Conceptualizing the Carceral Turn: Neoliberalism, Racism, and Violation

Abstract

This article considers the turn to punishment in neoliberalism, and the hardening it marks in the criminal justice system, education, and public life. Examining tensions between neoliberalism’s doctrine of equality before the market and its actual reproduction of racial disparities, I specify a concept of violation, as a principle of both material and symbolic domination, that can respond to these tensions. Considering influential analyses of the turn toward punishment, I argue that the historic legacy of racism is a crucial determinant of the excesses of current regimes of penality, and that racialized repression figures in a contemporary recomposition of political economy. Furthermore, in the neoliberal moment the disciplinary repertoire of racism is extrapolated to new populations and terrains. I recontextualize the current carceral turn within a broader logic of violation that links moments of social production and decomposition, and fuses processes of material exploitation with racialized injury and subjection.