AMERICAN PURGATORY

How America used prisons to consolidate its global power.

Weber, a professor of African American and African studies, shows us how “prison imperialism” has repeatedly been employed by the American government to subjugate groups identified as threatening to the nation’s ambitions. “Over successive eras of empire building,” writes the author, “intersecting ideas about race, crime, and punishment, not only within the United States but around the globe, have been central to making mass incarceration and the modern American state.” Weber explores not only how a teeming “purgatory” was created by large-scale prisons, but also how long-standing efforts at resistance were carried out, beginning on slave ships and extending to contemporary prison abolitionists. The author makes a compelling, well-illustrated case for how American methods of controlling those deemed unruly have been guided by an ideology of white supremacy. Especially incisive are the sections detailing the significance of techniques developed by American prison officials in the Philippines, including a “banal and bureaucratic form of record keeping [that] became a lynchpin of the rise of the American surveillance state.” Also striking are Weber’s discussions of brutal policies commonly deployed in penal colonies, such as family separation and forced labor. The author delivers a convincing overview of America’s use of incarceration as an imperial tool, though the treatments of some complex subjects—such as how Native Americans responded to the colonialist aims of boarding schools or how American penitentiaries adapted techniques developed in other parts of the world—are sometimes rushed and in need of elaboration. Nevertheless, Weber drives home the importance of reckoning with the nation’s penal history: “As the migration to American cities of militarized police and torture techniques from overseas sites like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib renew concern over the consequences of war making at home, the United States continues to train police forces and export its model of incarceration abroad.”

A timely consideration of the geopolitical role of American prisons.