In 1904, the United States occupied the Isthmus of Panama as it began to build the canal that would ultimately let the US link its Atlantic and Pacific empires. Importing more than just soldiers to the “Canal Zone,” the United States also brought with it a reanimated form of racialized involuntary servitude: the “road gang.” These “gangs” were composed of Black workers, many of whom had migrated to the Canal Zone from nearby Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Haiti, Martinique, and Antigua. They had come hoping to be employed in the building of the canal, but—with the arrival of US troops—these Black workers suddenly found themselves jammed up by morality laws, which criminalized harmless activities like gambling and swearing. The widespread criminalization of Black workers soon led to their overrepresentation among the prison population. And this, in turn, led to them being pressed into the road gangs, which would now build the infrastructure necessary for both American capital and white settlement.
These Black workers had come to Panama seeking work and economic opportunity. Now, however, they would not be paid for their labor.
These road gangs in the Canal Zone resembled the “chain gangs” of Black convicts used to build roads in the Southern states following the Civil War, as well as in Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and the Philippines. In fact, such convict roadbuilding was crucial to constructing the massive infrastructural projects that spanned the contiguous US as well as its territories. Still, the value of the road gangs went beyond their material support of modernization efforts. Convict labor created a racio-colonial logic that sutured criminality to Blackness and colonial status; and this, in turn, allowed for the (re)capture of free populations far beyond the US South.
It is this very racio-colonial system against which we continue to grapple today, in our own moment of hyper-incarceration and policing. In fact, the settler colonial state and imperial state has also always been a carceral state. In other words, settler colonial and imperial projects are impossible without carceral structures, practices, and ideologies. The prisons of Georgia were connected to the prisons of Panama, just as today’s US military aggression abroad is connected to the over one million people incarcerated in the US at this moment.
Both domestically and internationally, there is “a network of historical and contemporary black sites,” according to historian and African American studies scholar Benjamin D. Weber, “that reveal the colonial roots and global dimensions of the U.S. carceral state.” Such a notion is something that many scholars would likely affirm but that few actually endeavor to demonstrate. The work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Stuart Schrader, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jenna Loyd, Nadine Naber, Naomi Paik, and Micol Seigel stand out for grappling with the transnational, colonial, and imperial dimensions of the US carceral state.
To understand further the ways the imperial and colonial are deeply embedded in the development, expansion, and consolidation of the US carceral state, consider Weber’s American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, along with historical sociologist Julian Go’s Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US. Both texts show how the US carceral state is deeply linked to the rest of the globe, expanding our very understanding of where we might locate the US carceral state. By the “carceral state,” I am referring to the vast web of punitive institutions, policies, practices, and logics that are implicitly and explicitly sanctioned by the state and function to incapacitate criminalized populations and eliminate social threats. This certainly includes but is not limited to prisons, as both Weber and Go powerfully demonstrate.
Indeed, Weber and Go, through their focus on incarceration and militarized policing respectively, show how the US has functioned as a carceral archipelago, comprised of sites across the country and around the world that together work to maintain and facilitate racial hierarchy, capitalist extraction, and territorial expansion. As Weber concludes, “If the rise of the carceral state is considered a continuation of slavery and the Jim Crow racial caste system, it has also always been a strategy of empire building.”
Where, then, is this carceral state? It is not merely those discrete places in which prisoners are held; instead, it is the vast system that is required to hold those prison walls in place.
A little over a decade ago, I began my career at Dickinson College, a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania. Dickinson is in Carlisle, a town that worked hard to promote a quaint, welcoming aesthetic. Yet this exterior hid a much more complicated history and reality of white supremacy, economic abandonment, and pharmaceutical predation.
When I talk about my time at Dickinson, I often remark that it was a place that was heavily marked by layered histories of violence. Certainly, I was not-so-obliquely referencing the violence that academia so often inflicts on young queer scholars and scholars of color. But I was also signaling the violent histories literally embedded in the place itself, which marked daily life in ways both subtle and overt.
Carlisle was the site of the country’s first federal Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Opened in 1879, the Carlisle School was the brainchild of Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War veteran who promoted the forced assimilation of Native people into white culture as a solution to the “Indian problem” seen as impeding continental expansion. Pratt succinctly summed up this mission as “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Both Go and Weber force us to think about the carceral state not as a bounded site or discrete object, but as a network of power relations that facilitate racial capitalism and colonial extraction both within and between states.
During the Carlisle School’s 39 years of operation, Native children were separated from their families and communities, transported to Pennsylvania, and forced to break with sacred and cultural traditions. Approximately 10,000 students from over 140 different tribes went through the forced assimilation program at Carlisle and the school became a national model, leaving its stamp upon thousands more.1
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School is undoubtedly part of the United States’ long and brutal history of settler colonial violence. The closure of the school in 1918, however, is far from the end of the story.
Today, the site of the Carlisle School is home to the US Army War College. There, military officers are trained for top leadership positions and strategize how best to achieve national security goals and wage global counterinsurgency. Entangled with imperial violence and catastrophic foreign intervention around the world, one must seek permission at the Carlisle Barracks to visit what traces remain of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Carlisle exists in many ways as a palimpsest of colonial and imperial violence. It is also a deeply carceral space although seldom recognized in those terms.
Early on in American Purgatory, Weber details how the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was part of a wide-ranging set of policies aimed at incapacitating Native people in order to facilitate land expropriation, quell resistance, and eliminate Indigenous lifeways and epistemologies. The expansion and consolidation of the US settler colonial state relied upon a continuum of violence that ranged from outright slaughter to family separation to cultural assimilation. But, as Weber shows, criminalization, incarceration, and prisoner transport worked together to undergird the settler colonial project.
Indeed, the era of the so-called Indian Wars, Weber reveals, was also a period of mass imprisonment. Those Native people who were seen as “warring” with the United States were imprisoned at military prisons such as Fort Marion, while their children may have been sent to Carlisle or other residential schools. Meanwhile, Native practices of communal landholding were criminalized under federal policies such as the Major Crimes Act of 1885 and the Allotment Act of 1887, which sent Native parents to the vast network of jails that existed in Indian country and their children to the growing number of residential schools as they were transfigured into wards of the state. “The federal government developed a multigenerational strategy,” argues Weber, “that relied on family separation, forced assimilation, and imprisonment on reservations, in residential schools, and in Indian Country jails to exterminate Indigenous placemaking and lifeways.”
I dwell on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and its layered history because it highlights the way that the carceral, as countless scholars and activists have long pointed out, far exceeds prison walls.
Our current era of mass incarceration arose from a doctrine of what Weber calls “prison imperialism”: the way that “U.S. policy makers sought to govern the world through the codification and regulation of crime.” As I have already mentioned, he begins his story by examining federal Indian policy and the ways that it relied upon the incapacitation of Native people through various forms of incarceration. Weber then traces the outward flow of the Jefferson-Monroe Penal Doctrine, which advocated for the establishment of penal colonies in noncontiguous territories possessed by the United States.
By the middle of the 19th century, the United States had already been experimenting with nascent forms of penal colonization for decades, specifically through the interregional forced transport of criminalized enslaved people and Native people. But following the end of the Civil War, panic emerged over the place of newly free Black people within the nation. And, suddenly, there was a surge of interest in prison imperialism, inspired by the French penal colonies in Algeria, Guiana, and New Caledonia. Perhaps new American penal colonies could rehabilitate criminal population through labor and create the material infrastructure for US rule in its new possessions.
The proposals to create a penal colony in Alaska, according to Weber, show how politicians and the press worked to solidify the notion that criminalized segments of society must be banished. In particular, penal colonization gained traction in the postbellum period, as it was seen as a way to prevent Black criminality from contaminating white society. As Weber puts it, “The national penal colony served as a symbol through which they envisioned a national spatial solution to what many white people referred to as the ‘race problem’: through empire.” Alaska never became a prison colony. Still, Weber shows how the United States continued to use spatial fixes to address both issues of crime and empire.
Take for example Spain’s transferring of the Philippines to the United States as an imperial possession, following the Spanish American War. This was met by protracted struggle against the United States’ rule, which the US, in turn, combatted with a brutal counterinsurgency campaign. Waged by first the US military and later the police, this violent campaign criminalized anticolonial fighters as “bandits” and forcibly transported and incarcerated well-known figures seen as able to mobilize rebellions. Political prisoners were exiled to US-controlled Guam (Guåhan) or far-flung jails and prisons across the Philippine archipelago, all in order to separate them from regional bases of support. Criminal transport and incarceration, argues Weber, “became used as a valve for distributing revolutionary pressure around the archipelago.”
Such colonial logic has long been embedded within our carceral systems. One need only think of the ways that policing and incarceration have been used to defuse the “social dynamite” of rebellion: After all, the revolutionary figures of the 1960s and 1970s were often incarcerated in federal facilities far from their families, communities, and networks. Of course, these efforts at isolation often created greater bonds of solidarity as federal facilities like Leavenworth, Florence, and Alderson became schoolhouses for revolutionary thought and sites of connection between Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican freedom struggles, for instance, which Weber explores in his chapter “The Imperial Boomerang.”
Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of Weber’s book is chapter 4, “The Strange Career of the Convict Clause,” which I touched upon in the introduction to this essay. The runaway success of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow (2010) and Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary 13th (2016) have drilled into the collective consciousness the way that the continued enslavement of Black people was snuck into the postbellum period through the “convict clause,” or the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which dictated that slavery and involuntary servitude could continue as a form of punishment for crime. Departing from a well-trod history, Weber examines the way that the convict clause applied to any place subject to US jurisdiction, including, as noted above, the 1904 Canal Zone.
Thus, the convict clause traveled to territories such as Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal Zone. And, for Weber, this demonstrates how taxonomies of US racial domination followed imperial routes and were imbedded within emerging structures of colonial law and punishment. “In places like the Canal Zone, the federal government took an active role in promoting white uplift through Black immiseration by promising to turn convicts’ alleged debt to society into a ‘public good,’” writes Weber, “literally paving the way for capitalist development, tourism, and other forms of profit and pleasure seeking.”
If Weber aims to uncover the colonial roots of our present moment of mass incarceration, Julian Go in Policing Empires reveals how “empire is the fulcrum of modern militarized policing, if not of policing itself.” This can be clearly seen in the MRAP vehicles dislodging students protesting university complicity with the unfolding genocide in Gaza, or in police wielding the latest battlefield tested weapons and technology against Black Lives Matter and No DAPL protestors. These, after all, are not only the excesses of policing but also the entanglements of policing with the military. Ostensibly democratic societies like the United States may pride themselves on the separation between the military and civilian policing as a core organizing principle. But the reality on the street reveals a much more complicated reality, one that shows the imperial foundations of policing.
Focusing on the United States and Britain, as well as the intersections between them, Go shows that policing has never existed as a pristine object in a display case, uncontaminated by militarism. Instead, Go argues, militarization is a constitutive element of policing. In other words, these moments of excess familiar to us in the United States—the NYPD’s invasion of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the deployment of local and federal law enforcement in response to the Ferguson rebellion or the 2020 uprisings, the ariel bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia, the Chicago Police’s torture and rendition program at Homan Square—are features rather than bugs. All reveal how military logics, practices, and technology are fundamentally entangled within policing. “Truly demilitarizing policing is impossible,” Go provocatively asserts, “without abolishing the police entirely.”
If civilian policing is premised on the notion (rather than fact) of a clear distinction between the police and the military, then what explains waves of police militarization, or “the moments of heightened borrowing from the military,” such as the ones mentioned above? For Go, the answer lies in the domestication of imperial dynamics as a means of racial subjectification and subjugation. Drawing from theorists Aimé Césaire and Michel Foucault, Go suggests that militarized policing is a misnomer and that it is better understood as a “boomerang effect” or “imperial feedback.” According to Go, “The militaristic means and methods that police have imported for home use originate in the frontiers and peripheralized spaces of empire, in effect transforming the ‘civil’ police into not just a militaristic force but a colonial force on home terrain.”
What we see, then, is that militarized policing transforms citizens into colonial subjects as a function of racialization. This, after all, is something that groups like the Black Panthers and Young Lords pointed out in their discussions of internal colonization.
Racialization processes at home, notes Go, play an oversized role in determining when and how colonial policing is exported. Racialization—and the ability to homologize, or construct and overemphasize similarities between colonial and marginalized domestic populations—allows for the state to summon the imperial boomerang and justify militarized policing and violence against internal others.
Go starts by examining the birth of the civilian police: Sir Robert Peel’s London Metropolitan Police, which started patrolling in 1829. The early 19th-century Met Police used logics and approaches gleaned through suppressing Irish anticolonial rebellion and normalizing it as simply modern and professionalized police work shows. For Peel, this potent mixture of domestic policing, international empire, and racialization was all accomplished through a unique subject people. Peel and his colleagues, notes Go, actually “found in Ireland a solution to the problem of policing in England.” This transfer of military strategies to civilian law enforcement reveals, according to Go, how militarization as product of imperialism and racialization has been baked into policing since the beginning.
A panic over barbarous hordes of Irish criminals filling the streets of English cities is the crucible that produced both the civil police as well as the seemingly contradictory militarism embedded within the police as a strategy of racialized control. Building on Cedric Robinson’s insights in Black Marxism, Go shows that, despite similar skin color, the British racialized Irish migrants in England through religious, cultural, ethnic, moral, and supposed biological differences; characteristics that also, allegedly, marked the Irish as predisposed to criminality. The construction of the Irish working classes as “fundamentally foreign, unalterably alien, and incorrigibly inferior”—coupled with a fear that the Irish sought to foster insurrection on English soil—is what allowed for the militarized policing of the colonies to boomerang back to the metropole.
Peel’s new civil police directed their attention to the Irish and other disreputable and criminalized populations, unleashing upon them technologies and approaches honed abroad by the colonial Irish Constabulary. The upper classes accepted this blurring of the boundaries between police and military, colony and metropole. And they did so because, with time, it became clear that the colonial violence of militarized police power was not aimed at them but rather was intended to protect them and their interests. “The upper and middle classes could thus be assured that the new police was not to be feared,” explains Go. “Its functional coloniality made it something to be praised.”
It was not long before the London Met became a model to be emulated. New civil police departments quickly spread to other industrial English cities, like Liverpool (1836), Bristol (1836), and Manchester (1839). After spreading to smaller English cities and towns, the model of the “Peelers” jumped the pond. New York City established the first civil police force in the US, followed by cities like Chicago (1851), Boston (1854), Philadelphia (1855), Savannah (1854), Charleston (1856), and New Orleans (1866).
It is here, in tracing the transatlantic flows of these new civil police forces, where Go makes what is arguably his most surprising and important move in the book. Go asks us to consider the ways that cotton imperialism from the 1830s through the 1850s shaped both the character and development of civil policing in the transatlantic sphere. In this context, Go argues that we must understand civil policing and its inherently militarized character as emanating from “the transatlantic interimperial relations of racialized state power and colonial capitalism that traversed the British-American cotton empires of the time.”
English and American financial centers, ports, and zones of production, Go notes, were connected to the US South’s plantation empire. Using enslaved labor, Southern plantations produced raw materials that fueled global capitalist expansion and helped to grow urban metropolises in both Britain and the United States. As Go powerfully and painstakingly points out, “Dispossessed Irish workers in Lancashire’s factories spun raw cotton that had been cultivated and harvested by the hands of Black slaves in the American South. That cotton had been stored in and then shipped from Savannah by fellow Irish workers to Liverpool, where Irish dockworkers unloaded the white gold and sent it to Lancashire’s factories, where it was spun by other Irish laborers.”
The carceral far exceeds prison walls.
Militarized policing influenced by colonial policing became a way to control the “transatlantic subproletariat” producing the wealth that would, in many ways, remake the world. Go shows that the previous forms of policing that existed in these sites, namely the militia-watch-patrol system, could not handle the new racialized threat created by the migration and urbanization spurred by the transatlantic industrial capital and accelerated colonial extraction.
Thus, the London Met, with its roots in the colonial policing of the Irish both in Ireland and England, became a model for waging counterinsurgency in American cities dealing with their own “Irish problem,” as well as anxieties generated by enslaved and free Black workers. According to Go, “The new racialized subproletariat became the repository of residents’ fears about the social changes wrought by empire, prompting officials to summon the colonial boomerang and create ostensibly ‘civil’ police forces that were militarized from the start.” Despite these imperial entanglements, the militarized and colonial core at the heart of civil policing in the Anglo-American world has been hidden and denied.
Both Go and Weber force us to think about the carceral state not as a bounded site or discrete object, but as a network of power relations that facilitate racial capitalism and colonial extraction both within and between states. Building from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago, Michel Foucault developed the notion of a carceral archipelago to refer to the continuum of institutions, practices, and epistemologies that comprise the carceral. Weber and Go, while engaging with the Foucauldian understanding of the carceral archipelago, remind us of the importance of holding on to the materiality of Solzhenitsyn’s version of the archipelago. The gulag archipelago indexed the vast network of sites of incarceration spread throughout the Soviet Union, highlighting the role that prisoner transport and isolation played in political repression, something that is extensively discussed in Weber’s book. Additionally, the archipelago’s expanse and distance from the core allows for violence and experimentation, themes that Go highlights in his work.
Ultimately, by examining the imperial roots of the carceral, Go and Weber complicate neat and straightforward narratives about the growth of militarized policing and incarceration in the United States. More importantly, in focusing on the ways in which the lines of foreign and domestic are blurred through the carceral, we can see the grounds for solidarity necessary to upend the entire system. 
This article was commissioned by Imani Radney.
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