Histories of class and the carceral state: a response to Paul Durrenberger and Dimitra Doukas

Abstract

In their forum statement, on class in the USA, Paul Durrenberger and Dimitra Doukas downplay the role of race in the history of class formation in the USA. I propose one way of centering race in working class history, through an examination of recent histories of the carceral state. Given its disproportionate impact on the poor and people of color, virtually all studies of the carceral state see the intersections of race and class as central to its nature. A promising literature probes race, labor, and class in relation to the structural economic transformations that accompanied the rise of the carceral state in the late twentieth century. Several works also address or center immigrant detention and deportation, and insert the debate into working class history. In the literature on the carceral state, class—and the working class specifically—is invoked in several different ways. In some cases, the literature addresses class directly; in others, it suggests questions that scholars of labor and class could pursue further. Workers and the labor movement played an important role in the creation of the mid-century social welfare state that both reproduced and challenged settler colonial racial ideologies and structures. A concerted attack on the labor movement accompanied the mass incarceration of the late century, including the criminalization of immigrants. Reading carceral studies from the perspective of labor, and labor histories from the perspective of carceral studies, suggests a more complex narrative than that offered by Durrenberger and Doukas on the late twentieth century travails of the labor movement;, the varied responses to deteriorating conditions of labor by workers inside and outside the labor movement, and ways in which a racialized and settler colonial past continue to haunt the neoliberal present.