Book Review: Jamie Bennett and Victoria Knight, Prisoners on Prison Films

Abstract

practices of the working class” (p. 144). McQuade frames their dialectic relation with police power as the essential contradiction of security. The chapter analyzes three regional ILP initiatives that disrupt moral economies of poverty: multiagency drug war operations; landlord training, trespass affidavit, and narcotics eviction programs; and secondhand dealer laws. McQuade provocatively claims moral economies of poverty may be more threatening than political movements. The book concludes with a reflection on contemporary abolitionist movements in Chicago and a return to Camden. Here, McQuade uses interviews conducted with community organizers and activists, and observations from his ride-along with a Camden police officer to problematize the narrative about Camden’s “success” with crime reduction (the “Camden model”). McQuade queries how abolitionist’s “non-reformist reforms” and his own analysis might inform future accounts of police power. I end with a note on the book’s appendix on research methods. As of now, Pacifying the Homeland is the only book about fusion proper. McQuade’s account of how he obtained access is instructive for other researchers. It also illuminates that research about fusion matters to the extent it can speak to fusion’s organic priorities and specific materializations. The book’s widereaching interviewing (82 people total) is apt, itself reflecting fusion’s decentralized operations. McQuade does not just probe two fusion centers; he provides a critical framework for how to address developments of mass supervision irreducible to and including fusion. After reading McQuade’s uncompromising book, one might feel that fusion centers’ closure is a modest goal, even. As forces of pacification structurally reinforce policing’s mandate for routinized violence, radical anti-pacification orientations are vital.