As Angela Y. Davis has proposed, the “path to prison,” which so
disproportionately affects communities of color, is most acutely
guided by the conditions of daily life. Architecture, then, as
fundamental to shaping these conditions of civil existence, must be
interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path.
Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to
expand the ways the built environment’s relationship to and
participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture.
The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more
longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in the
United States—and follow the premise that to understand how the
prison enacts its violence in the present one must shift the
epistemological frame elsewhere: to places, discourses, and
narratives assumed to be outside of the sphere of incarceration.
Paths to Prison:
On the Architectures of Carcerality offers not a fixed or
inexorable account of how things are but rather a set of starting
points and methodologies for reevaluating the architecture of
carceral society and for undoing it altogether.
With contributions
by Adrienne Brown, Stephen Dillon, Jarrett M. Drake, Sable Elyse
Smith, James Graham, Leslie Lodwick, Dylan Rodríguez, Anne Spice,
Brett Story, Jasmine Syedullah, Mabel O. Wilson, and Wendy L. Wright.
