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Mass Incarceration, Executions, and Gun Violence in “the Land of the Free”

Mugambi Jouet

in Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute ... More

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute the most prisoners alongside abusive dictatorships like China, North Korea, and Iran. American justice is further characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, the peculiar “War on Drugs,” the dehumanizing treatment of juveniles, and routine use of harmful solitary confinement. Modern America has thus become a systematic human rights violator in criminal law and punishment. It was not always so, as foreigners once saw American justice as enlightened. Harsh justice has not made America particularly safe. It has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West due to extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by die-hard partisans of the Second Amendment and lobbying by the NRA. Criminal justice reform gained more attention after shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and beyond led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, historical root causes behind this dimension of American exceptionalism have been widely overlooked, including systemic racism, populism, anti-intellectualism, market fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism.Less

Mass Incarceration

Peter Temin

in The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy

The United States has a dual justice system; the FTE sector pays fines, and the low-wage sector goes to jail. One out of three black males spends time in prison in a new Jim Crow system. Poor white ... More

The United States has a dual justice system; the FTE sector pays fines, and the low-wage sector goes to jail. One out of three black males spends time in prison in a new Jim Crow system. Poor white men are far less likely to be imprisoned, but they still are a majority of prisoners. This dual system is administered by all levels of government, from the Supreme Court to local police and prosecutors. Mass imprisonment destroys social capital in black, brown and white communities alike. Mass imprisonment costs the government large amounts of money that could be used elsewhere. Current policies are complicated by the growth of private prisons and restricted to helping prisoners re-join society.Less

Introduction: Overpoliced and Underprotected in America

Simon Balto

in Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

The introduction lays out the book’s key parameters. It offers a framework by which Black communities are shown to be simultaneously prone to being “overpoliced” (subject to undue surveillance, ... More

The introduction lays out the book’s key parameters. It offers a framework by which Black communities are shown to be simultaneously prone to being “overpoliced” (subject to undue surveillance, harassment, and violence from police) and “underprotected” (lacking the safety from personal and property crime that the police are nominally supposed to provide). It critically argues that studies that date America’s policing crisis to the War on Crime or War on Drugs are insufficient and that better attention must be paid to local histories of policing. In so doing, it also argues that if scholars and citizens are to understand why mass incarceration has been such a deeply racialized project from its inception, they must better understand how police departments themselves constructed regimes that punished blackness over the course of the twentieth century.Less

Blood In, Blood Out: The Emergence of California Prison Gangs in the 1960s

Heather Mccarty

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

The chapter offers a study of changing social relations within the prison system during the transition from 60s-era activism to gang formation in the beginning decades of mass incarceration. Between ... More

The chapter offers a study of changing social relations within the prison system during the transition from 60s-era activism to gang formation in the beginning decades of mass incarceration. Between the decades of the 1960s and 1990s, California experienced a societal shift within prisons from interracial and Black Power campaigns for prisoners’ rights to the racialized balkanization and violence stemming from the rise of prison gangs and the worsening of prison conditions due to overcrowding. Within prisons, mass incarceration’s effect reshaped prison societies because the rapid growth of prison populations accelerated the violence that accompanies human caging. Internal dynamics of societal change reflected California’s changing racial demography, as Cold War defense industries and giant agribusinesses attracted African American laborers from the U.S. South and Mexican migrant laborers from across the border. As mass incarceration swept up more people of color in California’s overcrowded prison system, the prior social networks centered on politicization and protest were disrupted and replaced by rival prison gangs who met the needs of a sub rosa internal prison economy with racial violence and competition.Less

The Heart of the Other?

Sarah Tyson

in Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism

In the United States, life without parole (LWOP) has become the leading alternative to the death penalty. However, we have compelling reason to be suspicious what passes for the abolition of the ... More

In the United States, life without parole (LWOP) has become the leading alternative to the death penalty. However, we have compelling reason to be suspicious what passes for the abolition of the death penalty. If, with the death penalty, we have the calculation of the precise moment a life will end, with LWOP we have a different sort of calculation: however long the life of the accused, that will be length of punishment appropriate to this crime. The only possible life after a sentence of LWOP would be the afterlife of civil and social death. This chapter moves between Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty, his interview “Death Penalties,” and the written reflections of people serving LWOP sentences, particularly Spoon Jackson, and people condemned to die to interrogate the leading “alternative” to the death penalty and to continue the work of thinking deconstructive abolitionism.Less

Introduction

Carl Lindskoog

in Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

This chapter introduces the problem of immigration detention and reviews its history, noting that the policy of detention was discontinued in 1954 but then began to re-emerge in the 1970s and was ... More

This chapter introduces the problem of immigration detention and reviews its history, noting that the policy of detention was discontinued in 1954 but then began to re-emerge in the 1970s and was formally reinstituted in 1981. What led to the return of immigration detention in the United States and how did the detention system become the behemoth that it is today, the introduction asks. It then lays out the main arguments and framework of the book, emphasizing the central role that Haitians have played in the history of immigration detention and making connections to the broader history and scholarly literature of immigrant and refugee resistance, race and citizenship, and mass incarceration. The introduction concludes with a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.Less

An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name: From the Death Penalty to the Prison Industrial Complex

Lisa Guenther

in Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional." Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, but he ... More

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional." Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, but he does not develop a critical analysis of race or racism. Drawing on the work of incarcerated intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal, critical race theorists Cheryl Harris and Angela Davis, and contemporary prison abolitionists, this chapter argues that racism is an issue, not only in the particular context of the United States, but also for the logic of the death penalty that Derrida proposes to deconstruct. Derrida’s own account of indemnity, interest, and condemnation is incomplete without a supplementary analysis of black civil death and the construction of whiteness as property. In conclusion, this chapter argues that an abolitionism worthy of the name would have to move beyond the death penalty, towards the (im)possible project of prison abolition and the abolition of white supremacy.Less

Introduction

Robert T. Chase

in We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America

The introduction offers a historical intervention to a number of critical narratives surrounding the advent of the carceral state, prisoners’ rights and radicalism, and mass incarceration.

Stuck between Justice and the Carceral State: Ruiz v. Estelle and the Politics of Mass Incarceration

Robert T. Chase

in We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America

Chapter 9 analyzes the Ruiz trial itself as drawing from prisoner-initiated narrative, but it situates even the most far-reaching courtroom victory within a political arrangement of carceral massive ... More

Chapter 9 analyzes the Ruiz trial itself as drawing from prisoner-initiated narrative, but it situates even the most far-reaching courtroom victory within a political arrangement of carceral massive resistance, where southern Democrats resisted court orders and new southern Republicans consciously reinterpreted the court’s intent as part of mass incarceration’s broader political project. In the immediate aftermath of the 1980 Ruiz decision, the prisoners’ courtroom victory was stuck over a political struggle between the state and the federal system. Prisoners were at the mercy of a variation on “massive resistance,” where the TDC resisted federal court intervention at every turn. Making matters worse, as mass incarceration was now fully taking hold, the prisons were becoming more and more overcrowded and prone to violence. Trapped between the court and the state, prisoners had fewer external political allies as the 1980s dawned.Less

Epilogue: Attending to the Living

Simon Balto

in Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

The book’s epilogue discusses how the history told in the book’s core chapters can inform our understanding of the present. It explains how the modern, massive racial disparities evident in the ... More

The book’s epilogue discusses how the history told in the book’s core chapters can inform our understanding of the present. It explains how the modern, massive racial disparities evident in the system of mass incarceration and the systems of policing that drive it built directly from those disparities and systems that local police department’s like Chicago’s implemented decades and generations ago. It explains how exploding police budgets like Chicago’s do and have done little to keep people safe and have, indeed, done significant harm to certain communities. And it shows how modern movements to demand reparations for police torture, to challenge police surveillance, harassment, violence, and racism, and make, as the demand goes, Black Lives Matter, are part of a long tradition of Black resistance to abusive and anti-Black police power.Less

Introduction

Adam Malka

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

The opening chapter introduces the broader story that the next seven chapters will tell, and makes clear that this is a study of policing which culminates in the mass black incarceration of late ... More

The opening chapter introduces the broader story that the next seven chapters will tell, and makes clear that this is a study of policing which culminates in the mass black incarceration of late 1860s Baltimore. The book has two primary arguments: first, that Baltimore’s police institutions were from the onset shaped by a liberal order that assumed criminality as the essence of black freedom; and second, that the criminalization of black freedom in turn encouraged white police power. The introduction also defines three concepts central to these arguments – police, property, and manhood – while situating the book in existing historiography, especially that of 19th century criminal justice and American liberalism. Finally, it suggests that this history of the nineteenth-century is an antecedent to today’s stories of racialized police brutality and mass black incarceration.Less

Reinforcing the Detention System, 1994–2000

Carl Lindskoog

in Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

Haitian detention at Guantanamo Bay continued to focus attention on U.S. detention practice in 1995 as the government’s detention of hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian youth generated enormous ... More

Haitian detention at Guantanamo Bay continued to focus attention on U.S. detention practice in 1995 as the government’s detention of hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian youth generated enormous controversy and loud calls for their freedom. Chapter 6 documents this struggle over child detention before it moves to an examination of two key pieces of legislation in 1996 that had a decisive impact on the history of immigration detention in the U.S. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) were measures that consummated the marriage of immigration restriction and mass incarceration, devastated immigrant communities, and led to an enormous expansion of the immigration detention system. Finally, chapter 6 illustrates what the immigration detention system had become by the late 1990s and how, despite the extraordinary power and cruelty of the system, detainees continued to exercise resistance.Less

Uses of the Profane

Sharon Luk

in Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity

Chapter Six explores letter correspondence across prison walls as under-recognized mode of communal preservation in the face of publicly administered torture and genocide. This chapter shifts our ... More

Chapter Six explores letter correspondence across prison walls as under-recognized mode of communal preservation in the face of publicly administered torture and genocide. This chapter shifts our perspectives on social movements by paying critical attention to ruptures in racial epistemology realized by twentieth-century liberation struggles and to interventions of the epistolary form in this context. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the life of paper constitutes a contradictory kind of creative shelter—a sacred place to foster social being, provide for its study, and generate a mode of its inhabitation. Reading archival materials for traces of the intellectual and affective labor they both congeal and augment, this chapter views letter correspondence as reproductive activity that instantiates life-sustaining claims of belonging to one another and enunciates the experience and significance of being human: nurturing forms of connection and conditions of existence that generatively stress the limits of what is currently knowable.Less

Conclusion

Sarah Haley

in No Mercy Here: "Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity"

The conclusion engages questions of historical memory and assesses the implications of late nineteenth and early twentieth century punishment for subsequent regimes of prison expansion and mass ... More

The conclusion engages questions of historical memory and assesses the implications of late nineteenth and early twentieth century punishment for subsequent regimes of prison expansion and mass incarceration. This section argues for the necessity of gendered frameworks of analysis for understanding the development of carceral institutions and the character of carceral violence.Less

War on the Prison Insurgent: Prison Gangs, the Militarized Prison, and the Persistence of Carceral Violence

Robert T. Chase

in We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America

Chapter 10 reinterprets how the prison responded to the Ruiz victory with a new regime of militarization dedicated to waging war on what it considered to be the new class of prisoner insurgent. In ... More

Chapter 10 reinterprets how the prison responded to the Ruiz victory with a new regime of militarization dedicated to waging war on what it considered to be the new class of prisoner insurgent. In the militarized climate, the new development of prison gangs erupted from the challenges of prison-made civil rights and racial struggle to initiate a new era of political assassination within the prison that constituted a carceral version of 1980s outsourcing and violence. The formation of the neo-Nazi and KKK white gangs attempted prison assassinations for radical white supremacist ends as an effort to stem the victories of civil rights in both the courtroom and the prison courtyard. This chapter contends that the new prison violence was due to mass incarceration, overcrowding, an attempt to reassert white privilege through gang outsourcing, and the militarized prison where gangs functioned as prison insurgents and correctional officers became counterinsurgent forces. As such, the final chapter reconsiders the sociological “paradox of reform” and “authority as good social order” argument by demonstrating that the shift from prison mobilization for prisoners’ rights to racialized balkanization must be understood within the onset of mass incarceration.Less

Shades of Mississippi

Garrett Felber

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

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam deployed a series of tactics to fight for rights for incarcerated people. They used litigation, as well as They used direct action tactics such as ... More

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam deployed a series of tactics to fight for rights for incarcerated people. They used litigation, as well as They used direct action tactics such as sit-ins, hunger strikes, and occupations of solitary confinement, which anticipated the “Jail, No Bail” efforts of southern civil rights activists. These actions sought not only to neutralize the power of the cell but also to draw public attention to these groups struggles by eliciting violent reprisals from the state. These two simultaneous streams of activism—appeals to the Constitution and direct-action protest—operated as effective parallel strategies to win protections for prisoners under the law while challenging white supremacy and incarceration more broadly. The state responded with tactics such as prison transfers, confiscation of religious literature, solitary confinement, and loss of good time credit.Less