‘You feel it in your bones’: Mobility, animacy, and the everyday violence of incarceration in the American southwest

Abstract

In this article, I explore how mobility, animacy, and ontology intertwine to shape everyday violence in the carceral American Southwest. I draw on ethnographic research that I conducted between 2016 and 2017 at the Desert Echo Facility, a state prison that holds individuals from minimum to high-security levels. Some incarcerated people feel supposedly inanimate objects, such as walls, rocks, paper, and floors moving, while others feel vibrations moving across the compound. For some of the incarcerated, physical movement signifies aliveness – meaning that incarceration forces them to question if they are less alive than the “inanimate” materials that confine them. Others understand these movements as the direct violence of the state that purposefully disrupts how they construct relations. In this context, incarcerated peoples’ alive status is no longer a given and their relations no longer assumed to be inherent and ongoing, but rather, processes to be negotiated within criminal punishment systems. I focus on what these movements mean to incarcerated people, and how they situate these movements within differing ontologies to make visible the often-hidden violence of incarceration in the United States.