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Progressive Punishment begins with an early and disorienting moment from Schept’s field research, when he first encountered a local official criticizing the prison industrial complex and calling for significant local carceral expansion. The chapter uses this seeming contradiction as a point of departure for discussing several foundational elements of the book. First, the chapter discusses the ways that carceral expansion in Bloomington fits into and complicates the national picture of mass incarceration. Building on that discussion, the chapter then introduces a central element of the book’s theoretical framework: carceral habitus, or the ways that neoliberal policies and logics structured community dispositions, including those that appeared to reject incarceration. The book uses carceral habitus as a way to reconcile the power of the neoliberal carceral state to structure its own reproduction with the ways communities filter dominant logics of imprisonment to fit particular political and cultural contexts. Finally, the Introduction discusses the importance of ethnography attuned to the structural and historical production of local events and dispositions.

Following the short introduction to Part 1, Chapter 1 begins the story of local carceral expansion with an examination of the 85-acre site designated to house the justice campus. The site was the former home of the largest color television production plant in the world, owned for decades by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). RCA was the community’s largest employer at one point but began shifting production to Mexico in the 1960s and ultimately closed the Bloomington plant in 1998. Almost immediately, the county began considering the site for a justice campus. The chapter traces the community’s loss of that plant and subsequent attempt to build the campus as part of broader currents of the neoliberal state, including the geographical movement of capital across scale and space and the rise of the carceral state. As part of this examination, the chapter looks at the municipal growth strategies that created a zone of tax abatements and financing within which the justice campus would have sat. The chapter relies on research from cultural and Marxist geography to discuss the importance of material and symbolic reading of the landscape to consider its telling of history and the way it can be mobilized as an ideological template on which to project a particular vision for the future. The book begins with this history and analysis in order to situate and disturb the "common sense" of carceral expansion.

This chapter explores what motivates and sustains anti-austerity activism within the context of continued austerity. It affirms the centrality of the affective and normative dimensions of political engagement by demonstrating that anti-austerity activism is motivated and sustained by three core elements; emotion, morality and relationship. Individuals are motivated by an emotional response to perceived injustice combined with normative ideals about how society should be and how we should act in relation to others. They utilise notions of humanity and empathy to combat the dehumanising effect of neoliberal capitalism and its focus on individualism and competition. Participants translate such abstract, universal concepts into concrete, particular actions through a focus on everyday activism and individual choices. Rather than an outright rejection of individualism, participants seek to redefine it in ways that move away from the dominant neoliberal understanding and towards reconciling the individual with the wider collective and common good. Here, activism is conceptualised as a moral duty. Participants therefore suggest that everyone and anyone can and should do activism, with small acts making a difference. This chapter begins to unpick the ways in which activists resist, subvert and sometimes unwittingly reinforce neoliberal capitalism, as well as questioning the problematic distinction drawn between ‘non-activist’ and ‘activist’.

This chapter explores what happens when neoliberal capitalism becomes a hegemonic system of thought and practice, with its unswerving belief in the virtues of markets and the private, of competition and inequality, and of calculation and individual choice. But it is not a general account of this phenomenon, rather a study of how it plays out in one small part of the neoliberal world – early childhood education and care (ECEC) in England. Nor is this chapter solely critique. It is also about the possibility of thinking differently and an exercise in putting the neoliberal approach to ECEC where it belongs: in perspective, as but one of a number of alternatives, a possibility rather than a necessity. In particular, the chapter explores just one of these alternatives, an ECEC inscribed with democracy as a fundamental value. It makes the case for researching critical case studies of innovative provision and practice to understand better the conditions and processes that might stimulate and sustain alternatives. The chapter concludes it is still possible to envisage a demarketised system based on Children's Centres, each serving all families in a local catchment area and each generating a wide range of projects in response to local encounters.