The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post-World War II America

Abstract

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the expansion of the carceral state in the post–World War II United States. This scholarship centers on how repressive laws, combined with more aggressive policing and sentencing guidelines, fueled the 500 percent rise in the nation’s prison population since the 1960s. With black and Latino men imprisoned at several times the rate of white males, the consequences of mass incarceration have fallen primarily on these men, their families, and their communities. Another facet of the literature focuses on how increasingly aggressive police practices, such as police stop-and-frisk tactics, have greatly expanded in recent years. Due to the Supreme Court’s “reasonable suspicion” doctrine, police officers have almost unfettered freedom in choosing whom they stop and interrogate on the street. To cite but one example, more than 80 percent of stops made by the New York Police Department between 2004 and 2012 were of blacks and Latinos. These aggressive and biased law enforcement tactics, the scholarship tells us, have lessened civic engagement, endangered the children of incarcerated individuals, and stigmatized whole generations of brown and black men as criminals.1 The destructive consequences of the carceral state are real. They do not, however, tell the whole story. Populations negatively impacted by overly aggressive policing and mass