“I'll make you shit!”

Sensory understandings of prison management and the life of prisoners are essential for decolonizing criminality and thinking about how forms of control have been justified and applied in diverse historical settings of power and resistance. Colonialist discourse often manifested what levels of atmospheric threat the oppressed could supposedly take in their daily lives. Through atmospheric pressures, the colonial world became a prison for many of the colonized, and sensory worlding was to blame for much of the violent force from the colonizers. Understanding odor categories specifically allows for greater recognition of the links between bourgeois prison ideals of the Enlightenment and how those aspects of burgeoning control societies within Western Europe were exported to the colonies. Smell functions in similar manners to sight in these contexts, whereby colonialism patterned a panoptical carceral regime that used sensation to manage perceptions of behavior and construct categorizations of criminality. In a comprehensive process, colonizers generally articulated that the colonized sensed the world differently, and were consequently meant, through an absurdist version of natural law, to be colonized. Such a belief system was based within multiple diverse fields of power related to smells ability to mark racialization in spatial regimes of diverse colonies.