“We’re Not Trying to Make a Better Tomb” - Lydia Pelot-Hobbs’ Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

In this episode we speak with Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, about her book Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an assistant professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. In addition to Prison Capital, she is the co-editor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books 2024). Her research, writing, and teaching is grounded in over 15 years of abolitionist organizing and political education facilitation in New Orleans and beyond. 

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This book is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

In this discussion we talk about the dynamics that contributed to that history. It’s a fascinating conversation that gets into Louisiana’s shifting political economy, the policing of New Orleans, the importance of sheriff power in Louisiana, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and various forms of anti-carceral organizing from the streets of New Olreans to Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola. 

Massive Bookshop has Prison Capital if people are interested in picking up a copy and delving more deeply into this conversation, as I mentioned a couple times during the episode there is a lot of really interesting analysis in the book that we didn’t have time to adequately address in this conversation.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say we’re releasing this conversation during Black August, find some local or online political education about that, write to political prisoners, get involved in their campaigns. 

If you want to support our work please consider contributing a $1 a month or more to our patreon at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We do have a Trinity of Fundamentals study group that starts this coming week and you can find details about that on our patreon as well. 

Links:

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.

The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration

Trinity of Fundamentals study group