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The law enforcement badge is a prized possession for white supremacists. Broader patterns of alliances between law enforcement and civilian white supremacists are endemic to social order in the United States, both in free society and within prisons. Using archival methods on trusty systems in California prisons, I show the development of prisoner-officer alliances that reify the privileges of white power.

The expansion of monetary sanctions constitutes what Beckett and Murakawa describe as the “shadow carceral state,” where covert penal power is expanded through institutional annexation by blending civil, administrative, and criminal legal authority. A growing body of work on monetary sanctions has begun to dissect covert penal power by tracing increased civil and administrative pipelines to incarceration, civil financial alternatives to criminal sanctions, and innovations to generate criminal justice revenue. However, institutional annexation and innovation in the form of contemporary pay-to-stay practices remain understudied and undertheorized. In this article, I first examine statutes and practices to theorize pay-to-stay as exemplary of the shadow carceral state—an outcome of legal hybridity and institutional annexation legitimated using the legal construction of “not punishment,” which frames monetary sanctions as non-punitive. Second, I expand Beckett and Murakawa’s framework to argue pay-to-stay practices reveal how the shadow carceral state compounds or initiates the civil death of those charged. I broaden our notion of civil death to include financial indebtedness to the shadow carceral state. I suggest covert penal power expands through the accumulation of resources extracted from people marked for civil death through criminal justice contact. Finally, I conclude that monetary sanctions such as pay-to-stay reveal how the shadow carceral state expands covert penal power through necrocapitalism, meaning institutional accumulation occurs through dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death.

Brittany Friedman proposes embodied carcerality as a conceptual tool for understanding the production of carceral subjects through reifying one’s physical representation as indistinguishable from a deviant object in her work on criminal justice imagery. She argues this reification process occurs through a series of interpersonal interactions, where a person’s outward representation (movement, speech, appearance) is perceived as inherently dangerous and deserving of control, prior to any legally identifiable offense. During the interpersonal interactions, black women and girls are understood in relation to their perceived proximity to the criminal controlling image. Embodied carcerality guides us on this precarious journey, subjecting us to social, civil, and with ultimate finality, physical demise. Black feminists have organized for centuries against controlling images and the embodied consequences. Alexis Gumbs reminds us the scenes of black feminist fugitivity spill far and wide across time and space.