About the talk: 

This presentation focuses on the links between global capitalism, the hyper-incarceration of poor and racialized working-class communities, and surplus humanity. It explores the social control mechanisms used against poor communities throughout the globe. In an effort to draw out the links between the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of analysis, Soto undertakes a macro-analysis of the crisis of global capitalism by examining existing data and then turns to a three year ethnographic research approach with self-identified activists, immigrants, homeless individuals, formerly incarcerated and system-impacted people. Soto will show how the above participants are part of a social control mechanism of surveillance, policing, and criminalization – systems that funnel people into the prison system and that form part of what Robinson calls the global police state. Specifically, Soto will look at Robinson’s (2020) militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression in an effort to show how transnational capital is more and more dependent on hyper-incarceration as a means of capital accumulation worldwide. The dissertation calls for a systemic upheaval and a revolution that rallies for the abolition of the prison–industrial complex and the criminal injustice system.

About the speaker:

Oscar Fabian Soto is a formerly incarcerated Xicano Marxist activist-scholar, prison abolitionist, and community organizer in North San Diego County. He received his Ph.D. from
the University of California, Santa Barbara in the field of Sociology with an emphasis on radical criminology and Black studies. He is the recipient of the University of California
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including, the Hein Family Fellowship, Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholarship, and the GSA Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His published works include Passive Revolution and the Movement against Mass Incarceration: From Prison Abolition to Redemption Script and On the Outs: Global Capitalism and Transcarceration published in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, A World Order, Barrio Criminology: Chicanx and Latinx Prison Abolition published in Abolish Criminology and Can the Panthers Still Save Us? Street Action, Non-profit Factions and the Non-Movement against State Violence published in St. Anthony’s International Review.