Finding and Defining the Carceral State

Abstract

Finding and Defining the Carceral State Dan Berger (bio) Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 221 pp. Map, graph, table, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Sometimes the simplest questions are also the hardest ones. Take, for instance, the time a few years ago when a colleague who, like me, works on the carceral state asked me a simple question following a conference panel about the carceral state: what is the carceral state? No one on the panel had actually defined the term. Indeed, it was in that moment that I realized how little of the published work or conference sessions on the topic engaged in this most basic act. What is it we are talking about? What are its parameters, its institutions, its ideologies? For my friend, this basic question invited a return to an earlier modality of state formation, the welfare state. How, she asked, is the carceral state different from the welfare state? Where and when does one end and the other begin? Do they coexist or compete? The obvious, inescapable truth of the colossal growth of incarceration in the late-twentieth-century United States was overdue for contextual analysis on political, social, economic, and cultural fronts by the time historians began to turn their attention to it. Yet, as often happens in the development of intellectual subfields, studies of the carceral state took for granted the core precept of what we looking at. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, historians of the carceral state simply knew it when we saw it. More often than not, this intuitive approach to the topic focused on prison and explaining how the US came to lock up so many people for so long in such a relatively short period of time. This river was big enough for many scholars, junior and senior alike, to swim in. As the field has grown, scholars have explored both a longer time period and a wider set of institutions. Traveling along these various tributaries, as Anne E. Parsons does in her study of Pennsylvania institutions From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945, has shown that the path the U.S. took toward mass incarceration was multifaceted and multidirectional. This scholarship has shown the carceral state to be bigger than prisons and to be [End Page 279] the site of routine resistance and contestation by those caught in its grasp. But have we gotten closer to a working definition of what the carceral state is? Historians were rather late to the game of studying mass incarceration, which had already preoccupied scholars in Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and elsewhere. And even as historians have turned greater attention to the history of prisons, policing, and surveillance, the field has remained robustly interdisciplinary. The carceral state is one of the subject areas—conservatism and capitalism being perhaps the other leading contenders—in which historians can best ply a critical interrogation of change over time to address matters of great social and political urgency in the present. The interest of historians in the carceral state has been both professional and public: flagship journals, Journal of American History and Journal of Urban History, dedicated themed issues to the topic in 2015, while a number of historical books on the topic of prisons and prisoners have won major awards from both professional associations and the larger book-reading public. Heather Ann Thompson's highly decorated history of the 1971 Attica rebellion, Blood in the Water (2016) is the most visible example of what has been a growing and often stunning list of titles investigating how it is that the US came to incarcerate so many people for so long in such cruel conditions. As abusive conditions, prisoner strikes, and policy reforms dot the current political landscape, a number of historians—myself included—have penned op-eds connecting our research to matters of ongoing public concern. Historians have productively followed the story of the carceral state across a variety of places and times. As U.S. criminal justice is largely a state-based affair...