Academic literature on the topic 'Carceral sate'

Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in the UK, comprising 20 staff interviews and 20 photo production interviews with patients. We use John Law’s ‘modes of ordering’ to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit. We identify two ‘modes of ordering’: ‘keeping safe’, which we argue tends towards empty, stultified and static spaces; and ‘keep progressing’ which instead requires filling, enriching and ingraining spaces. We discuss ways in which tensions between these modes of ordering are resolved in the unit, noting a spatial hierarchy which prioritises ‘keeping safe’, thus limiting the institutional capacity for engendering progress and change. The empirical material is discussed in relation to the institutional and carceral geography literatures with a particular focus on mobilities.

This paper begins by examining recent scholarship on the carceral state and its political consequences as an opportunity to reassess the study of urban politics. Along with illuminating how race structures local power relations, research on the carceral state exposes gaps in the long-standing, political–economy paradigm, and in particular regime theory, concerning the political lives of ordinary people and the role of ideas, values, and ideology in shaping political behavior. At the same time, this paper recognizes the powerful impact of market forces on urban governance, as well as regime theory’s emphasis on organizational resources, intergroup collaboration, and coalition building in accounting for business influence over city policymaking. A new analytical approach is proposed—the mobilization–governance framework—that seeks to build on the insights of scholarship on the carceral state while retaining still-valuable aspects of regime theory. A case study of contemporary politics in Philadelphia is presented to illustrate how the mobilization–governance framework might be applied.

Scholarship on the expansion of the U.S. carceral state has primarily focused on imprisonment rates. Yet the majority of adults under formal criminal justice control are on probation, an “alternative” form of supervision. This article develops the concept of mass probation and builds a typology of state control regimes that theorizes both the scale and type of punishment states employ. Drawing on Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 1980 and 2010, I analyze whether mass probation developed in the same places, affecting the same demographic groups and driven by the same criminal justice trends, as mass imprisonment. The results show that mass probation was a unique state development, expanding in unusual places like Minnesota and Washington. The conclusions argue for a reimagining of the causes and consequences of the carceral state to incorporate the expansion of probation.

The use of detention as a tool of immigrant enforcement has grown in the United States and around the world. In this article, I examine the practices used to structure the physical detention of immigrants and explore the role that carceral immigrant control plays as a form of labor market governance. I argue that the same security and detention practices that equate being out of status with criminality are also used to tag immigrants as unskilled. Through the delineation of skill categories, which are vested with certain political rights, I posit that this carceral enforcement of skill categories shapes how immigrants are able to navigate the labor market, with particular attention to the implications for recipients of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) protections.

We face a social landscape with more (or at least as much) need for radical change than we faced in the 1960s, an era that produced, flawed though it was by lack of follow-through, a mighty impulse toward change…Prison walls are being posed as a final solution. They symbolize our shortsightedness, our fear of the real problems caging us all. The pity is how blindly, enthusiastically, we applaud those who are constructing the walls dooming us.John Edgar WidemanThere is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.Walter Benjamin

The Covid-19 pandemic has made a commonplace of the carceral imaginary. Isolation, social distancing, quarantine have become watchwords. Physician instructions, epidemiologist advice, state orders jostle alongside memes and jokes about being under ‘lockdown’, barricaded-in and homebound across the world. An immobility regime dominates now with cancelled airline, bus and train services. Yet, the same regime has generated an extreme mobility in nations like India, particularly in cities like New Delhi....

Black girls regularly experience gendered, racial structural violence, not just from formal systems of law enforcement, but throughout their daily lives. School is one of the most central and potentially damaging sites for Black girls in this regard. In this paper, I draw attention to the role of the beauty salon as a space of renewal for Black women and girls as they navigate systems of oppression in their daily lives and report on the ways in which a specific beauty salon in Chesterfield County, Virginia, supported a group of Black high school girls. The study focuses on the exposure of Black girls to carceral measures in school settings and speaks to the role of African-American beauty salons as spaces where collective care from violence can manifest and strategies to interrupt racialized gendered violence against Black girls can emerge. As Co-Investigator of this study funded by the Department of Justice, I created the “scholar-artist-activist lab,” consisting of a small group of undergraduate and graduate students facilitating workshops with a mixed gender group of Black high-school students, to discuss, interact, and participate in social justice-centered exercises. I focus here on the experiences of the Black girls who participated in the study.

In this reflection, I take up the contradiction of calling for justice to be delivered from the same institutions that, under contemporary conditions of settler-colonial and white supremacist hetero-patriarchy, are often themselves the sources of injustice. I argue for an orientation toward justice that grounds itself on its condition of failure, drawing on Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics and queer theory’s embrace of failure as a resource for critical analysis and liberation. From an abolitionist perspective, I thus call for thinking about justice as failure in order to better hear the voices and respond to the demands of those most marginalized by carceral logics and practices.

Human rights advocacy today engages with criminal law at international and national levels with a new and rather conflicted posture. It is reorienting from an approach that primarily treated human rights as a shield from (unjust) prosecutorial and carceral power, and toward one calling for criminal penalties and vigorous prosecutions as a remedy for harms. The human rights abuses for which state prosecution is invoked today include not only past and present state violations, such as torture, but crimes by non-state actors, such as sexual and gender-based violence. At the same time, paradoxically, many rights groups are calling for the review and reduction of criminal regulation of a range of sexual and reproductive health practices, including abortion, consensual sexual conduct outside of marriage (same sex, heterosexual, and sex for money), and HIV transmission.

The Great Appalachian Flood of 1977 was a historic flood that killed over 100 people, damaged nearly 1,500 homes, and displaced almost 30,000 Appalachian residents. The flood lasted from April 2nd to April 5th, 1977 affecting southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. This project focuses on the disaster relief efforts by the incarcerated population of Wise County Correctional Facility, commonly known as Unit 18, in Wise, Virginia. This project utilized locally produced primary sources known as the Mountain Community Television interviews. These interviews were archived online through the Appalshop Archives in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The Mountain Community Television interviews used for this project were recorded three to four weeks following the early April flood in Wise by media activists and volunteers. The reporters interviewed incarcerated men from Unit 18, the administrative staff and correctional officers at Unit 18, local business owners, and residential community members of Wise. This article examines how the community of Wise, Virginia reacted to the disaster relief efforts in the community. The disaster relief work performed by Unit 18 inmates in the aftermath of the 1977 flood exemplifies a growing reliance on prison laborers in central Appalachia specifically, and rural America more generally. The majority of residential community members in Wise expressed NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) attitudes toward the prison facility and incarcerated population at Unit 18. On the other hand, local business owners who directly benefited from disaster relief work and prison labor changed their opinions about Unit 18 inmates. This project details how the April flood influenced local business owners to move from "Not In My Backyard" to an expanding reliance on incarcerated labor. Most of the Wise community retained NIMBY perceptions about Unit 18 and the incarcerated population after the April flood relief efforts excluding local business owners, a small but important sect of the Wise population. The article concludes by examining Unit 18 inmates' reflections on their labor, wages, and the rehabilitation programs at the Wise County Correctional Facility in the late 1970s.
Master of Arts
In 1977, a catastrophic flood impacted the central Appalachian region of the United States. This flood later became known as the "Great Appalachian Flood of 1977." The flood primarily affected small towns and rural communities in southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and southern West Virginia. Disaster relief efforts in the aftermath of the flood varied across the region causing regional activists to criticize the government's relief efforts. In Wise, Virginia imprisoned men from Wise Correctional Facility Unit 18 volunteered to help the local community in their time of need. This project pays direct attention to Wise, VA community members' changed or solidified opinions about the local prison population at Wise Correctional Unit 18. The writing examines how Unit 18 prisoners viewed their role in the Wise community, their labor and wages, and the different approaches to prisoner rehabilitation. This project uses primary sources from the Appalshop Archives labeled as the Mountain Community Television interviews. In the late 1970s, Mountain Community Television interviewers were a group of local activists and volunteers that circulated broadcasts in southwestern Virginia. The Mountain Community Television interviews were conducted in the following weeks after the Great Appalachian Flood in Wise,Virginia. The interviews describe how local business owners of Wise and Unit 18 correctional administrators worked closely to change the working relationship between the community and the inmates at Unit 18. The vast majority of community members of Wise did not change their opinions about the location of the prison or the population of Unit 18 despite prisoners volunteering to help the community in the aftermath of the flood. On the other hand, the imprisoned population at Unit 18 advocated for more inclusion in the community with an expansion of educational and rehabilitative programs at the correctional facility after. This research is important because it highlights how rural communities and small towns contribute to mass incarceration in the United States. The project can be used to explain how Wise, Virginia directly, and central Appalachia generally, became an important landscape for the U.S. prison regime before the end of the twentieth century.

The contributors to Long Term use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect. They consider commitment in all its guises, particularly relationships beyond and aside from monogamous partnering. These include chosen and involuntary long-term commitments to families, friends, pets, and coworkers; to the care of others and care of self; and to financial, psychiatric, and carceral institutions. Whether considering the enduring challenges of chronic illnesses and disability, including HIV and chronic fatigue syndrome; theorizing the queer family as a scene of racialized commitment; or relating the grief and loss that comes with caring for pets, the contributors demonstrate that attending to the long term offers a fuller understanding of queer engagements with intimacy, mortality, change, dependence, and care. Contributors. Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Scott Herring, Annamarie Jagose, Amy Jamgochian, E. Patrick Johnson, Jaya Keaney, Heather Love, Sally R. Munt, Kane Race, Amy Villarejo, Lee Wallace

This chapter looks at how carceral affiliations come to connect the prison and high-incarceration neighborhoods. For incarcerated residents, affiliations serve as important ties to home and as sources of support in unpredictable settings. When these community members return home with little formal or material reentry support, many hold on to these identities—both because they may supply the only help that parolees do find and because these residents can never be certain that they will not be locked up again. At the same time, local youth learn about these affiliations from previously or currently imprisoned friends, relatives, and neighbors, informing how they imagine they will need to survive their own potential experiences with incarceration. This not only proliferates carceral affiliations in local spaces but also contributes to an understanding of poor black and Latina/o neighborhoods as pathological that many young residents internalize.

Influenced by critical carceral studies and abolition feminism, this non-empirical work identifies a political, social and economic carceral system that is fueled by existing racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, ableist and xenophobic ideologies, which both minimize resources for Latinx/a women and girls and increases the level of state violence perpetrated against them. The consequences of dispossession, subjugation and stigmatization have impacted Latina/x women's access to livable waged jobs, healthcare, safe and healthy food and water, adequate living conditions, quality education, and acceptance in American society. This violence is justified and considered necessary by constructing Latina/x women and girls as unworthy of state protection and state resource and as threats to the economy, culture and politics of the United States. Latina/x women, like other women of color, are not afforded the protections extended to white women by the state. Many Americans do not see them as the “good victim”, but often they are the “bad woman”, “bad mother”, “sexual deviant”, exploited laborer, culturally defiant, and increasingly they are “illegal”, “criminal” and “terrorist”. This results in Latinx/a women and girls being more likely to be imprisoned than white women and are one of the fastest growing prison populations in the United States.

This chapter demonstrates how a tragic state of affairs, one in which economic insecurity and the frayed safety net, coupled with the expansion of carceral institutions, have made jail a safe and even desirable place for women like the ones interviewed so far in this book. In contrast to their precarious and sometimes violent lives on the streets, jail provided safety and stability, and thus became a version of home. But this version of home is shaded with the knowledge that safety is predicated on criminality: punishment is the institutional form that safety and security takes, hence the relationship between the violence of the streets and the care of carcerality.

This introductory chapter provides a snapshot of maternal care in jails and how it reveals two deeply entrenched crises in U.S. society: mass incarceration and health care inequalities. Jail and the broader system of incarceration, referred to as the “carceral system,” have become an integral part of U.S. society's social and medical safety net. The chapter illustrates a historical trajectory that is peculiar to the United States and that represents one of its greatest tragedies, defined by the whittling away of public services for the poor, coupled with an escalation in the number of jails and prisons serving as sites for the care of that same population. Statistics on the disproportionate number of incarcerated women and people of color are also discussed. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of jailcare conditions in San Francisco's jail, which serves as the case study for this volume.

The aim of this essay is to understand the underlying motivation behind Derrida’s initial objections to Foucault in his 1963 “Cogito and the History of Madness” and the way these objections anticipate so much of Derrida’s subsequent work. Beyond a disagreement over how to read a crucial moment in Descartes’ Meditations regarding the Cogito’s relation to madness, the “Cogito” essay provides a full-fledged theory of the relationship between history, language, and reason, on the one hand, and madness, silence, and death, on the other. Only through understanding this configuration is it possible to understand why Derrida would call Foucault’s The History of Madness not just a mistaken or misguided text but a “totalitarian” one. After outlining the reasons for Derrida’s strident critique of Foucault’s work on the basis of this underlying opposition between history and madness or reason and silence, Naas demonstrate how this same configuration is at work in early texts such as “Violence and Metaphysics,” right up through Derrida’s final seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign and, especially, The Death Penalty. Naas concludes by pointing out that while Derrida’s theoretical questions were always very different than Foucault’s, both thinkers ended up, curiously, on the same side in their critique of today’s carceral system and its forms of punishment. Only by taking into account both the similarities and the differences between Derrida and Foucault, in both their political positions and their philosophical texts, can we today really “do justice” to the history of their infamous debate.