UC San Diego

My dissertation examines quotidian enactments of resistance in California state prisons that undermine carceral control and express collective self-determination. The field of carceral geography primarily interrogates the production of carceral violence, incapacitation, and extraction; in doing so, it often fails to recognize the commonplace unruly actions done by people inside who act against the concretization of carceral control. My dissertation unpacks how people inside creatively maneuver within the limitations of prison space in ways that thwart the surveillance designs of the racial carceral state. I trace material modes of clandestine exchange and mobilization within prison walls. Environmental toxicity is the backdrop of incarceration that operationalizes mundane death and debility dealing technologies of carceral punishment. I trace how people incarcerated use oft-broken infrastructure to elude carceral control and surveillance. These alternative uses of infrastructure are what I term fugitive cracks, or the detailed material openings in prisons that disorder the violent architectural, social, and political designs of carceral space. Fugitive cracks offer a grounded analysis that examines how people may not evade capture but evade the spatial determinations of capture. I put forth a conceptual framework of fugitive cracks as seeding abolitionist futures. The dissertation is organized into case studies crafted through mixed methods to conceptualize how fugitive cracks are subversive spatial productions. Each case study builds upon the former to elaborate on the concept of fugitive cracks as that which can transform from individualized enactments of struggle to mass social movements. Chapter One elaborates on instances when people inside used broken infrastructure for their own purposes, such as hiding objects or sending messages. Chapter Two extends the theory of fugitive cracks by looking to the socio-material networks that enabled Caryl Chessman and George Jackson to smuggle their book manuscripts out of prison between 1950 and 1970. These publications were made possible through supporters, material hiding spaces, legal loopholes, and physical obfuscation tactics. Chapter Three depicts how mobilizing for the 2011 and 2013 California Prisoner Hunger Strikes relied on clandestine communication pathways created from storm drains, cracks in walls, sewer pipes, outside allies, and more that grew the strike into the largest prisoner movement in the U.S. with over 30,000 participants. The Conclusion focuses two cultural texts that put forth New Afrikan liberationist principles gathered from Black radical mentorship inside Pelican Bay solitary confinement cells. People inside are subject to the immense and unceasing terror of racist captivity, and they are at the forefront of weaving instructive fugitive relations that make worlds otherwise.