“It Feels Like You’re Being Robbed”: Prison Transfers, Dispossession, and Legal Plunder

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on State-Corporate Power

Abstract

Prisons extract wealth from those they entangle and their loved ones, disproportionately people of color and poor people. Existing literature has focused on three overlapping forms of this dynamic, which Page and Soss [2021] term “predation”: financial burdens placed on criminalized people, service privatization, and labor exploitation. Drawing on interviews with 52 formerly incarcerated New Yorkers and analysis of prison policies, this paper highlights an additional and undertheorized form: dispossession of personal belongings. Subject to strict property rules, incarcerated people have little control over their belongings. Examining transfers between prisons as a critical moment where property is confiscated, I argue that dispossession exemplifies carceral predation: it is enabled by law and formal rules and predicated on the subordination of incarcerated people vis a vis prison staff. Dispossession not only has significant material and sentimental effects but also amplifies inequalities generated by other forms of predation, including the disparity between individuals with and without outside financial support. Altogether, this paper traces how penal property dispossession contributes to racialized extraction. Moreover, it demonstrates that dispossession intersects multiplicatively with other predatory forms, deepening incarcerated people’s precarity. Doing so opens new questions about dispossession across varied domains of the carceral state.

Author

• Iolanthe Brooks, Northwestern University