Abstract
Abstract. Increasingly, governments are adopting alternative strategies to mass incarceration and drawing on the rhetoric of community to create softer and less restrictive sanctions. This paper argues that this transition provides an opportunity for geographers concerned with incarceration to consider a more expansive understanding of the carceral state. To call for a more geographically expansive consideration of incarceration, this paper draws upon a study of one juvenile court that sought to end racialized over-incarceration by promoting a "community orientation". As a consequence, juvenile detention now acts as a single node in a broader process of sorting, placing, and punishing, but the carceral aspects of juvenile court involvement did not lessen. Instead, the community orientation encapsulated a range of practices that are traditionally outside the state, yet extended the power of the state over a broad geography that resulted in the coerced mobility of children and subjection to greater insecurity. By tracing how the carceral apparatus extends into neighborhoods, community programs, probation practices, and residential placement, I argue that paying more attention to variegated carceral practices is necessary to more fully consider how incarceration has permeated places outside the prison.
Highlights
Geographic attention to mass incarceration has often highlighted the austere and isolating logics of punishment that have pushed millions of people into places far away from their homes that resemble little more than Goffman’s (1961) totalizing institutions
Carceral practices certainly extend beyond the sites of prison and detention
In the case study above, juvenile detention is the traditional site of carceral practice, yet is just a single node in larger practices of social control
Summary
Geographic attention to mass incarceration has often highlighted the austere and isolating logics of punishment that have pushed millions of people into places far away from their homes that resemble little more than Goffman’s (1961) totalizing institutions. Carceral spaces are not limited to the prison and immigrant detention, though, and, as geographers have noted, the practice of incarceration does not end at the boundaries of the prison (Gilmore, 2007; Moran, 2013; Turner, 2013). While the sheer numbers of those incarcerated still surpass any other nation, and are close to two times the rate of countries that the US considers as peers, after 4 years of incarceration declines, a new trend may be emerging This trend, though, may represent a geographical shift, rather than a shift in the carceral logics of US state power. While often seen as alternatives to incarceration and carceral power, increasing mechanisms, such as drug treatment, probation, and parole, halfway houses, and diversion programs are used to extend control over the imprisoned long after official prison sentences end (McKim, 2008). I add to Beckett and Murakawa’s call for an “institutionally capacious approach to the study of punishment” in calling for a geographically expansive approach to the study of incarceration
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