[6] As a PhD candidate, Wang published her first nonfiction book, Carceral Capitalism, which examines the neoliberal, capitalist incentives to use prisons and other systems of incarceration to manage crisis, specifically with a focus on how race influences these processes.
[7][8] She considers topics including municipal finance, debt economies, and the concept of innocence in her analyses, combining both poetry and autobiography into passages.
Throughout the book, Wang used historical analysis, case studies and personal reflections to argue that the American criminal justice system disproportionately targets black and other nonwhite people for fines, legal fees, and incarceration.
Wang specifically draws from Cedric Robinson's concept of racial capitalism as well as Afro-pessimism to explain both the motivations for incarceration and the nature of violence and punishment.
In 2014, to cut costs, the city switched its water source from Detroit's Lake Huron system to the Flint River.
According to Wang, this practice gave rise to a culture in which some residents who failed to pay off citations for minor infractions then became subject to arrest warrants, limiting their freedom of movement.
[18] Wang noted that these factors gave rise to an unlivable environment[19] which–together with the destruction of makeshift memorials for Brown's death, both in the immediate aftermath[20] and in later months[21]–motivated the civil unrest following his shooting.
[24] Wang also gave a personal example, noting that her older brother Randy[25] received a JLWOP sentence for a crime that was committed in 2004, when he was seventeen.
"[26] In 2005, Randy was convicted of second-degree murder and other charges in connection with a drug deal which went awry; the judge was Joseph Bulone, and the prosecutor was Mike Halkitis.
Wang writes that within the framework of innocence, a person must necessarily meet the standards of moral purity and authentic victimhood in order to be treated with empathy.
Thus, Wang explains that many forms of racist state violence are overlooked in this paradigm, such as racialized patterns of incarceration and the attacks on the urban poor.
Wang's thesis is that the enemies of state peace, the “criminals”, are first are foremost defined by their race, gender and class.
According to Wang's framework of innocence, the guilty as defined by the state, i.e. the criminals, should not be heard, which fosters a culture of vilification of convicts and those around them.
The author states that the politics of innocence, by focusing on the spokesperson model, which emphasizes the situation of an individual, fails to address systemic racism and violence, and obscures the collective nature of these harms.
Wang exemplifies this idea by writing that if the innocence of a Black victim is not established, they cannot be an appropriate spokesperson to talk about the violence they endured.