Carceral Agrarian Dreams and the Rise of the Plantation Prison

Keywords: carcerality, agriculture, prisons, land, aboltion
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Carcerality, a material regime and ideology of social control, is central to the development of agriculture in the United States. From the settler colonial logics of dispossession and enclosure to racial capitalism’s rapacious growth through plantation-style enslavement, growing food has required a set of narratives and practices of violent capture. This capture of land, bodies, and minds is historically masked by agrarianism. The belief that agriculture is natural and good, and the foundation of society has been fundamental to shoring up white male landed power. Such beliefs have furthered disciplinary and punitive methods of social control that target Indigenous, Black, Brown, immigrant, and poor communities. Seen as threats to contain and re-educate, agrarianism’s seemingly righteous roots prove pivotal to the rise of a penal system that targets these same groups. This paper reads these broad historical conditions against the grain to situate the rise of the plantation prison, a geographically and temporally malleable carceral formation. Whether through convict leasing, penal work camps, and on-site farms or penal farm colonies, agribusiness prison industries, and agricultural training of the incarcerated, the plantation prison has always and continues to legitimate the criminal punishment system. Grounded in the exploitation of ethnoracial and class hierarchies, the plantation prison has become a persistent feature of carcerality whose reliance on agrarianism requires rethinking agricultural practices behind bars and resisting reformist efforts that recycle legitimating narratives. Indeed, the plantation prison requires abolishing the carceral agrarian dreams that continue to haunt American agriculture as we know it.