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Carceral Camouflage: Inscribing and Obscuring Neoliberal Penality through New York City's Borough-Based Jail Plan

Wilson, Katie
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1576859980056084

Abstract Details

2019, BA, Oberlin College, Comparative American Studies.
This project seeks to interrogate the socio-spatial implications of New York City's contemporary criminal justice machine through mayor Bill de Blasio's ongoing jail reform plan to build new, "borough-based jails." In 2017, following decades of controversy over entrenched violence and horrific abuses on Rikers Island, New York's notorious island penal colony, de Blasio announced a 10-year plan to "to close Rikers Island and replace it with a smaller network of modern jails." While the plan claims to make jails in New York "smaller, safer, and fairer," this project analyzes the plan's strategies, its rhetoric, and its goals to understand the vision of New York City that is being produced and propagated. Rather than a plan to contain, shutter, or dismantle the carceral legacies at work on Rikers Island, this project unpacks how liberal criminal justice reforms in the urban context rely upon exclusionary citizenship, spatialized inequality, and commodification of neighborhoods to take shape. While the plan is in the early stages of implementation with an uncertain future, this research helps to uncover how the carceral state and neoliberal governmentality in contemporary U.S. cities cohere at the street level, working to normalize the capillary expansion of carceral control in the name of urban consumption.
Gina M. Pérez (Advisor)
Charmaine Chua (Committee Member)
Annemarie Sammartino (Committee Member)
98 p.
American Studies; Geography; Land Use Planning; Urban Planning
Carceral Geography; Urban Studies; Jail Studies; Critical Prison Studies; Incarceration Reform; Neoliberalism; Mass Incarceration; Criminalization; New York City; Rikers Island; Borough-Based Jails; Criminal Justice Reform;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Wilson, K. (2019). Carceral Camouflage: Inscribing and Obscuring Neoliberal Penality through New York City's Borough-Based Jail Plan [Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1576859980056084

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wilson, Katie. Carceral Camouflage: Inscribing and Obscuring Neoliberal Penality through New York City's Borough-Based Jail Plan. 2019. Oberlin College, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1576859980056084.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wilson, Katie. "Carceral Camouflage: Inscribing and Obscuring Neoliberal Penality through New York City's Borough-Based Jail Plan." Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1576859980056084

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

oberlin1576859980056084
318
© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Oberlin College Honors Theses and OhioLINK.