Carceral Migrations: Reframing Race, Space, and Punishment

We theorize state governance through population spatial trajectories to capture how seemingly disparate systems of punishment employ the same set of punishment logics and technologies to spatially regulate populations of color, which produces and reifies racial projects. Advancing a theoretical framework called carceral migrations, we argue that governments use legal punishment to force, restrict, and prevent movement as a racializing project of settler empire and anti-Blackness. Carceral migrations extend understandings of mass incarceration beyond confinement and holding by articulating three major points. First, the state’s regulation of populations’ spatial trajectories is punishment by design. Second, these spatially-oriented punishments operate as race-making and reinforcing technologies by producing punitive and recognizable spatial trajectories (or nontrajectories) for groups of people of color. Third, despite appearing race neutral in language, the development and application of legal codes and policies have disparate impacts on the spatial trajectories of people of color.