How to Program a Carceral City: Smart Urbanization and Transformations in Carceral Governance

While US media has placed China’s digital surveillance apparatus under increasing scrutiny, its US origins of this apparatus remain virtually absent from these accounts. In addressing this deficiency, my talk explores the rise and expansion of real time crime datacenters in US cities over the past two decades. Focusing on New York City, the talk highlights how these datacenters fuse logics of computer networking, security, and carceral governance into a distinct apparatus designed to manage criminalized populations in cities. I also explore the limitations implicit to city efforts to program carceral urban spaces, and how these efforts constitute a unique terrain for resisting racial criminalization.

Brian Jordan Jefferson is an Associate Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign