Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2010
Capstone Advisor
Dr. Tom Perreault
Honors Reader
Dr. John Western
Capstone Major
Geography
Capstone College
Arts and Science
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Social Sciences
Subject Categories
Geography | Human Geography | Nature and Society Relations | Other Geography
Abstract
This Capstone project examines the effect of New York State’s prison industrial complex on local economies. The prison industrial complex is a system of imprisonment that, through various methods, transforms prisoners into commodities. The complex involves endorsing legislation to create more crimes and longer sentences for those crimes, thus increasing the number, and term length, of incarcerated citizens. In New York, the creation of the Rockefeller drug laws resulted in a revitalized diligence in the war against drugs, leading to the promotion of prisoner-based upstate economies. Through engagement with United States drugs laws, historical accounts of drug use and addiction, and statistical analysis and research in regards to race, wealth, gender, and drug use this Capstone provides original maps that illustrate the racist nature of the Rockefeller drug laws, New York’s main drug law set, and the spatial organization of the prison system itself. Also, through personal interviews with state and city officials the project describes the distinct power structure within the prison system, involving guards and officials, as well as inmates. Overall, this project aims to understand why in many instances in the incarceration process in New York State, the modern black man falls victim to the power of the prison industrial complex and faulty legislation, that ultimately, transforms addict, into convict.
Recommended Citation
Kinney, Alexis, "The Commodification of the Modern Black Man: Examining the Effect of Drug Law on the New York State Prison Industrial Complex" (2010). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 404.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/404
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
