The Ghetto-to-Prison Pipeline: Racialization, 'Reactionary Psychoses', and State-Sanctioned Violence

The ghetto-to-prison pipeline echoes Nirmala Erevelles’ conception of ‘institutional arrangements’ whereby marked bodies are removed “from public generative spaces, such as schools, to restrictive spaces of isolation, violence, and shame, such as prisons.” (20: 81) In essence, these processes of qualifying, measuring, appraising, and hierarchizing of people (Foucault, 1980: 144) perpetuate contemporary manifestations of colonialism. In this paper, the school will be replaced with the ghetto wherein regularized police patrols mirror territorial occupation, hyper-surveillance legitimizes notions of civility and inferiority, and through these modalities, generational grief and trauma are annulled by pathologized notions of criminality, whereby the people of the ghetto are held accountable for their own communal vulnerabilities.