AHA Session 233
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Salon C6 (Hilton Chicago, Lower Level)
Chair:
Jordan Camp, Trinity College
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel examines how the United States has mechanized policing and incarceration to ostensibly resolve political crises. By focusing on specific formations of carceral logics and regimes–such as US Civil War-era policies toward Black refugees; Texas’s criminalization of ethnic Mexicans in the early twentieth century; and city management during the LA Olympics, the panelists will offer insights on continuities of carceral tactics within a range of contexts and time periods, rethinking the longer and wider trajectory of incarceration history. Foregrounding the state’s selective dispersal of violence against refugees from slavery, Mexican immigrants, and the unhoused population of LA, this panel brings together several inquiries in the fields of incarceration studies, African American, immigration, and urban histories. The panelists demonstrate how upheavals, moral panics, and even internationally significant domestic events led to more state policing. Moreover, as this panel shows, the state also insinuates itself into the everyday lives of racialized groups by normalizing surveillance and violence even in the aftermath of these events and marking Black and Brown communities as deviant and in need of policing. Although these groups were deemed as outsiders and second-rate citizens, they demanded to be treated with dignity and challenged the state’s framing of crises. They brought to light how the state redefined the refugee, immigrant, and unhoused crises as problems with the affected peoples themselves rather than catastrophic consequences of unfettered capitalism. They further confronted state power in familiar and novel ways, prompting us to rethink approaches to prison abolitionism and the limits of policing in the face of collective resistance.
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