Decolonizing Carceral Resistance: Bridging Political Economy and Decolonial Criminology

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 1

Abstract

Contemporary carceral studies suffer from analytical fragmentation because political economy illuminates how prisons manage surplus populations but under-theorizes colonial violence, while decolonial criminology centers Indigenous dispossession but under-specifies material circuits of accumulation. This literature-based paper advances a Decolonial Political Economy of Carceral Resistance (DPECR) to bridge this divide arguing that penal institutions govern both surplus labour and dispossessed land/sovereignty simultaneously under racial capitalism and coloniality. Drawing on counter-colonial/decolonial criminology (Quijano, 2002; Agozino, 2003), Indigenous criminology (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016; Coulthard, 2016), and abolitionist praxis (Davis, 2003), my paper shows how decolonial criminology extends political–economy by reorienting analysis toward land, jurisdiction, and epistemic violence. Methodologically, the article undertakes a synthetic theoretical review of statutes, archival accounts, and movement texts, comparing three strategic cases: the Attica Prison Uprising (United States), the Northern Ireland Dirty Protest, and the internal anti-colonial struggle in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. Across these cases, findings demonstrate that neither critical political economy nor decolonial criminology alone can explain the intertwined formation and resistance of carceral regimes in global north and south. Only a braided framework can account for Attica’s racial governance, Ireland’s embodied counter-colonial resistance, and the CHTs’ land-sovereignty struggle. The article contributes a decolonial political economy of carceral resistance that reorients abolition as a decolonizing project— requiring the dismantling of colonial infrastructures and the restoration of Indigenous jurisdiction beyond technocratic criminal justice reform.
Keywords: Decolonizing Carceral Resistance; Decolonial Criminology; Political Economy; Racial Capitalism; Indigenous Epistemology; Abolitionism.

Author

• Mohammed Jahirul Islam