Welcome to My Cell: Housing and Race in the Mirror of American Democracy

This article examines the parallel expansion of two forms of housing in the United States: the housing market of homes bought with subprime mortgages; and security housing units and solitary confinement beds in the rapidly growing network of prisons and detention centers. It considers the intersection of the two markets in which black and brown people are not only consumers of a false ontological security in the housing market but also a product—a body that fills a bed—in a racialized system of incarceration. It argues that both forms of participation find their place under the rubric of securitization, conceived in the full force of its double meaning, in terms of the transformation of debt into financial securities and of the financialization of “security,” that is, of state violence and social control as related to the racial subject, through the historical trajectory of the ideals of personhood and property and the practices of dispossession and colonial accumulation.