Unmaking Carceral Disasters: A Post-Katrina Timeline of Struggles Against the New Orleans Punishment Regime

The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was produced by the state’s dual response of carceral violence and organized abandonment. This article takes the twentieth anniversary of the storm to chart out how struggles over racial criminalization, confinement, and disposability have been central to the contested recovery of New Orleans. Attending to the dialectic of resistance and domination, I detail the post-Katrina intensification of carceral power alongside how New Orleans organizers have sought to dismantle carceral infrastructures of criminalization, policing, jailing, surveillance, and detention. New Orleans’ lessons point to the importance of abolitionist politics in a world increasingly marked by climate disasters.