My deepest thanks to Banu Bargu for her thoughtful and challenging review. It is an honor to be in conversation with her as I think we are both striving to do critical theoretic work that identifies how current conditions are built on specific practices of domination, exclusion, and marginalization that cannot be reformed on the currently accepted normative terms. And even as we are doing this work across different times and geographic spaces, I think we share a commitment to radical theory, direct action, and the reworking of collective practices of freedom in solidarity with those most precariously positioned as unfree.

As Bargu notes, my central claims in Punishment and Inclusion are, first, that criminal disenfranchisement polices internal boundaries within the political body of the United States, and, second, that it does so in support of white supremacy as a political system. My focus on voting rights is ultimately in service of moving beyond electoral politics and the norms of inclusion that are managed through the franchise. As I write in the closing pages of the book, this analysis has led me to prison abolition and political solidarity with those who are most subjected to the social and civil death of incarceration. Bargu is quite right to note, however, that it is only in these last pages that such resistance appears.

On the one hand, the lack of voices of resistance from the “many individuals who are captured by the prison system” is partially a product of the discourse of disenfranchisement itself. While voting rights might be of particular interest to political scientists, political professionals, and some mainstream Civil Rights organizations, they are also just one of the many “collateral consequences” of incarceration that perform the pernicious work of enforcing white supremacy in the United States. Such rights are more abstract and arguably less directly relevant to the lived experience of criminalized persons when compared to the more materially harmful and symbolically degrading exclusions from safety, housing, employment, social services, education, and dignity that felons and “ex-felons” experience. Disenfranchisement has not been a primary site of organizing by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons, and perhaps rightly so, as there are more pressing struggles at hand. Moreover, even when organized resistance against criminal disenfranchisement has emerged, the focus is typically on ex-felon disenfranchisement, with few calls for the rejection of criminal disenfranchisement itself. This is, perhaps, a defensible strategic choice, but it is also through this distinction (between felons and ex-felons) that the “liberalization” of disenfranchisement strengthens white supremacy by fetishizing a form of exclusionary electoral politics that (as critical race and feminist scholars have routinely noted) is largely incapable of addressing systematic forms of exclusion. It is, in part, because of the widespread acceptance of criminal exclusions and lack of resistance to disenfranchisement itself that I argue we must look beyond voting rights for sites of resistance to combat white supremacy, ablism, and hetero-patriarchy.

On the other hand, I fully accept Bargu’s criticism, and the lack of these voices is a shortcoming of the book. Where her book excels—working with death fasters themselves as agents and theorists—my own book fails. My analysis would have been improved had I done more to think with (and not just about) my subjects. If this has produced a certain functionalism in the book, I nevertheless hope that it can also be destabilized and denaturalized by the genealogical method and the possibilities offered there for reconfiguring subjectivities, agency, and practices of freedom. But I also grant that the best tools for such a destabilization and denaturalization are the voices of the imprisoned and marginalized, as well as those who rebel against the prison itself, resist its techniques of dehumanization, and create new political possibilities and build new political spaces on terms that render the prison impossible. My attention has been turned (in no small part by reading Bargu’s work) to these sites of struggle that address both carceral “symptoms” and the underlying “diseases” of domination and marginalization: to the recent hunger and work strikes across prisons in California, Ohio, Georgia, and Alabama, and in immigration detention centers; to the rejection of “gender responsive prisons” by persons incarcerated in women’s prisons; and, above all, to the everyday acts of resistance, community accountability, and prison and police abolition that occur inside and outside of prison walls.

It is only in retrospect, perhaps, that I recognize the primary audience for this book: those who (like myself) are able to come to these questions “freely,” who materially and symbolically enjoy the privileges produced through the unfreedom of others, and who continue to hold that difference-blind forms of liberalism can produce freedom without directly rejecting these enjoyments. This audience can be read analogously to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s audience in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”: the white moderate who says “wait,” and in doing so, prevents the necessary confrontation with white supremacy that has been naturalized under the sign of liberal freedom and civic equality. And it is precisely this audience that must recognize that voting rights, while perhaps necessary, are insufficient for liberation under the terms of mass incarceration.