CARCERAL EXTRACTIVISM, LIVELIHOOD STRATEGIES, AND “ACTING RIGHT” IN THE U.S. SOUTH

Mass incarceration and its effects are well documented and carceral privatization is hotly contested on moral and economic grounds. This dissertation examines the local effects of carceral privatization in the U.S. south in historical context. Tallulah is a small, rural predominately African American town in northeastern Louisiana that endures high rates of poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment. It also hosts four private prisons operated by LaSalle Corrections, LLC. Two primary and overlapping questions guide the research. 1) How has an history of carceral entrepreneurship and mass incarceration impacted the way persons and communities create livelihoods and imagine futures, and how have these strategies changed over time? 2) In what ways does for-profit incarceration in Tallulah sustain historically racialized social and economic patterns of low educational attainment, unemployment, crime, and poverty? Findings presented here draw on 13 months of ethnographic data collected from 2015–2019 where I conducted informal interviews with multi-generational participants and partial life histories with persons aged 19-92, participant observation in community spaces and public meetings, as well as guided tours in the community and surrounding area and local archival research. The dissertation provides an overview of Louisiana’s carceral economy spanning chattel slavery, convict leasing, and sharecropping up to the more recent history of carceral entrepreneurship in Tallulah recounted from local newspaper archives, publicly available documents, and resident’s experiences. I argue that incarceration and prisons be understood as an extractive industrial enterprise (carceral extractivism) within a longer trajectory of expropriative racial capitalism. Examining the local history and effects of carceral entrepreneurship as it materialized locally in Tallulah during the 1990’s in the building of a men’s detention facility and a youth prison, since converted to a women’s transitional facility, illustrates how these processes involve private individual investors, the community, and state actors that national debates often leave unexamined. I argue that carceral entrepreneurship in Tallulah influences community livelihood strategies and well-being overtime through changing employment possibilities and wage migration but must be understood alongside and with other processes including periods of school integration, state policy towards social services, and the legacies of deep poverty, disenfranchisement, and criminalization in the south. Similarly, carceral entrepreneurship in Tallulah exacerbates socioeconomic challenges in the community, materially in the form of financial resources diverted from the city to private companies and the Sheriff’s office, but also in terms of imagined life outcomes and of living day to day in a “prison town” where the facilities predominate on the landscape. In response to the challenges presented by mass incarceration in the community I examine the ways in which people make lives worth living alongside extractive carceral institutions through various forms of work, including scrapping metal, cottage food industries, and involvements with local churches. Through these livelihood creating activities, centered around an ethic of “acting right,” non-carceral spaces of social reproduction are created, resisting, even as they are constrained by, carceral entrepreneurship in the community and broader region

The Natural Right to a Living Wage and the Ethical Means of Acquiring It

Too much attention and research cannot be given to so vital a question as Unionism and Strikes. The newspapers are filled daily with new outbreaks in labor and controversies between employer and employee. Employees are continually striving to better their living conditions by asking for a living wage, while employers are striving to cut down expenses by trying to pay only a minimum wage. This wage is arrived at through bargaining between the employer and employees without any consideration for the vital factors that enter in when calculating an honest and living wage

Considering the Human and Nonhuman in Literary Studies: Notes for a Biographic Network Approach for the Study of Literary Objects

In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of mapping that biographic assemblage, and tentatively develops a biographic network approach as one alternative to traditional literary interpretative practices. Attending to the novel as an actor shifts critical focus away from its interior – the “text” or content – and expands traditional literary criticism’s default practice – interpretation – and logic – mimetic representation – in hopes of facilitating a discussion of Zelda’s novel in a manner which destabilizes the overdetermined themes that continue to scaffold her imaginary. Ultimately, this work argues that a biographic network approach can prove instructive as a “method” for dealing with other texts which remain relatively obscured at the margins of literary consciousness

\u27Sing unto the Lord a New Song--Just Not That One!\u27 A Case Study of Music Censorship in Free Will Baptist Colleges

Like so many of the world’s other religious institutions, the Christian church has a long and well-documented history of using music to enhance and enliven the spiritual experiences of believers. Many of the church’s greatest champions throughout history have spoken about the inherent power of music, but as history always seems to demonstrate, along with power comes the need for control. As long as church leaders have used music to attain spiritual progress, they have also censored music that threatens to impede that progress. Even today, many church leaders still rely on music censorship to protect the future and identity of Christianity. The following case study highlights the underlying reasons for and effectiveness of music censorship among the current generation of believers. Interviews were conducted with nine individuals who were students at a Free Will Baptist college when it closed its doors in 2013. Eight of the nine students relocated to one of two other Free Will Baptist colleges to continue their education. The purpose of this study is to trace the ways that their views on music and spirituality either changed or stayed the same after they left Gateway and also to provide broader observations about what their experiences say about music censorship in the modern Christian church. As information about the students’ experiences with music and spiritual authority is discussed, it becomes apparent that the role of personal experience is just as important as the role of spiritual authority in helping students to forge their own ideas about music and spirituality. It also becomes clear that as the students navigated from one spiritual institution to another, they actually chose to expand their musical preferences far more than they chose to limit them. The research from this case study ultimately suggests that music censorship is not producing the desired effect among Christian young people. Instead of complying with the music standards of those in places of spiritual authority, students instead propose that church leaders either offer the reasoning behind their standards or stop talking about music altogether

Vendor Comparison of Video Detection Systems

Video detection has become increasingly popular for presence detection at signalized intersections because of its versatility. However, several reports have documented performance problems in specific systems. This paper quantifies the performance of three different commercially available video detection systems. The systems were tested in May and September 2005 for presence detection accuracy. Prior to the May 2005 test, a representative from each vendor configured the video detection zones to match the loop detection zone as closely as possible. The outputs from the loop detection for the through-right and left-turn lane groups were compared with the corresponding output from each of the video detection systems. Whenever there was a discrepancy between the loop and video, a digital video was observed to determine the cause of the discrepancy. Missed calls and false calls were categorized for each system. The errors were also categorized according to the impact that they would have on signal operations. During a 24hr test on two separate days, the number of missed detections longer than 5 seconds ranged from 9 to 147, and the number of false calls longer than 5 seconds ranged from 16 to 149

Real-Time Probe Data Dashboards for Interstate Performance Monitoring During Winter Weather and Incidents

The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) manages over 1800 centerline miles of interstate that can be profoundly impacted by weather, crashes, and construction. Real-time performance measurement of interstate speeds is critical for successful traffic operations management. Agency managers and Traffic Management Center decision makers need situational awareness of the network and the ability to identify irregularities at a glance in order to manage resources and respond to media queries. One way to access this level of detail is crowdsourced probe vehicle data. Crowdsourced probe vehicle data can be obtained by collecting speed data from cell phones and global positioning system (GPS) devices. In Indiana, approximately 2673 predefined interstate segments are used to generate over 3.8 million speed records per day. These data can be overwhelming without efficient procedures to reduce and aggregate both spatially and temporally. This paper introduces a spatial and temporal aggregation model and an accompanying real-time dashboard to characterize the current and past congestion history of interstate roadways. The primary high level view of the aggregated data resembles a stock ticker and is called the “Congestion Ticker.” The data archive allows for after-action review of major events such as ice storms, major crashes, and construction work zones. The utility of this application is demonstrated with two case studies: a snowstorm that covered northern and central Indiana in February 2015 and an I-70 back of queue crash in April 2015

2011 Indiana Interstate Mobility Report—Summary Version

The 2011 Mobility Report—Summary Version introduces the use of crowd sourced probe data collected from vehicles and mobile devices to quantify the location and duration of congestion on Indiana interstates. The report presents a detailed case study of the I-65 corridor, as well as examples of travel time reliability information for sections of Interstates 65, 70, and 94. Summary monthly mobility statistics for all 943 centerline miles of Indiana Interstates 64, 65, 69, 70, 74, 94, and 465 are tabulated in a graphical format to facilitate comparison of mobility along those corridors

2013–2014 Indiana Mobility Report: Full Version

The 2013–2014 Indiana Mobility Report: Full Version examines the mobility performance of Indiana’s state highway system. Minute-by-minute crowdsourced probe vehicle speed data and vehicle volume data were used to develop performance measures that identify, quantify, and visualize the location and duration of congestion on Indiana Interstates. The report presents overall system performance, including a monthly overview covering January 2011 through June 2014 as well as selected highlights of significant projects. In addition to the Interstate system, the report characterizes selected high-priority arterial corridors to rank their mobility performance in terms of travel time and travel time reliability. The full version includes the following appendices: Appendix A: Interstate Speed Profiles Appendix B: Interstate Speed Profiles with Linear Distance Scale Appendix C: Interstate Congestion Hour Summaries Appendix D: Interstate Summary Statistics Appendix E: Interstate Segment Congestion Ranking

2013–2014 Indiana Mobility Report: Summary Version

The 2013–2014 Indiana Mobility Report: Summary Version examines the mobility performance of Indiana’s state highway system. Minute-by-minute crowdsourced probe vehicle speed data and vehicle volume data were used to develop performance measures that identify, quantify, and visualize the location and duration of congestion on Indiana Interstates. The summary report presents overall system performance, including a monthly overview covering January 2011 through June 2014 as well as selected highlights of significant projects. In addition to the Interstate system, the report characterizes selected high-priority arterial corridors to rank their mobility performance in terms of travel time and travel time reliability