‘Moving from protest to policy’: civil society responses to carceral governance

Abstract

Baltimore’s exclusionary divisions are palpable in the city's long-standing concentration and segregation of its African American population and in its institutions of governance. The city is synonymous with carceral governance, or governance via the criminal justice system and other practices of control, which constrains the political expression of urban citizenship. A focus on the period since the city uprising in 2015, triggered by racist police violence, underlines that the fundamental struggle concerns the democratisation of the city’s governance and how this is envisaged. The research affirms a key schism between incremental change, associated with co-option into the status quo, and visions of radical, transformative change. But considering the choices and activities of three civil society organisations refines this bifurcated understanding of civil society responses to carceral governance. The organisations move from protest to policy by combining outsider strategies, focused on youth leadership development, with insider strategies of collaboration with, and policy advocacy targeted at, different tiers of government. In making choices about when they work with and when they work against the state and city elites, the organisations navigate the co-optive risks of incrementalism when it is perceived as contributing towards their vision of transformative change.