Carceral State Research Articles

Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State. By Brad Stoddard

Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State. By Brad Stoddard

Editorial: New Editors

With this issue, seven new editors join the collective of History Workshop Journal, significantly enlarging our expertise. We’re delighted to welcome them: Meleisa Ono-George (Queens College, Oxford) is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is currently conducting research for a book that focuses on the lives of several Black women in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. She has also begun to develop her next project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the politics of historical production. Kennetta Hammond Perry is Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, DeMontfort University. Her research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Black women’s history, archives of Black Europe, and anti-racist movements for citizenship, recognition and social justice throughout the African Diaspora. She has published widely, including a book-length study on Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain following the Second World War titled London is the Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2016). Currently, she is researching histories of state-sanctioned racial violence and the relationship between the decline of the welfare state and the expansion of the carceral state in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.

The Cost of Freedom: The Violent Exploitation of Black Labor as Essential to Nation Building in Jamaica and the United States of America

With a specific focus on labor, our goal is to demonstrate the inherent violence located within nation-building projects that have performed the slippage of equating freedom with the freedom of people to choose their labor (i.e., wage labor). It is within this context that we situate “work” and “labor” as antithetical to Blackness. Similar to the transmutation of freedom to free labor by the financial and industrial class during Reconstruction, Western constructions of labor and work have been utilized as modalities to suppress liberation. Utilizing interlocutors within Black studies who have theorized the relationship between statecraft and Blackness, we foreground Blackness as a way to move beyond the geographic boundaries of nations in order to understand the intent of capital formations that have demanded the gross exploitation of Black labor throughout the African diaspora. To this end, while our argument is based within Jamaica and the United States, we utilize models of the plantation and the carceral state to demonstrate that the usages of labor as a racialized disciplining force are not bounded to national demarcations. Further, we document how Western nations react to Black radical organizing and communal development in order to suppress ideological formations that expose the decadent and corrupt nature of Western modalities of being that are centered on vile exploitation.

Political Participation Amid Mass Incarceration

Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present a series of stylized facts about the carceral state and political behavior, highlighting places where we know a great deal (such as the relative underrepresentation of people with criminal convictions among voters) and places where more work is needed (such as nonvoting participation and community spillovers). Then, I discuss policy proposals that seek to mitigate the political impacts of the carceral state, and what is and is not yet known about what they might accomplish.

Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian's Diaries and Walter Benjamin's 'Theses'

It seems important at this point in the conversation on Medbh McGuckian to look at her prose. This article close reads two autobiographical pieces, the diaries ‘Women are Trousers’ (2000) and ‘Rescuers and White Cloaks: Diary, 1968 – 69’ (2001). The focus here is the form: I consider these diaries as diaries, war diaries particularly, crafted through a poetics of the fragment in a close reading in which their performative functionality is contemplated together with contexts, principally the relation to history that founds the diary and the specific era, Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. These texts are not merely remarkable literary achievements but remarkable in being strikingly analogous to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. While McGuckian names her form, in fact her texts push back on every boundary of it and, familiar from the poems, all expectations of craft and language. All this is true of Benjamin’s text: while we understand the ‘Theses’ to be philosophical writings, they are as abstruse and literary as McGuckian’s. These peculiar, fragmentary texts are generically esoteric and they are so in extraordinarily similar ways. I consider both authors as literary artists in order to suss out the rich and efficacious insights that come in ‘forgetting’, if temporarily, that Benjamin was a philosopher and ‘hearing’ him as the literary artist he (also) was, next to literary artist Medbh McGuckian.
 
 Keywords: The Diary, The Fragment, Prose Poetics, Lyric Prose, The Carceral State, The Angel of History

Undocumented Latina GBV Survivors: Using Social Capital as a Form of Resistance

This research draws on the tradition of Latinx critical race theory (LatCrit) to explore how social capital is deployed by undocumented Latina GBV survivors as a form of personal and collective resistance. The study uses the social capital matrices of bonding, bridging, and linking capital as its primary narrative analysis grids. The research qualitatively analyzes a sample of undocumented survivors’ counter-stories regarding three factors: citizenship status, help-seeking behaviors, and service use patterns. Research findings illuminate the social logics of GBV disclosure locations, the use of informal support services, and how survivors strategically deploy new economic opportunity structures. The article highlights the intersectionality of GBV and undocumented status, demonstrating how survivors leverage various forms of social capital to resist both the carceral state and the violence of abusers.

Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State

Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State

Paul M Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State

Paul M Renfro, <i>Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State</i>

Transformative Community: Gathering the Untold Stories of Collaborative Research and Community Re-integration for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, Post-Incarceration and Beyond

The Canadian carceral system is purposefully designed to disconnect and isolate people. Ongoing colonialism in Canada at the intersection of carceral, social service, health and child welfare systems has resulted in the disproportionate and unjust representation of Indigenous Peoples across each stage of the penal process. Given the ongoing silencing of people who are or have been incarcerated, Participatory Action Research led by Peers with living experience of the carceral state and grounded in the wisdom of Indigenous Elders is urgently needed. In this context, a research network, called the Transformative Health &amp; Justice Research Cluster (THJRC), based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, has formed to disrupt status quo research practices, bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peer Leaders, Elders, academics, community advocates and student trainees, and support the empowerment of people who have been incarcerated. In this reflective piece, Nicolas Crier, one of the THJRC Peer Leaders, will provide an overview of the who, what, why, when and how of the THJRC, reflecting on the impacts and strengths of the collaborative community in general, as well as within the specific context of COVID-19. Co-authors, representing diverse positionalities and perspectives within the THJRC, will weigh in when relevant.

Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-based Prisons and the American Carceral State, by BRAD STODDARD

Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-based Prisons and the American Carceral State, by BRAD STODDARD

Advancing Racial Equity in Education in the Carceral State

Advancing Racial Equity in Education in the Carceral State

Toward a Conceptualization of the College-Prison Nexus

ABSTRACT While a robust body of research has documented the intricate relationship between our nation’s education and penal systems, the weight of this work has focused on primary and secondary schools, absolving colleges and universities of their role in the carceral state. In this essay, we describe some of the ways in which higher education institutions exert carceral state powers that are mostly subtle and covert though sometimes overt as well; institutional innovations that increase penality and exacerbate racial and social inequality; and the creation of pathways to and forms of punishment. We introduce the concept of the college-prison nexus, as a heuristic for scholars to consider in future theorizing and empirical examinations of the symbiotic relationship between postsecondary education institutions and the penal system. We close with recommendations for future research.

Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity, and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars

In recent decades, public prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. By the early 2000s, private equity-owned corporations had entered the core sectors of prison and jail operations, creating “markets behind bars” in telecommunications, commissary sales, health provision, and a range of other services. Two decades later, they have become a quasi-oligopolistic market force across the carceral economy. Reacting to these developments, scholars and activists have explored how private firms generate profits by extracting resources from families of the incarcerated. Less explored is the fact that it is often and particularly private equity firms that partner with public carceral institutions in these extractive practices. In this reflection, we propose a three-part schematic for understanding how such partnerships, with their attendant predation on the poor and people of color, have become normalized. We focus, first, on the mechanism of bureaucracy through which mutual profit-making by public and private entities becomes regularized; second, we explore the legal mechanisms—the apparently small but potent and politically unexamined legal maneuvers—that enable the redirection of family resources beyond the support of a loved one to the operational needs of jails and prisons; finally, we trace the role of gender as a social mechanism through which private equity and its prison/jail partners rely simultaneously on women’s traditional role as caretaker and non-traditional role as primary breadwinner. We show that all three mechanisms are crucial to the economic functioning of the carceral state.

The health/power/criminality-nexus in the state of exception

The positioning of the ‘other’ as a dangerous vector of disease is a long-standing trope. This has existed both in racial terms, such as the 1905 Aliens Act, and for others positioned as on the outliers of society, such as sex workers, under the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864, 1866, 1869 (Hamilton, 1978). The public health system has long been used as a system of control, alongside its self-described role as existing for the betterment of population health. Similarly, other aspects of our health system have long functioned both as a foundational part of the welfare state, and as key perpetrators of racial injustice and part of the carceral state. This is most obvious in the psychiatric system, where there continues to be a disproportionate detention of black men (Singh, 2007). Injustice, surveillance, and even mass detention, that is enacted within a health systems framework is rarely given the same critical focus as other systems of power, such as the criminal justice system – which has been highlighted by the reality that various recent reports into racial discrimination only give a brief mention to the role of healthcare systems in perpetrating various injustices (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2016). During the pandemic the healthcare system has increasingly been used as a justification for advancing a state apparatus of biopower, and has experienced little resistance from the organised left.

Rites of Passage: The Voyage to Convict Australia and the Creation of the Penal Labourer

This article explores the ways in which convict labour was simultaneously regulated and co-opted on the long sea passage to the Australian penal colonies. It uses linked longitudinal data for over 39,000 male convicts transported between the years 1817 and 1853 to Van Diemen’s Land, to explore on-board recruitment of convicts by surgeons. A particular focus of interest is the way in which the organisation of the convict vessel shaped subsequent experience in the penal colonies. The article concludes by arguing that a transport ship was not one, but a series of institutions operating under one deck – part of a wider carceral archipelago that served to link metropolitan and colonial institutions.

Constructing the unruly public: governing affect & legitimate knowledge in post-Katrina New Orleans

This paper turns to a series of public meetings surrounding the rebuilding of the New Orleans jail, OPP in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to argue that neoliberal urban governance is predicated on the everyday reification of racist and patriarchal power hierarchies through the sociospatial policing of what constitutes legitimate knowledge and of affect in the public sphere. We demonstrate that these public meetings served to reproduce racialized and gendered power relations under the façade of urban civic participation. Through ethnographic research and drawing on anti-racist and Black feminist scholarship on epistemology and affect, we uncover three key bureaucratic mechanisms/techniques that shaped the public meetings: the regulation of space, the defining of legitimate knowledge, and the policing of affect. We argue that together these mechanisms produced an unruly public along lines of race and gender which was then used as justification for silencing communities directly impacted by the harms of the criminal legal system from legitimate discourse and debate. However, meeting attendees challenged these processes, using their ‘unruliness’ to call attention to how the narrow definition of legitimate participation in public meetings under neoliberal urban governance regimes mirrored the broader punitive patterns that mark the everyday crises of the carceral state.

Garrett Felber. Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State.

G<scp>arrett</scp> F<scp>elber</scp>. <i>Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State</i>.

Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance

Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance

Robert T. Chase, ed. Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 440. $100.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsRobert T. Chase, ed. Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 440. $100.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).Tana R. HamiltonTana R. HamiltonUniversity of New Orleans (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 106, Number 4Fall 2021Reconceptualizing the History of Black Internationalism A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716263 Views: 24Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“There isn't no trouble at all if the state law would keep out”: Indigenous People and New York's Carceral State

“There isn't no trouble at all if the state law would keep out”: Indigenous People and New York's Carceral State