Reading Racial Capitalist Urbanism through California Prison Funding

Keywords: municipal finance, carceral geographies, racial capitalism, social reproduction
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Recent urban scholarship calls attention to the racial character of municipal finance (Pulido 2016; Leroy and Jenkins 2021; Ponder 2021). These perspectives situate urban fiscal practices within the broader political economy of racial capitalism – rendering the politics and practices of municipal finance central in processes of death-dealing racial differentiation that make and remake the city (Ponder and Omstedt 2019; Dantzler 2021; Norris 2021). This paper examines prison funding as a component of municipal finance that illustrates racial capitalist urbanization and its relationship to sites of social reproduction.

The project integrates frameworks across political economy, urban and economic geography, cultural studies, and the Black radical tradition to interpret financial data from two California prisons. In Stockton, I examine a prison-making project that emerged amid the city’s 2012 solvency crisis, and twenty miles south, in Tracy, I examine a recent (2021) prison closure. The comparison of carceral funding data advances a fiscal geography (Tapp and Kay 2019) of prisons. Fiscal carceral geography, I suggest, is a useful conceptual frame for understanding the ways municipal finance is produced by fiscal policy and market reform and is productive and protective of racial hierarchies characteristic of capitalism (Robinson 2000; Woods 2002; Gilmore 2007; Wilson 2019). Crucially, charting carceral municipal finance locates theoretical and spatial links between geographies of risk and speculation, racialized politics of public debt, and sites of social reproduction.