“So High You Can’t Get Over It, So Low You Can’t Get Under It”

Abstract

Over the last two decades, much has been written about the number of black men in prison. While much of this scholarship has commented on the social and economic conditions many black male prisoners emerge from and on how the criminal justice system has targeted and built a billion-dollar industry on their bodies, little has been said about the spatial geographies they lived in before entering prison. Why space? Because, like race, gender, class, and sexuality, spatiality is a central fundament of subject formation. Indeed, the human is always spatialized. We need look no further than black people’s fight for social justice, which have largely been contestations over or within space—segregation, apartheid, slavery, ghettos, Bantustans—to understand its importance. Critically analyzing what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called “the production of space” reveals much about the ways in which subjects are constituted through space. This essay maps out emergent questions regarding space and the construction of black subjectivities. It explores the ways black quotidian space and prison space interact. Examining the spatial geographies of poor and working-class black men preincarceration reveals how prison has been for many, an ubiquitous reality, not only in terms of the rapid acceleration of black men entering and exiting prison, but, more precisely, in the deployment of carceral techniques (surveillance, policing, and containment) into the quotidian lives of poor and working-class blacks. But the prisonization of black spaces fostered an even more egregious formation: the emergence of prisonized subjectivities.

I was prepared for prison.

— George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother

Blacks are always in one prison or another. They cannot escape imprisonment for one moment.

—Michael Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid