Carceral State Research Articles

Reflections on the Ethical Possibilities and Limitations of Abolitionist Praxis in Social Work

Since 2020, blatant forms of state violence within the United States have reignited attention in the field of social work, where numerous calls have been made to realign and reconsider our standing ethical values and principles. Individually, social workers are beginning to reckon with the field's role within the carceral ecosystem and reimagining practice outside the confines of the carceral state. Institutionally, however, social work's professional organizations have reacted in contradictory ways. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) in particular has been overtly inconsistent; touting support for racial justice while also broadcasting long-standing support for and partnerships with police. Furthermore, the NASW purportedly upholds a set of professional ethics and values that center social justice while also supporting tactics that surveil and criminalize marginalized communities. This disconnect between espoused ethics and actuality of practice undermines the professional legitimacy of social work. The profession must either acknowledge the current Code of Ethics as performative or take action to bring practice into alignment with professed ethics that affirm abolitionist practices. Using institutional social work statements, this article presents a conceptual exploration of the ethical potentials and limitations of abolitionist praxis in social work, culminating with a call to action.

Panopticism and Complicity

Historically, libraries, archives, and museums—or LAM institutions—have been complicit in enacting state power by surveilling and policing communities. This article broadens previous scholars’ critiques about individual institutions to LAM institutions writ large, drawing connections between these sites and ongoing racist, classist, and oppressive designs. We do so by dialing in on the ethical premise that justifies panoptic systems, utilitarianism, and how the glorification of pragmatism reifies systems of control and oppression. First, we revisit LIS applications of Benthamian and Foucauldian ideas of panoptic power to examine the role of LAM institutions as sites of social enmity. We then describe examples of surveillance and state power as they manifest in contemporary data infrastructure and information practices, showing how LAM institutional fixations with utilitarianism reify the U.S. carceral state through norms such as the aggregation and weaponization of user data and the overreliance on metrics. We argue that such practices are akin to widespread systems of surveillance and criminalization. Finally, we reflect on how LAM workers can combat structures that rely on oppressive assumptions and claims to information authority. Pre-print first published online February 10, 2023

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Racial Inequality in the Prevalence, Degree, Extension, and Permeation of Incarceration in Family Life

The prevalence, consequences, and unequal distribution of parental and own incarceration in the United States are well documented. However, much of our knowledge of the reach of the carceral state into family life is focused on incarceration of a parent, romantic partner, or child, to the exclusion of other important relationships. Using data from the Family History of Incarceration Study, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 2,029), this study introduces novel descriptive measures that provide a more comprehensive picture of the demography and racially unequal distribution of family incarceration: degree, generational extension, and permeation. This analysis shows that Black adults in the United States are not only more likely to have experienced family incarceration but are also more likely to have had more family members incarcerated (5.3 members vs. ≤2.8 members for adults of other racial/ethnic groups) and to have had family members from more generations ever incarcerated (1.7 generations vs. ≤1.1 generations for those of other groups). Further, the stability of these estimates across model specifications underscores the importance of interrogating long-standing approaches to the analysis of linkages between race, the criminal legal system, and family life and the investigation of racialized systems and social inequality more broadly.

Carceral logics and education

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose a new conceptual lens for understanding issues of racialised discipline and school exclusion that takes into consideration the foundational carceral logics of the settler colonial state. By bringing together carceral state, settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies literatures I demonstrate how the settler colonial carceral state is driven by racial capitalism and the white possessive and how this impacts schooling. With a focus on Australia, but drawing connections to other British settler colonial contexts, I propose school discipline is connected to raced carceral logics, through relations of: 1) crisis, safety, and security; 2) containment and control; 3) policing and surveillance. I argue that by examining the carceral logics of the state that underpin school discipline and exclusion, it is possible to shift attention onto structural violences that impact racialised young people in schools, rather than expecting such students to be included into a violent system.

What Makes It a Just Transition? A Case Study of Renewable Rikers

This essay offers New York City’s Renewable Rikers as an example of what a just transition might look like in practice. Specifically, this essay describes how Renewable Rikers connects the need for non-polluting energy infrastructure with a broader conversation about decarceration and racial justice to build an inclusive pathway for prosperity and environmental health for all New Yorkers. The first part of this essay sets the stage with a brief overview of the climate crisis. Part two sketches the contours of what constitutes a just transition as that term is used in the Green New Deal Resolution. Part three situates the idea of a just transition against the current racialized injustices embedded in the carceral state. Part four turns to Renewable Rikers. After describing the history of incarceration on Rikers Island, and contours of the Renewable Rikers project, this section highlights the creativity of the partnerships, legal structures, and participation pro- cesses embedded in the Renewable Rikers project. The final section draws some early lessons from Renewable Rikers, suggesting how it does and does not offer a model for how to solve what Nadia Ahmad has called “the tsunami of the problems arising from the carceral state and extractivist economy.”

This Country Ain’t Low—The Country Music of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash as a Form of Redistributive Politics

This article examines how the country music styles of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash serve as a form of redistributive politics in which ideological struggles are engaged in ways that dissolve low/high culture distinctions and instead offer a mass-accessible avenue through which cultural recognition is conferred to marginalized identities. This ranges from class-based social critique in Dolly Parton’s song “9 to 5” to the condemnations of the carceral state in Johnny Cash’s work. Engaging country music as an arsenal for social progressivism is not only an underexplored topic in pop cultural studies, but it also provides fertile ground for illuminating how perceptions of the genre are impacted by stereotypical images drawn from the “culture wars” and how these images interrelate with implicit low/high distinctions. For instance, what does the commercial success of Parton’s and Cash’s works say about the low/high distinction? In what ways do their songs, lyrics, aesthetics, and public personae offer a distinctive space for a type of discourse that affords recognition to oppressed communities? Through addressing these questions, I seek to illustrate how prominent segments of country music are resistant to the mere reproduction of cultural hegemony. In doing so, they actively disrupt widespread conceptions of low culture as reactionary.

Where Protection Meets Punishment: Public Education and the Carceral State in Urban America

This essay calls upon scholars in the largely siloed fields of history of education and carceral studies to examine the history of American education and criminal legal systems in tandem rather than in isolation from one another. In introducing the special section’s articles, it proposes a new template for historicizing the “school-to-prison pipeline” in particular and the intertwined evolution of the state’s protective, preventative, and punitive power more broadly. Specifically, the essay discusses how the carceral state both moved into and emerged from within public schools prior to and following the 1960s and 1970s. It also notes that the relationship between public education and the carceral state evolved in highly localized and contingent ways based upon the actions of individuals, organizations, and institutions at the community, state, and federal level. The essay concludes with a discussion of considerations for further research.

The One Carceral State: Mass Incarceration and Carceral Citizenship in Israel/Palestine

The One Carceral State: Mass Incarceration and Carceral Citizenship in Israel/Palestine

An Ethic of Abolition

This paper addresses the uncanny resemblance between the educational industrial complex and the US carceral state. Both schools and prisons comprise carceral apparatuses that use policies, pedagogies, and practices to respond punitively to com­munal transgressions. Moreover, architectural designs and fiscal budgets further reveal symmetries that make learning communities unsafe and complicit with carceral systems. Black and Brown people are disproportionately caught in the frays of punitive disparities, targeted violence, and stereotypes of deviance that drastically impede social thriving. Ergo, this paper responds to the inextricability of punishment that link classrooms to prisons by introducing an abolitionist theological ethic to create educational sanctuaries.

Frivolous Justice in a Carceral State: Black Poetics, Physical Injuries, and the Prison Litigation Reform Act

Frivolous Justice in a Carceral State: Black Poetics, Physical Injuries, and the Prison Litigation Reform Act

Carceral Socialization as Voter Suppression

In an era of mass incarceration, many people are socialized through interactions with the carceral state. These interactions are powerful learning experiences, and by design, they are contrary to democratic citizenship. Citizenship is about belonging to a community of equals, being entitled to mutual respect and concern. Criminal punishment deliberately harms, subordinates, and stigmatizes. Encounters with the carceral system are powerful experiences of anti-democratic socialization, and they impact peoples’ sense of citizenship and trust in government. Accordingly, a large body of social science research shows that eligible voters who have carceral contact are significantly less likely to vote or to participate in politics. Hence, the carceral system’s impact on political participation goes well beyond those who are formally disenfranchised due to convictions. It also suppresses participation among the millions of legally eligible voters who have not been formally disenfranchised—people who have had more fleeting encounters with law enforcement or vicarious interactions with the carceral system. This Article considers the implications of these findings from the perspective of voting rights law and the constitutional values underlying it. In a moment when voting rights are under siege, voting rights advocates are in a heated discussion about how our federal and state constitutions protect ideals of democratic citizenship and political equality. This discussion has largely (and for good reason) focused on how the law should address what I call “de jure” suppression: tangible election laws and policies that impose legal barriers to voting, or dilute voting power. Eliminating these formal barriers to voting is vital. But, I argue, fully realizing the constitutional values underlying voting rights will also require also addressing what I call “de facto” suppression, or suppression through socialization. This occurs not through formal legal restrictions on voting, but when state institutions like the carceral system systematically socialize citizens in a manner that is incompatible with democratic citizenship. I show how de facto suppression threatens the constitutional interests protected by the right to vote just like de jure suppression does. In short, by systematically socializing people in a manner that is fundamentally incompatible with democratic citizenship, the state can effectively strip a citizen of much of the instrumental and intrinsic value conferred by the right to vote. Those who are concerned about advancing and protecting voting rights should understand the carceral system’s anti-democratic socialization as a form of political suppression—one that should warrant constitutional scrutiny for the same reasons that de jure suppression should warrant scrutiny.

“It’s just this lingering, hovering thing …” Professionals supporting individuals under community supervision during disasters

PurposeAlthough a growing body of literature examines the intersection of disasters and the criminal legal system, the experiences of individuals under community supervision during disasters are not well understood. Additionally, there is limited understanding of how professionals working in organizations and agencies support these individuals. This study expands our knowledge by examining two research questions: 1) What are the experiences of individuals under supervision during disasters? and 2) How do professionals support individuals under community supervision during disasters? MethodsThis study draws on individual, in-depth interviews with 14 professionals who worked with people currently or formerly on community supervision during disasters (i.e., hurricanes, wildfires, and COVID-19). ResultsPeople under community supervision face routine challenges in meeting their supervision conditions. Fulfilling their supervision requirements often contends with fulfilling their basic needs, and individuals are forced to make decisions that can cost them their freedom. The precarity stemming from their involvement in the criminal legal system compounds their social vulnerability before, during, and after disasters, leading to unique disaster-related challenges. However, organizations and government agencies can mitigate some of the most damaging impacts of disasters for system-involved populations by supplementing necessary resources and social capital. ConclusionsThe study lends insight into how criminal legal involvement promotes and exacerbates vulnerability and broadens conceptual frameworks of social vulnerability to include vulnerability induced by the carceral state.

The Boundaries of the Carceral State: Accounting for the Role of Military Incarceration

The Boundaries of the Carceral State: Accounting for the Role of Military Incarceration

The weaponisation of ‘trauma-informed’ discourse in prison policy: An abolition feminist critique

Taking an abolition feminist standpoint, this article develops a critique of the absorption of the language of ‘trauma-informed practice’ into gendered penal policy. We use Carol Bacchi's methodology for post-structural policy analysis, which centres around the question, ‘what is the problem represented to be?’, and apply it to an Australian correctional policy document designed to inform practice in the Victorian women's prison system: Strengthening Connections. We find that the policy constructs criminalised women's trauma as an individual psychological pathology that causes ‘criminal offending’ and makes them vulnerable to further harm. In effect, the prison is framed as both necessary for the protection of the community and for the protection of criminalised women themselves. We argue that these discursive distortions sanitise the structural violence of the prison and revalorise the carceral state under the guises of rehabilitation and therapy. Our contribution highlights broader implications and challenges for criminological research that engages attempts to ‘soften’ carceral conditions without reckoning with their capacity to entrench gendered carceralism.

Inside Out: Legacies of Attica and the Threat of Books to the Carceral State

Inside Out: Legacies of Attica and the Threat of Books to the Carceral State

Advocating for Abolition in Health Law: A Theory and Praxis to Liberate Black Incarcerated Women.

The prison-industrial complex has historically operated as a mechanism for social control generally and as a tool to restrict women's reproductive capacities specifically. Reproductive justice is a domain within the practice of health law. However, health law as currently practiced is ill-equipped to understand how the carceral state functions as a structural determinant of health or how legacies of oppression have facilitated the abridgment of incarcerated women's reproductive capacities.

The Closed and the Open Prison: Contested Imaginaries and the Limits of Openness

This article explores the conceptual landscape of open prisons in India. Open prisons are institutions intended to facilitate prisoner rehabilitation by permitting them to live in small dwellings with their families and earn livelihoods outside their boundary walls. The article delves on the tensions between how “openness” is conceived in prison reform documents and the multiple ways in which it is imagined and materialized through everyday practices. It focusses on a specific open prison in north India which is considered exceptional even as far as open prisons are concerned both for its scale and forms of community. It draws attention to its histories and the modes of governance that incrementally shape its socio spatial landscape. This is followed by an interrogation of the elevated status this specific prison enjoys in penal discourse as an idealised community of reformed prisoners while underscoring the open prison’s overall potential as a shifting institutional form. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted with activists, open prison advocates, formerly incarcerated persons and open prison residents, this article makes contributions to the study of governance, political and legal institutions and the carceral state.

Work and the Carceral State By Jon Burnett

<i>Work and the Carceral State</i> By Jon Burnett

The carceral logic of parental responsibility

AbstractObjectiveTo elucidate the institutional logic underpinning the child support system's expectations of parents.BackgroundCompelling parental responsibility through punitive enforcement mechanisms is the central focus of child support system enforcement. Although much is known about noncustodial parents' experiences in the system, less is known about how this site of state intervention shapes the definition and expectations of parenthood and family.MethodObservations in five courts and child support‐related sites were conducted over 18 months. Interviews were also conducted with child support system workgroup members.ResultsThe racialized, gendered, and classed stereotypes that undergird the system's definition of parental responsibility are grounded in controlling images of parenthood and family, prioritizing financial support above any other contributions of parents. Court officials wielded this expectation of parental responsibility to punish—or threaten to punish—noncustodial parents, resulting in significant material and symbolic consequences.ConclusionThe carceral logic of parental responsibility in this site underpins punitive state policies, procedures, and practices around nonpayment of support and other acts of noncompliance, reproducing racialized, gendered, and classed social controls of parenthood and family. As a result of this logic, the child support system plays a significant role in shaping the institutions of parenthood and family, (re)produces the expansion of the carceral state, and contributes to broader family inequality.ImplicationsAddressing family inequality should attend to the pervasiveness of the carceral logic of parental responsibility in the child support system and beyond, which has significantly oppressive consequences for parents and families.