From Carceral Food Systems to Abolitionist Food Justice

How are the strug gles for prison abolition and food justice intertwined?For us as scholars and activists, organizing focused on food systems within and beyond carceral spaces provides opportunities to understand how communities facing police occupation, mass incarceration, food apartheid, and organized abandonment can build life-affirming places beyond racial capitalism's "death-dealing displacements" ( Gilmore 2002). 1 Using the lenses of carcerality and abolition, this collaborative chapter explores some of these intersections, focused specifically on land, labor, and food as vehicles for creating "freedom as a place" (Gilmore 2017; Heynen and Ybarra 2021; see chapters 4, 5, 8, 12, and 15).This starting point helps us center place-making, in par tic u lar how people organize land, resources, and social capacity against the historical pro cesses of unfreedom that produce and reproduce hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion.Carcerality is a core logic under lying racial cap i tal ist and settler colonial development, whose agents capture, dispossess, displace, and confine dehumanized groups to clear land and organize labor for extraction (Wang 2018; Estes 2019).To enforce violent divisions of " human" and racialized others, carcerality requires "place annihilation" (McKittrick 2011), the nevercomplete ideological and material destruction of poor, Black, and Indigenous capacities for nourishing life on land.The resulting formation of plantations, reservations, ghettos, and prisons creates territories of " human sacrifice" (see chapter 4).The history of food production and eating has been central in this regard, which in the form of cap i tal ist food systems is part of an extractive carceral universe that destroys connections to place, consolidates power, and produces profit.