UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation focuses on the links between global capitalism, the hyper-incarceration of poor and racialized working-class communities, and surplus humanity. It explores the social control mechanisms used against poor communities in Southern California. In an effort to draw out the links between the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of analysis, I undertake a macro-analysis of the crisis of global capitalism by examining existing data and then turn to 37 interviews with self-identified activists, immigrants, homeless individuals, formerly incarcerated and system-impacted people, and street vendors, all as part of a three-year ethnographic approach. I show how the above participants are part of a social control mechanism of surveillance, policing, and criminalization – systems that funnel people into the prison system and that form part of what Robinson calls the global police state. Specifically, I look at Robinson’s (2020) militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression in an effort to show how transnational capital is more and more dependent on hyper-incarceration as a means of capital accumulation worldwide. The dissertation calls for a systemic upheaval and a revolution that rallies for the abolition of the prison–industrial complex and the criminal injustice system. In addition, the final chapter provides a strong critique of identitarian paradigms and argues that these paradigms lack a critique of and struggle against global capitalism.