"We do this just for love": anti-black racism, white supremacy, and abolitionist resistance in the prison visitation process

Abstract

Prison visitation is a significant predictor of successful reentry into society for incarcerated people, but it is a time-, resource-, and psychologically-intensive process for visitors themselves. Prior research treated negative experiences of visitors as uniform, yet research to date has failed to adequately examine how visitation is experienced differently for various groups. Based on a long-term ethnographic study in collaboration with a community-based Black-owned prison visitation transportation service, this study demonstrates that racism and white supremacy, which have been ignored in visitation research, plague the visitation experience for visitors, the majority of whom are Black, brown, and veiled Muslim women. Interpersonal and systemic racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia are heavily entrenched in prison policies, procedures, and practices that shape the visitation experience, as well as in the surrounding predominately white prison towns that visitors and transportation services must navigate. Ultimately, these embedded forms of oppression result in behaviors and systems that replicate social and cultural dynamics similar to those historically identified with “sundown towns” characterized by policies, intimidation tactics, and violence intended to exclude people of color. As a result, the rural and distally-located towns in which many prisons and detention facilities are sited within in the US become what I term “sundown prison towns.” At the same time, Black, brown, and Muslim visitors face serious racism and white supremacy at the hands of correctional officers in the prison visitation process, with many guards espousing white supremacist beliefs or having direct ties to white supremacist groups. Prison visitation services, however, engage in strategic resistance against the carceral state and the violence it enacts on vulnerable communities, fostering rare spaces for Black and brown women to come together to engage in peer support, mutual aid, and political organizing to better protect each other and their communities from further harm via state and white supremacist violence. This project reveals that the carceral state, far from keen on the resistance that these services and the women who use them pose to the status quo of carceral control in the visitation process, goes to extensive lengths to repress, stifle, co-opt, recuperate and dismantle these important community-based services, which are some of the only organizations available to provide care for loved ones of the incarcerated. This dissertation fills significant gaps in the prison visitation literature, and offers a variety of community-grounded solutions for confronting the extensive abuse and violence that this dissertation reveals is inherent to the visitation process for the thousands of women of color who visit their incarcerated loved ones in US detention facilities each year.