Domination

Part 1 centers prisons as the current system of confinement used to maintain social control through the hierarchization of humans for labor. It extends the idea that confinement is the engine driving the region’s social, political, and economic systems while teasing apart how prisons advanced capital production by eliminating the need for commodities, and thus also the need to set labor to work making them. It identifies how systems of capitalist reproduction function in and across time and place—by disassembling and remaking itself across hundreds of years, always in ways that preserve the labor hierarchy and modes of social control established during the era of chattel slavery. Today’s prisons are not “the same” mode of domination as chattel slavery, Lenape reservations, or World War II labor camps. They do, however, dominate the landscape, structure the labor hierarchy, and function within and for the political economy in similar ways to past systems.