ABSTRACT
Nazi Germany targeted Jews for destruction in accord with their “war on crime,” and the United States targets African Americans, the poor, and the mentally ill as part of their war on crime. Assuming Claudia Card’s definition of genocide as the infliction of “social death,” I argue that, in the US, certain populations targeted for arrest have suffered genocidal wounds as a result of the traumas of incarceration; these are populations already marginalized by the racist, classist, and ableist distribution of power relations. The prison system reinforces and ensures the powerlessness of marginalized populations against violence and discrimination. It serves to perpetuate the genocidal logic that rationalized the American genocides against Native Americans and African slaves that created—and continues to create—the material basis for a white supremacist nation-state. Our moral blindness to the lethal terror inflicted by the prison system is made possible by our refusal to grant epistemic value to the testimony of those oppressed by the system. In this chapter, I draw on testimony from women I visit at a medium- and maximum-security state prison, as well as draw on lyrics from underground rap songs to support my argument that the genocidal conditions of confinement in the United States belie the existence of a just justice system. I ultimately argue that the category of the “criminal”—always imagined as a one-dimensional, “evil” individual—has played an essential role in supporting and justifying genocidal practices both in the past and the present.
