Geographies of Debt: The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global South

This essay identifies the shared rhetoric of aid and rehabilitation used to establish both the global south and California’s prison industrial complex (PIC), two seemingly disparate places. Following Ruth Gilmore’s disavowal of the global south as a fixed entity, that geographical term is here identified with a method of conserving poverty management organizations designed to capitalize on poorness. Although the rehabilitation of prisoners creates a somewhat different creditor-debtor relationship than the aid-based systems that link the nations of global north and south, the southern trope links both phenomena to the production of a sovereign’s moral legitimacy and virtue. So long as a geography is discursively constructed to be surplus, poor, or “southern,” the labor of the subjects that occupy that space can be rearticulated in such a way that the capitalists’ moral debt accrued by the extraction of surplus-value is misrecognized as the laborer’s obligation to the sovereign. Identifying the capitalist as being always already indebted to the worker reveals the capitalist’s interest in obfuscating that debt. This essay’s major intervention is its recognition of how the discourse of aid and rehabilitation produces an indebted laborer who cannot, in theory, be seen as exploited. The exploitation of the prisoner is misrecognized as payment for the debt owed, and the beneficiaries of prison labor therefore free themselves of any guilt, or moral debt, that might accumulate from the surplusvalue that said labor creates. Consequently, the expansion of the PIC and poorer places proves to be more of a solution to the dilemma of surplus-value that haunts the capitalist than an effect of criminality and malfeasance.