the US (Maruschak, Minton, and Bureau of Justice Statistics 2020). The racial and ethnic disparities surrounding who is incarcerated reveals the white supremacy of the CIC. For instance, one out of every three Black men will be sentenced to prison (Sentencing Project 2018). When considering the human toll, the impact of the CIC is unfathomable at this scale. It is the moral heft of this racial oppression that has brought people to the streets in protest.

I watch this moment with cautious hope that in mourning the systematic loss of Black lives to the CIC that this movement becomes a pivot point. The momentum holds within it demands for abolitionist, rather than “reformist,” logics. As Angela Davis has noted, the history “of the prison is a history of reform” (1988, 22). Racialized technologies have facilitated reform through the promise of new and humane modes of incarceration and e-carceration (Arnett 2019; Jones 2014; Williams 2019).

This article arises out of feminist science and technology studies (STS) and calls for an abolitionist turn that intervenes in the epistemologies, or knowledge structures, that sustain mass incarceration (Pollock and Subramaniam 2016). It draws from my ethnographic fieldwork in New York City jails, the second largest jail system in the US (Haag 2019). Based on this research, this article sets out to (1) argue for an abolitionist STS that intervenes in the racialized logics of “criminal man”; (2) offer the carceral body as arising from this abolitionist intervention into mass incarceration; and (3) illustrate how ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology might be deployed as abolitionist STS tools.

The article begins with an introduction to the theoretical frames relied upon—abolition, ontological multiplicities, and critical phenomenology. I then provide a broad overview of criminology to illustrate this article’s intervention. Next, I delineate the methods of my ethnographic, dissertation fieldwork. This is followed by three vignettes to which ontological multiplicities, critical phenomenology, and then both are applied. Together, these vignettes support the central argument for an abolitionist STS that intervenes in the epistemologies that sustain the CIC.

Abolition works against mass incarceration (Mathiesen 2014; Ruggiero 2010). Dylan Rodríguez (2019), an ethnic studies scholar, defines it as “a radical reconfiguration of justice, subjectivity, and social formation that does not depend on the existence of either the carceral…or carceral power as such (a totality of state-sanctioned and extrastate relations of gendered racial-colonial dominance)” (1576). Here, feminist abolition works towards a future in which race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, dis/ability, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality are no longer sites of violent state control.

Abolition has far-reaching implications; as Ruth Wilson Gilmore delineates, “prison is not a building ‘over there’ but a set of relationships that undermine…everyday lives everywhere” (2007, 242). This leads to the call for a restructuring of socio-political and economic structures to ameliorate the dehumanization of racism and the perpetuation of racial categories (Calathes 2017; Gilmore 2007). I argue for the incorporation of an abolitionist STS that takes aim at the carceral logics insinuated in the foundations of Western knowledge production (Pollock and Subramaniam 2016). Such an approach is premised upon the understanding that science is situated and has values (Haraway 1991; Harding 2008).

Feminist STS holds that bodies and minds are neither epistemological effects nor singular entities, but rather assemblages of multiplicities shaped in relation to broader forces. The abolitionist STS framework offered here demonstrates the potential of integrating ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology. Philosophical approaches rooted in ontological monisms take objects/beings as unitary and knowable. Such monisms serve as the premise for “criminal man.” In contrast, this analysis borrows from Annemarie Mol’s (2002) approach to ontological multiplicities that are enacted through practices.

Broadly, ontology is the study of being/becoming or what is, and when it is multiple, realities proliferate. For instance, during the intake process, urine is collected from incarcerated people and tested for substance use. When the test strip is positive for opioid use, it is something different in each enactment. For corrections officers, it becomes an indicator of a “detox” housing status, which comes with concerns about medication diversion. The nurse will read it as indication of a substance use disorder that must be confirmed and documented. The statistician will pool the urine test results to tell stories about the population. A line on a test strip comes to be an assemblage of multiplicities hanging together (Mol 2002).

But why take this approach? If one recognizes that ontologies are multiple, and that their multiplicities have politics, then “reality does not precede the mundane practices,” and thus can be “both open and contested” (Mol 1999, 75). Drawing out carceral multiplicities is an abolitionist project, as it highlights the ways in which carceral processes enact that which they seek to find (Dwyer and Moore 2013). From this premise it becomes clear that carceral bodies contain epistemologies, making existences imbricated—undoing one necessarily affects the other. When reality is neither unitary nor fixed, bodies become part of an ontological flow. This flow opens carceralities to radical change, making it an important component of an abolitionist STS that intervenes in reality itself (Mol 1999).

These ontological multiplicities are augmented by Lisa Guenther’s (2013) conceptualization of critical phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of experience, which Guenther bolsters by integrating personal experiences with the complexities of structural “intersubjectivity” and the “textures of social life” (2013, xiii). Critical phenomenology binds the experiential, the collective, and the systemic from which the embodied effects of incarceration can be contextualized. In doing so, critical phenomenology resists the individualization of traditional phenomenology by connecting the experiential to the relational. For instance, Guenther establishes that social death is a routinized consequence of mass incarceration. She suggests that this form of death is enacted through forced isolation and/or eliminated privacy, both of which deprive people of “constitutive relationality” (Guenther 2013, 151). Guenther further ties such carceral conditions to the social death of slavery. Critical phenomenology, thus, provides abolitionist STS with the tools to disrupt the individualization of carceral subjecthood. It simultaneously draws out the moral imperatives of disrupting the sufferings caused by mass incarceration, while pointing to the socio-epistemological structures that perpetuate it.

Abolitionist STS is tasked with accounting for the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability, while simultaneously recognizing that the carceral is always, already insinuated in such constructs (Benjamin 2016; Zurn 2019). Here, abolitionist STS is a response to Ruha Benjamin’s call for “abolitionist consciousness” and “conceptualizing efforts to exercise freedom and agency” (2016, 151) arising from critical race STS. It also establishes the challenge to think beyond the binary of freedom/agency versus incarceration/criminalization. Further, abolitionist STS is deployed to problematize Western, neoliberal definitions of autonomy by drawing out multiplicities and experientialities (Thakor and boyd 2013). Moreover, it adds methodological tools aimed at carceral classifications and techno-optimisms that allow the CIC to continue in the name of “reform.” Abolitionist STS is needed not only to resist ossified carceralities, but also to serve as an epistemology of a propagative Otherwise germinated from radical dreams. Additionally, abolitionist STS is more than a counter-epistemology, instead calling for engagement with actual practices and sustained activism (Ben-Moshe 2018).

Abolitionist STS is tasked with the urgency of offering interventions in the field of criminology. Criminology entered the lexicon in the late 1800s as the science of crime and criminality (Rafter 2009). Criminology is comprised of explanatory regimes ranging from the biological (e.g., biocriminology, genetic theories) to the social (e.g., social ecology models, conflict theories) to the structural (e.g., queer, convict, critical criminology; Rafter, Posick, and Rocque 2016). The history of criminology has been well delineated by Michel Foucault and science studies scholars such as Piers Beirne (1993), Nicole Rafter (2009), and David Arthur Jones (1986). These scholars have addressed the assumptions and socio-historical contexts from which crime and the criminal has been rendered deviant, rare, and the exception rather than an inevitability across the lifespan (Coyle 2016, 2018).

The history of criminology typically begins with classical criminology that viewed Man as rational and calculative, thereby distinct from criminal man (Vold, Bernard, and Snipes 1998). The assumed weighing of costs and benefits not only led to calls for harsher punishments, but also gave rise to the imperative to identify those likely to commit crimes, marking the birth of the pre-crime criminal (Beirne 1991, 1993). Additionally, early criminology embraced statistics and applied normal distribution, or the bell curve, to identify aberrances from which certain characteristics could reveal an innate criminality (Gould 1996).

Classical criminology gave way to biocriminological approaches such as Cesare Lombroso’s work categorizing physiological differences indicating that “born criminals,” “lunatics,” and “the American black” were evolutionary “throwbacks to prehistoric man” (Beirne 1993, 148; Lombroso 2006). Bodily measurements became evidence of heritable criminality, which implies that crime prevention requires removing criminal man from society and the gene pool (Beaver, Barnes, and Boutwell2014; Burt and Simons 2014). Such heritability theories are deeply imbricated with scientific racism and eugenics. These theories target the genetic material of those experiencing sexism, white supremacy, criminalization, xenophobia, ableism, and homophobia (Davis and Mendieta 2005; Richie 2012, Rollins 2018).

It is against these waves of criminology that radical (Lynch 1997; Ross 2009), critical (DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz 2018; Taylor et al. 2013), convict (Earle 2016; Tietjen 2019), queer (Ball 2019; Buist and Lenning 2016), green (Brisman and South 2019; Stretesky, Long, and Lynch 2014), counter-colonial (Agozino 2003), and feminist (Humphries 2009; Musto 2019) criminologists have offered rebuttal. These frameworks offer strong critique from within the field surrounding race, gender, ability, environment, and poverty (Schept 2016). Broadly, these critical approaches sought to shift the field from individualizing notions of criminality to the structural and constructed.

Taking feminist criminology as an example, this branch of criminology began in the late 1960s with the assertion that females had been largely excluded from studies of crime (Bowker, Chesney-Lind, and Pollock 1978; Chesney-Lind 1973). Early feminist criminologists called for women to become both scholars and subjects of criminology research (Whalley and Hackett 2017). They also called for the strengthening of the CIC to enhance punishments for crimes against women (e.g., longer sentences for sexual assault; Thuma 2015, 2019). Later feminist scholars made explicit the social construction of laws and crime (Smart 1989). For instance, feminist anti-carceralism arose from the work of incarcerated women, formerly incarcerated women, and feminist activists and scholars working against mass incarceration (Michalsen 2019; Whalley and Hackett 2017). Abolitionist feminism engages with the specific ways gender and sexuality are policed and criminalized (Coyle and Schept 2017; Spade 2013; Thuma 2015).

These critical waves also led to criminologists applying STS methods and theories to carceral technosocial networks that resisted binaries and embraced assemblages (Brown 2006). Early on, Thomas Mathiesen (1974; Mathiesen and Hjemda 2011), in calling for abolition, was also critical of carceral logics and boundaries, taking aim at the individual and social (e.g., “collective morality”) explanations of crime. Criminologists drawing upon STS have called for approaches that attended to the materialities of intersectional oppressions and dynamic assemblages (Henne and Shah 2015; Henne and Troshynski 2019). It is upon these recent waves of criminology that abolitionist STS can offer further intervention.

On the other side of the disciplinary divide, STS scholars have made important strides in addressing both technologies and frameworks of the criminal justice system (Brey, McGuire, and Holt 2017). For instance, the technologies of identification and their organizational frames have garnered attention (Cole 2002; Sengoopta 2003). These studies of technologies expanded to include the social practices of forensic evidence and calls for engagement with CIC performativities (Kruse 2015; Robert and Dufresne 2016). Additionally, STS scholars have pointed out how carcerality and racialized, nationalist incarceration have seeped into Western knowledge-making writ large (Benjamin 2019a; Browne 2015).

This article builds on the work of these scholars as it draws upon feminist STS to advance abolitionist STS. Feminist STS scholars, such as Donna Haraway, call for us to stay with the trouble and recognize “surplus death” (2016, 134). Mass incarceration is a letting die and killing that is accepted when capitalist, colonial, and carceral structures persist. Such letting die is especially evident in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as incarcerated people are at vastly elevated risk (Schwartzapfel, Park, and Demillo 2020; Vose, Cullen, and Lee 2020). However, focusing on periods of epidemic can mask the systemization of suffering and death sewn into the everyday functioning of detention facilities.

To date, STS has not been central to carceral abolition, despite its embrace of contingencies and partialities that leave room for abundances of an Otherwise (Haraway 2016; Strathern 1988). Across recent waves of STS, drawing out ontological heterogeneity has facilitated a different sort of becoming. The suggestion here is that a feminist, abolitionist STS will need to delineate connections between the ontological and epistemological. It must also account for the experiential, the embodied, and the structural (Pitts-Taylor 2020). This approach is inspired by and closely related to Benjamin’s (2016) critical race STS, but specifically targets mass incarceration and its diffusions. Abolitionist STS is delineated as abolitionist in both its subject matter and philosophical underpinnings. Its philosophical intervention interrupts the ontological monisms inherent in the correctional and biomedical classificatory regimes of jails.

This project set out to understand jail intake processes and their stakes. It employed ethnography and interviews in three New York City jails and attended to materialities, physicalities, and emotion. This methodological approach is an early attempt at abolitionist STS research practices that grew out of two central research questions: (1) How do jail intake processes produce (analog and digital) incarcerated bodies and what are the ontological implications? (2) How are jail intake processes reflective of the logics of a carceral society?

Understandably, ethnography in correctional facilities comes with a fraught history (Clemmer 1958; Sykes 1958). In response, I attended to my own positionalities across this STS dissertation fieldwork and analysis. Additionally, interviews provided a rich source of insight into the experiences of others. Further, gaining and maintaining access to the jails was exceptionally challenging and demanded constant negotiation (Rhodes 2009). These negotiations were also carefully documented so as to reveal power dynamics, violences, and precarities.

The restrictions on data collection meant that I often only had a pen and paper to record field notes and some of the interviews. They were then transcribed and fleshed out as close to the date of collection as possible. This made the data partial and deeply mediated (Davies 2002). The hope is that the detailed engagement with access, the role of emotions, and reflexivity can be helpful to others.

Finally, iterative analysis took place across the data collection process and continued long after. The data was coded so that groupings and themes could be identified in accordance with grounded theory (Redman-MacLaren and Mills 2015). This approach incorporated and reflected some of the core concepts of STS (e.g., co-production, boundary objects, modest witnesses). The following sections reflect abolitionist STS interventions across three vignettes—ontological multiplicities, critical phenomenology, and the integration of both. Additionally, details have been changed to ensure that the participants are not identifiable.

A young, Latinx man with reddish hair and delicate freckles comes into the cramped jail clinic. The covering nurse recognizes him and says, almost warmly, in her thick Guyanese accent, “Uh oh, here comes the king of trouble!” The young man limps in and appears to be in great pain. He explains that he was beaten by police with a baton and that “everything hurts.” He is just one of the thousands of people in New York City who are arrested and must undergo “intake processing” as they await trial.

He is twenty-one, but there was a data entry error and in the electronic record systems he is fifty-one. This may explain why he was sent to this jail as opposed to another facility with housing areas specifically for young adults. The nurse gently chides him for being back, but seems tender. (Field notes 2017)

This young man is both twenty-one and fifty-one, his digital and analog bodies chafe. His “data double” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) requires additional screening as the electronic health record system flashes a reminder that men over fifty must be offered an electrocardiogram. This will be a test digitally recorded as “refused,” despite its never having been offered. Another disjuncture arises as the man’s wounds do not fit within the chronic diseases asked about, and thus remain outside of his digital body.

A patient care assistant (PCA) comes in and directs the young man to stand on the scale. He shuffles over trying to keep weight off his right leg. She takes his blood pressure, peak oxygen flow, and temperature. The nurse rapidly asks if he has heart disease, diabetes, seizure disorders, hepatitis, kidney disease, cancer, asthma, tuberculosis, or HIV/AIDS. He says “no” to each. (Field notes 2017)

In this instance, the PCA will record the measures digitally, turning the young man into a series of numbers tracked in line graphs from visit to visit, incarceration to incarceration. They tell stories of health and arrest in the language of “disease control” and “health maintenance,” a series of numbers, each with implications for further testing and intervention (Berg and Bowker 1997). They open his body to particular forms of racialized surveillance when identified as “high-risk” based on demographic categorization and bodily measures. Despite the imagined neutrality of such categories, this electronic system reinscribes the technologies of race and carcerality (Benjamin 2019a).

After she has run through the list of conditions from the electronic intake form, the young man says that he has “mental health problems” and has come from the psychiatric hospital. The nurse asks why and he says, “Because I tried to kill myself.” She says, “Why!?! Come on, hold your head up.” He looks down at his jail shoes and says “I’m suicidal.” “Why?” She says in a chiding tone, “that is not the way. You can’t be doing that.” He ducks his head and says, “For a lot of reasons.” (Field notes 2017)

The young man’s suicide attempt just before his reincarceration highlights the social and psychic deaths that occur in the carceral machine (Cacho 2012; Dayan 2001; Reiter 2016). As the young man discusses his despair, it will remain outside of his digital body for another eight hours in the freezing, crowded pen for a mental health clinician to assign a numerical suicide risk. Here, the series of questions and measurements require particular answers and, in their bureaucratized sluggishness, turn bodily needs into weaponry of the state. Perhaps most impactfully, later when he is labeled “a mental health,” he will be segregated. Although this label will be used across departments and sites, it means something different in the context of health care, public health, corrections, and the courts (Hatch 2019). It results in biomedical surveillance that takes place alongside the penological surveillance of “suicide-watch,” which refers to both physical space and specific forms of monitoring (Browne 2015).

This vignette presents how enactments proliferate, forming a carceral body multiple. The incarcerated man becomes a set of vital signs that are used to define, diagnose, and sort. The vital signs will be paired with a proliferation of risks that enact multiplicities such as housing area status, levels of clinical monitoring, statistical summaries, and so on. This multiplicity stands in contrast to classical criminology that is premised upon a unitary, objective criminal. The construct of the criminal is standardized through prescriptive normativities that are established through the bell curve. It is this search for deviance from an established norm that is coded in the health and corrections record systems. These carceral technologies are lobbed into the future as they provide data for statistical analyses made to tell carceral stories that perpetuate racializing, carceral logics.

As Mol (2002) suggested, when reality is enacted, it can be contested. Abolitionist STS draws out multiplicities in order to intervene in carceral epistemologies and facilitate radical transformation (Ben-Moshe 2018). When the carceral body is multiple and mutable, it can countermand the essentializing logics of traditional criminology that perpetuate racialized mass incarceration. The next vignette illustrates the stakes of such reimaginings and the need for interventions that account for the experiential (Brown and Schept 2017).

The physician assistant (PA) is completing the family history section of the medical assessment and asks, “Your mother, father alive?” The middle-aged man says, “They’re dead.” “Of what?,” the PA asks. He explains that his father died of AIDS. The PA assumes that it was sexually transmitted and says, “That’s why you needs to protect yourself.” He explains that his father was an “IV drug user.” She then asks about his mother and is informed she “died in 1984 of ‘double pneumonia’ is what they called it at the time,” he says, “but she probably died of AIDS, it was just too early for that diagnosis.” The PA gets frustrated and asks whether it was AIDS or not because she needs to “record a response.” The man is trying to explain that the diagnosis of AIDS did not exist at that time. They go back and forth and the conversation becomes heated. (Field notes 2017)

This vignette exemplifies the limited ways correctional medicine accounts for relationships, experience, and behavior. As the PA tells him to learn from his parents’ deaths and “use protection,” the epistemologies of heritability and learned behavior flatten the parent-child relationship to one of risk and disease transmission. Further, as the encounter unfolds, the need for data to estimate risk is used to justify the violence of interrogation. It can be jarring to be asked these questions any time, let alone when you are experiencing a headache, badly hurt, or going through devastating withdrawal symptoms.

Once the tiff has been smoothed over, the man begs to use the PA’s phone to call his wife and children. She apologizes and explains it is not allowed. The incarcerated man begins to cry and says that he is going to miss his daughter’s birthday because he hasn’t been allowed bail and his first court date is May 5th. He tells us his daughter has been asking for weeks, “Daddy, what are we doing for my birthday?” He is sobbing and says, “I haven’t been in trouble for 18 years.” He says he doesn’t think he will “get housed” in time to make the call tonight, and his family doesn’t know where he is. (Field notes 2017)

This vignette reflects the gulf between carceral biomedicine (i.e., intergenerational risk) and the pain of being taken from one’s family. The violences of carceral systems are intentionally and systematically absented from the majority of the criminology literature, erasing the routinized harms inflicted. To redress this erasure, Guenther (2013) provides a critical phenomenology that resists carceral heritability and behaviorism by acknowledging that criminality is not only enacted through the experience of being made carceral, but is disproportionately inflicted upon people of color and the poor.

Moreover, this vignette illustrates Guenther’s (2013) conceptualization of the social death that is experienced in correctional facilities. By acknowledging the intercorporealities of subjectivity, abolitionist STS can illustrate the use of incarceration as a weapon that aims to decimate relational personhood. Here, carceral bodies multiply to include a fatherless daughter and a husbandless wife. The anxiety of the man’s family when he does not come home and cannot answer his phone becomes part of the carceralities experienced beyond jail walls. This relationality opens the possibility of an abolitionist STS that undoes the social deaths of severed connections to family, communities, friends, and others.

Countermanding the weaponry of mass incarceration calls for an abolitionist relationality that interrupts the neoliberal imaginary of rugged individualism (Lake 2017). It requires an accounting for the interconnections and experiences of carceral bodies beyond jail walls. When STS embraces phenomenology with abolitionist politics, it is able to offer resistance to systemic racism, sexism, and ableism—all while acknowledging that experience is mediated. The implications of this approach are reflected in the next vignette that grapples with predictive technologies that parse carceral subjects.

I am speaking with a corrections officer in his late thirties and I ask him with false nonchalance if he knows how corrections “classifications” (e.g., general population, high security) are made. Over the course of my fieldwork this has remained the most closely guarded information and I have yet to find anyone who can provide more than the variables they assume are accounted for. He says, “In terms of classification, I mean, that is way over my pay grade, they don’t tell us that sort of thing. We just see what the computer says. I mean, you can see patterns though. Like the ‘tickets’ (which are given for violations of rules) are the most important, that and their crime, their charges. It’s cumulative. So, like, if this guy’s been here, like a frequent flyer, then he’s going to go up, especially if they are violent charges, like felonies or something.” (Field notes 2017)

The heft of the datafication of carceral bodies is illustrated in this officer’s nonchalant reflection on how algorithms are applied. As Jock Young (2011) has delineated, social statistics are constructed—a fact that is occluded through routinized carceral protocols and the black boxing of classification. As the officer lists the variables, their stakes are obscured, despite the fact that they shape every part of a person’s incarceration. It illustrates how ontological multiplicities are further proliferated through predictive processes.

The officer goes on to explain that there are probably other factors included, “like age, if they are in a gang, where they’re from.” But he explains they are not told what other information “counts,” they are just responsible for entering it into the Inmate Information System (IIS). This is said with the usual faith in digital storage and decisional algorithms, a perceived washing clean of bias. I ask him if this is why the officers must document all scars, tattoos, current injuries, and disabilities. He laughs and says, “That’s all just CYA (cover your ass). Otherwise, we get sued for injuries that happened during arrest.” This doesn’t seem to explain the careful parsing, but I can see the questions are making him uncomfortable. (Field notes 2017)

The IIS integrates and stores biometric information (e.g., fingerprints), photographs, demographic information (e.g., race, ethnicity, age), court information, body contraband search results, charges, and so on. As the incarcerated person is stripped and given a uniform, they are simultaneously parsed and digitized. When engaging an abolitionist STS lens, it is hard to ignore the resonances between this process and that of the slave auction block where similar information was documented and photographs taken (Browne 2015). While the outcome may no longer be a branding of analog flesh, the branding comes in the form of classification that opens the incarcerated person to certain surveillances as they become property of the state (Browne 2015). This resonance is further reflected in the following account from an incarcerated woman.

Her voice is threadlike. There is a shaking coming from somewhere deep in her body. “They strip search you with no gown if you’ve been caught bringing things in before. Even if it’s only on a misdemeanor.” Her eyes are tearing. “They take your clothes and they tell you to squat and cough. It’s like being an animal and it’s so cold. Then, they give you a uniform and say you can take a shower, but it’s so filthy. It’s so filthy.” While her body is opened to the corrections officers they must document the findings and any other markings. Her degradation is documented by officers who often speak about how uncomfortable the “search” is for them as well. (Field notes 2017)

These digital and analog documentation processes leave indelible marks that enact hypervisibilities through taxonomizations (Benjamin 2019a). When abolitionist STS engages phenomenological accounts of the search process, it is revealed to be one of violation and degradation. The emotional legacy of this lives on and will be re-enacted at each incarceration. Moreover, while it is perceived by corrections officers as being unbiased and “high-tech,” the assignment of classification is a “highly collectivized task” aimed at the delineation of carceral risk (Thakor 2017, 1058). While the classification system may assign weights, it is through the disciplined expertise of law enforcement and corrections officers that the characterizations are made (Katz 2020; Thakor and boyd 2013).

These findings both align with and resist those of Sarah Brayne (2017) and Brayne and Angèle Christin (2020), who have studied other sectors of the criminal justice system (e.g., policing and the courts). Corrections classification systems serve the same function as those in policing and courts. They appear to wash away bias, while occluding the practices that have politics and embodied implications (Brayne and Christin 2020). However, as the classification system was internally developed, there was less resistance to its determinations (Brayne and Christin 2020; Jorgensen 2015). This may be because officers retain considerable discretion in coding and housing.

Classification systems that set out to predict violence are just one of many technologies used in correctional facilities (Brennan, Wells, and Carr 2013; Russo, Woods et al. 2019; Russo, Vemeer et al. 2020). The result is a multiplicative racialized surveillance that begins in communities and is reinforced in the correctional setting (Eubanks 2018; Hannah-Moffat 2019). Not only are people of color more likely to be incarcerated, they are also more likely to be assigned higher levels of classification (Struthers Montford and Hannah-Moffat 2020), which puts them at greater risk of injury and death. In this regard, it is vital that abolitionist STS not only call for an end to carceral epistemes, but that it does so through generative and creative mechanisms. Such approaches are further tasked with conveying how classification systems shape ontologies and have embodied stakes. The gravity of this reality is multiplied when acknowledging that some bodies are more likely to experience incarceration and, in turn, to become objects of carceral knowledge production.

The day that I write this final section, another Black man has been shot in the back by police. The only weapons were those brandished by officers. The need for abolitionist STS is urgent. Attending to either practices or outcomes alone cannot be enough. When carceral taxonomies, rationalities, and epistemologies are allowed to persist, radical change is impossible. In the wake of sustained public attention to the racial injustice of the CIC, scholars and activists are urgently tasked with dreaming an Otherwise.

Abolitionist STS offers resistance to carceral knowledge, thereby intervening in reality itself. The CIC inserts systematized cruelties into the core of knowledge production and social order, shaping what it means to be human (Price 2017). This paper has offered an intervention into the criminological constructs of criminal man and attendant classificatory regimes. Abolitionist STS resists the techno-optimisms that allow the CIC to persist by offering placation through technological solutions, such as body-worn cameras and ankle monitors (Benjamin 2019b; Browne 2015). Such solutions, augmented by predictive technologies, are represented as free from bias and racism, thereby obscuring the racist and classist data that lobs past disparities into the future (Benjamin 2019b). The challenge is to think beyond carceralities and punitivities, despite their grip. This will likely require time and transdisciplinary, activist collaboration (Whalley and Hackett 2017).

When multiplicities, experientialities, complexities, contradictions, and power dynamics are drawn out, abolition is no longer an undoing but a proliferation that disinvests and contravenes carceral logics. Additionally, abolitionist STS has implications for the social sciences. It suggests that the ontological turn has not provided adequate purchase to address mass detention and the budding e-carceration crisis (Jones 2014). Further, given how fundamental carceral knowledge and its imaginaries are to Western knowledge systems, abolitionist STS can have far-reaching consequences.

Ultimately, with growing attention to racialized mass incarceration and attendant police violence, there is a pressing need for an abolitionist STS that can trace diffuse carceralities beyond what is conventionally considered to be part of the CIC. Abolitionist STS carries the urgencies of survival in this midst of the current crisis. Just as Stephen Molldrem and Mitali Thakor (2017) delineated a coalitional approach to queer STS, abolitionist STS must also form alliances with critical race, feminist, and queer STS. Together, it is possible to dream an end to the systematic loss of Black and Brown lives justified through the whitewashing of carceral logics and technologies.

I am deeply indebted to all of the people in the New York City jails who were willing to share their time and stories. This research would not have been possible without the support and assistance of Dr. Rebecca Hester, Dr. Christine Labuski, Dr. Saul Halfon, and Dr. Gabriel Blouin-Genest. Lastly, I am truly grateful for the generosity of the reviewers and editors of this article. It has been a wonderful and generative experience for a new scholar.

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Ariel Ludwig is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Houston. Her research lies at the intersection of biomedicine and mass incarceration.