This week, we are returning to the topic of Carceral Capitalism. We interviewed the poet and author Jackie Wang in previous episodes of Kite Line. You can access those by clicking her name in the tag links below. There, Wang discussed the relationship between the growth of municipal debt and the emergence of fine farming and other ways to extract money from communities of color through ticketing by police and court fees.
After a brief introduction on her inspirations behind the book, both in her own life and during her research, we hear Wang reading the concluding piece to her book, “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination”. She says that she wants to use poetics as a way to denaturalize prisons. Wang says, “I think of poetry not of the practice of writing in verse, but actually as a mode of thinking and being in the world.”