“Policeman’s Lot Is Oft a Happy One”: Ulysses and the Abolition of the Carceral State

Abstract: This essay reassesses Joyce’s representation of prisons and the police in Ulysses in light of recent scholarship on prison abolition. By examining the carceral landscape of Martello Tower, the Citizen’s comments on the death penalty, and Bloom’s encounters with British soldiers, this essay shows that Ulysses acts as a call to abolish systems of policing rather than merely a call to reform them. Joyce’s novel provides us with useful political strategies for the ongoing project of abolition, particularly in its condemnation of the state and its repressive apparatuses, as well as its depiction of the way a culture of debt fuels networks of imprisonment. The essay concludes with a statement about how Ulysses shows the need for an intersectional abolitionist praxis and the need for a coterminous eradication of the different overlapping oppressive structures that aid the ideology of incarceration in a multitude of ways.