Feeling Carcerality: How Carceral Seepage Shapes Racialized Emotions

Abstract

This article examines how young people experience policing and reveals the emotional weight of the carceral state. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with over forty Black and non-Black Latinx young men in Los Angeles County, I argue that the racialized emotions the young men allude to do not stem from one individual encounter with the police or any single identifiable source. Instead, they are responses to the ongoing violence of what I describe as carceral seepage: witnessing the policing of loved ones and peers, the omnipresence of police, and the vulnerability of being criminalized across social contexts (schools, healthcare settings, neighborhood settings, etc.). Integrating theories on racialized emotions and the slow violence of policing, I use carceral seepage to show the breadth of the carceral state and demonstrate how it elicits a particular set of racialized emotional responses (or racialized emotions).