UC Davis

This paper is an archival and ethnographic case study of community contestation and abolitionist refusal of carceral expansion in Sacramento County, California. Tracing recent carceral histories through legal, economic, and ideological geographies, I reveal how grassroots abolitionist organizing prevented two jail expansion projects from 2019 to 2021. Through participant observation and document review, I explore three sites of carceral expansion: (1) jail conditions litigation, or class-action lawsuits addressing profound abuses inside jails; (2) the role of finance capital investment from California’s Public Safety Realignment, and (3) the ideology of carceral humanism that attempts to justify carceral expansion as a necessary for improving medical and mental health care inside jails. I find that Sacramento County’s political-economic conditions created by Public Safety Realignment, jail conditions litigation, and carceral ideologies created a landscape ripe for carceral expansion. By contesting these three sites through the formation of abolitionist knowledge and discourse, community organizers were able to prevent two jail expansion projects and open pathways for decarceration and community reinvestment.