DCC Publishes “Detroit’s Carceral Landscape: Police, Politics, and Profit in America’s Blackest City–and How Detroiters are Reimagining the Future”

Detroit’s Carceral Landscape: Police, Politics, and Profit in America’s Blackest City–and How Detroiters are Reimagining the Future” by David Helps and Christine Hwang for the “Detroit as a Carceral Space” research initiative of the DCC project. This multimedia investigative report documents how settler colonialism and racial capitalism are intertwined processes, historically and in the present, that extract wealth from Black neighborhoods through land clearance, land theft, policing and criminalization, gentrification, and corporate handouts. These processes have transformed the city of Detroit into a carceral space, made the Downtown “renaissance” dependent on foreclosures and police violence, and inspired radical resistance politics as Detroiters continue to imagine and work for a co-liberatory future.

By Matthew D Lassiter

Professor of History, University of Michigan