An Institutional Autopsy
Three long-form institutional histories that examine how three different American institutions came to be what they are now. Carceral Nation traces three centuries of surveillance and discipline as they migrated from the prison yard to every other American institution. The Claimed Body documents how American institutions divide the human organism among themselves under a registered-claim logic borrowed from the Homestead Act. UNDERWRITTEN is the institutional history of federated American public broadcasting from the 1967 founding through the 2026 dissolution. Read together, the three books form a single argument about how American institutional architecture has been built, how it operates across time, and how it ends.
About the Trilogy
The Institutional Autopsy sequence was identified retrospectively. Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body were each written and published as standalone scholarly works. UNDERWRITTEN arrived in early 2026, and the three books turned out to share a method, a register, and a question. Each examines a specific American institution at sufficient length to map its actual architecture, drawing on primary sources, institutional records, oral history, and the long historical record. The books treat their institutions as something that can be opened up, identified, and accounted for, the way a coroner accounts for a body. The three volumes close with specific institutional reckonings rather than with recommendations for reform.
These volumes appear here in their established sequence. Readers may begin with any volume. Each book stands on its own. The shared analytical method becomes visible across all three.
Carceral Nation
Three centuries of American surveillance, discipline, and control as they migrated from the prison yard to the schoolroom, the workplace, the digital platform, and the public square. Beginning with colonial lantern laws and moving through Bentham's panopticon, Foucault's theoretical escalation, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-9/11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where citizens now report one another's movements, the book documents how a nation built on liberty constructed an invisible infrastructure of observation that touches every citizen. Fifteen chapters across five parts, drawn from twenty years of writing on the Panopticonic blog and CarceralNation.com. The walls came down. The logic walked out through the gap.
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The Claimed Body
The American body as territory, claimed by institutions that file on portions of it from before birth to after death. In 1862 President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act and the registered claim shaped the geography of the Great Plains. The Act was repealed in the contiguous states in 1976; its logic was not. A hospital claims your birth. The school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker claims an ongoing right to your patterns. Fifteen chapters tracking fifteen institutional domains under a registered-claim logic borrowed from the Homestead Act. The homestead did not end. It turned inward.
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UNDERWRITTEN
The first full institutional history of federated American public broadcasting, from the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House through the January 30, 2026 filing of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia. Fifteen chapters across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional production centers including Nebraska Educational Television in Lincoln, the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation before the sixth ended it. The federation is not coming back.
View This TitleAbout the Author
David Boles has been writing and publishing since 1975. The Institutional Autopsy trilogy joins a body of work spanning literary fiction, dramatic literature, ASL linguistics, and cultural criticism, all available through David Boles Books. Each volume of the trilogy is available in Kindle, paperback, and free PDF download.