Policing Black Data: The Semiology of Carcerality and Slavery in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish

Abstract

Discipline and Punish remains one of Michel Foucault's most iconic and influential texts. However, few social justice advocates in Black Studies or Critical Discourse Studies consider the ways in which his perfunctory statements on slavery and historization of Walnut Street Prison decontextualize our understanding of the mass incarceration of African Americans. This underappreciation helps reproduce—in the larger society—the kinds of injustices that we often find in our current systems of imprisonment and policing. Using the semiology introduced by scholars such as Toni Morrison, this discursive analysis challenges Foucault's consideration and advances black penal semiotics as a technology of representation and framework increasingly mediated by the digitalization and instrumentalization of human data by companies such as Palantir. Ironically, these data are often curated and weaponized under the reformist rhetoric of data-driven policing for maximum effect and limited impunity. The findings in this theoretical study suggest that black penal semiotics can serve as a conceptual tool and praxis that will help social justice researchers, educators, and others articulate and investigate this growing phenomenon and its impact on citizens in the United States, particularly African Americans. More specifically, it illuminates the role that black men played in making Walnut Street Prison an iterative model in the history of carcerality and a prelude to the data-driven models of policing that often undermine the rhetoric of equality, social justice, and empowerment associated with Black Studies and Critical Discourse Studies.