1st Edition

Policing and the American Racial State from Plantation to Algorithm Racial Governance by Design

By Jason M. Williams Copyright 2027
224 Pages
by Routledge

224 Pages
by Routledge

Why does American policing persist in producing racial inequality despite decades of reform? This book argues that the answer lies not in individual bias or institutional failure but in intentional design. Introducing the Racial Governance Theory of Policing (RGTP), Jason M. Williams offers a sweeping reinterpretation of American policing as the central mechanism through which the racial state... Read more

Introduction: Policing as Racial Governance 1. From Orthodoxy to the Racial State 2. The Genealogy of Racial Governance 3. Carceral Policing in Practice 4. Rupture and Resistance 5. Abolition and the Reconstruction of Safety 6.After the Racial State

Biography

Jason M. Williams is Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. His research examines race, policing, reentry, and qualitative methodology. He is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Racial Injustice and Resistance (2026) and co-editor of Abolish Criminology (Routledge).

Jason Williams offers an innovative theory of racial policing of the US as a settler colonial location where the theories of racial capitalism, internal colonialism, race-class-gender intersectionality, and articulation are applicable to show that it is not only subjective racism in isolation that is operative, it is always the racist-sexist-imperialist policing of societies structured in dominance that is challenged by all those who work through coalitions and alliances towards the abolition of oppressive structures of power in the interest of all.

Onwubiko Agozino, author of Counter-Colonial Criminology, and of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System