Criminalized Beyond the Justice System
In the reading “Homes, and the racial spatial Order of Chicago: The carceral Society in the American City”, writer Rashad Shabazz discusses the many ways that Chicago housing projects, including the infamous Robert Taylor Homes, behaved like prisons and instilled in its residents the prison lifestyle/behavior. Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes were very much like prisons because of the building’s layout -which didn’t grant residents privacy from each other or nearby police, mandatory ID badges, surveillance cameras, unwarranted house raids, and barbed fences. As of a result of these carceral conditions residents (vast majority in poverty and unemployed) turned to drugs, hustling, stealing, and violent hyper masculinity. Shabazz writes, “By creating this housing, multiple carceral technologies – policing, surveillance, curfew, etc – were deployed into these spaces. The result was the prisonization of Black spaces and the subjectivities that occupied them…it provided the intellectual capital and creativity to create open prisons on Chicago’s Southside,” (Shabazz 9-10). The Robert Taylor Homes projects looked, felt, and operated like a prison in order to keep a large chunk of the black community in Chicago’s Southside confined to one space; it provided easy way to police their living spaces and “bust” them for any offense. The projects also made it easier for privileged bodies to control the way black bodies moved within/around the space by making it harder for them to access healthier food and jobs. The vast majority of the residents in the projects were unemployed and as a result turned to consuming or selling drugs. For many that consumed, their lack of income also made them more prone to stealing and violence in order to fuel their addictions; the crimes many residents had to commit would be the cause of their imprisonment and ultimately the beginning of a vicious cycle created within the Robert Taylor Homes that kept passed residents between the projects and prison time after time. This reading relates to the theme of “Criminalized Beyond the Justice System” because the conditions and effects of the Robert Taylor homes criminalize black bodies out outside of prison by creating an open and discreet prison on the outside. The residents of the projects had no right to a private life because they were constantly under different forms of surveillance that made them more vulnerable than others. The families within these projects were treated and watched like criminals, lived in crammed/unsanitary conditions, and were denied a healthy living; just like prisoners.
In “Racial Profiling and Societies of Control” Jared Sexton discusses the many forms of punishment and policing black bodies are subject to. Sexton writes, “…blacks remain the preeminent objects of punishment in the United States…subject to the most vicious spectacles of state-sanctioned violence and precluded from the possibility of either granting consent…or achieving normalization…despite this fact, blacks are in fact nonetheless subjected to regimes of discipline and control as what we might understand as forms of supplemental violence” (Sexton 195). Here sexton argues that the position of blacks has not changed since the times of chattel slavery, but rather morphed into different forms – surveillance, racial profiling, disenfranchisement, etc. –throughout their life time they are subjected to forms of violence or control that may be deemed as excessive by others, but have been normalized for black bodies. This reading relates to modern day because many of the forms of surveillance and control that Sexton discusses are still very much alive; black bodies are subject to racial profiling, violence, police brutality, and criminalization on a day-to-day basis and it is because of these forms of violence that countless black men and women have lost their lives. It is because of the anti-black laws of the land that black lives have become so precarious.
-Cynthia N