Shows how the criminalization of people of color serves a religious purpose Most popular critical accounts of mass criminalization interpret police and prisons as solely social and political phenomena. While such accounts have been indispensable in moving millions into collective action and resistance, the carceral state remains as pervasive as ever. White Property, Black Trespass argues that understanding why we have police and prisons, and building a world of safety and abundance beyond them, requires that we acknowledge the inherently religious function that criminalization fulfills for a colonial and racial capitalist order that puts its faith in cops and cages in order to save it from the existential threat of disorder that its own structural violence creates. The book traces how what author Andrew Krinks describes as the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and private property both shape and are shaped by the religion of mass criminalization. Looking at the religious foundations of the criminalization of Black and economically dispossessed peoples in the United States, the volume illuminates criminalization as a way of producing and protecting the sacred social order of patriarchal whiteness and private property. At once incisive and expansive, this groundbreaking work illuminates how religion binds together white patriarchy and private property, and how police power and prisons are used to protect them. It concludes with thoughts on what might be entailed in a religion rooted in a rejection of the religious idolatry of mass criminalization, offering the initial framework for a religion of abolition.
