Papers by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2013
Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarcer... more Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.
Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.
Truthout, 2022
SHARE cross the United States, Democratic politicians are renewing their commitments to 1990s-era... more SHARE cross the United States, Democratic politicians are renewing their commitments to 1990s-era crime policies. From New York
Journal of African American History, 2022
GeoHumanities, 2021
This photo essay traces the historical geography of Norco, Louisiana—heart of Louisiana’s petroch... more This photo essay traces the historical geography of Norco, Louisiana—heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical industrial complex. Norco, named for the first oil company sited there (the New Orleans Refinery Company), is the quintessential Louisiana petrochemical town, neither exceptional nor provincial, a place that for generations has been a nexus of struggles between racial capitalism’s extractive drive and the demands for collective life encapsulated in slave uprisings and environmental justice activism. Moreover, the fact that by the late 20th century, petrochemical pollution made the best path forward for residents of the historic Black freedom neighborhood Diamond was by fighting for relocation raises critical questions about the life and death work of just transition from oil capitalism.
Critical Criminology, 2018
Antiprison activists have often turned the federal court system to reduce the violence of the car... more Antiprison activists have often turned the federal court system to reduce the violence of the carceral state. However, such reform attempts have too often had the unintended consequence of fortifying the penal system. In this article, I interrogate one such intervention-a federal court order that encompassed the Louisiana Department of Corrections from 1975 to 1998. I argue that while the lawsuit was declared a success in reforming Angola, the federal court's intervention buttressed and legitimated the growth of the Louisiana penal system. This paradox was produced through the limits of liberal reform ideology that failed to recognize the structural violence of incarceration. Rather, the federal courts located violence with prisoners instead of the punitive power of the state and racial capitalism. This framework not only led to an increase in punitive practices within Angola, it came to underpin penal expansion as the primary solution to cyclical overcrowding.
Punishment & Society, 2016
Gender, Place & Culture, 2021
Souls, 2013
During the 1980s and 1990s the U.S. prison system expanded at an unprecedented rate, with the Sou... more During the 1980s and 1990s the U.S. prison system expanded at an unprecedented rate, with the South emerging as the region with the highest incarceration rate in the nation. This article charts how prisoners at the nation's largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as Angola, leveraged this moment of crisis to collectively organize for freedom through the Angola Special Civics Project by using a combination of research, political education, electoral organizing, and coalition building. This article contends that their organizing should be conceptualized as a form of prison abolitionist reforms to be learned from today.
iv Epigraph v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Literature Review 9 Chapter 3: Methods and Met... more iv Epigraph v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Literature Review 9 Chapter 3: Methods and Methodology 26 Chapter 4: Political Opportunities Amidst the Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex .... 34 Chapter 5: The Angola Special Civics Project 45 Chapter 6: Conclusion 69 Bibliography 78 Vita 82
Journal of African American History
Gender, Place, and Culture, 2021
This paper turns to a series of public meetings surrounding the rebuilding of the New Orleans jai... more This paper turns to a series of public meetings surrounding the rebuilding of the New Orleans jail, OPP in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to argue that neoliberal urban governance is predicated on the everyday reification of racist and patriarchal power hierarchies through the sociospatial policing of what constitutes legitimate knowledge and of affect in the public sphere. We demonstrate that these public meetings served to reproduce racialized and gendered power relations under the façade of urban civic participation. Through ethnographic research and drawing on anti-racist and Black feminist scholarship on epistemology and affect, we uncover three key bureaucratic mechanisms/techniques that shaped the public meetings: the regulation of space, the defining of legitimate knowledge, and the policing of affect. We argue that together these mechanisms produced an unruly public along lines of race and gender which was then used as justification for silencing communities directly impacted by the harms of the criminal legal system from legitimate discourse and debate. However, meeting attendees challenged these processes, using their 'unruliness' to call attention to how the narrow definition of legitimate participation in public meetings under neoliberal urban governance regimes mirrored the broader punitive patterns that mark the everyday crises of the carceral state.
Truthout, 2021
On January 26, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive orders in the name of advan... more On January 26, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive orders in the name of advancing racial equity. One of the most high-profile orders resurrected an Obama-era policy to phase out the Department of Justice's contracts with privately managed prisons. As a politician whose career has been marked by championing federal law and order policies, including but not limited to the 1994 Crime Bill, Biden has been challenged by anti-prison activists and advocates to account for his past actions and to use his executive powers to reduce the scope and power of the federal penal system. Although couched in the language of taking on mass incarceration, Biden's private prison executive order fails to scale back incarceration or to confront racial state violence head-on.
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Papers by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.
Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.