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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.

This chapter provides an overview of the main themes of the book. It comprises the historical evolution of capitalism since the 19^th century and its different liberal, regulated and neoliberal phases. The chapter reviews the origin and evolution of neoliberal thinking and the impact of neoliberal policies on the social structure of capitalism (elites, middle class, labor, entrepreneurship) and the growing influence of big money on democracy. The book examines the causes and consequences of economic and financial crises and reviews the scope and limits of existing theories to understand them. It also examines the disruptive features of austerity policies and the emergence of global elites, migration and diasporas and the internationalization of social movements. The book finally elaborates on the concept and applicability of economic democracy as a way to counteract the inegalitarian and concentrating features of neoliberal capitalism and calls for systemic reforms for a prosperous and fair economy in a democratic society.

This chapter interrogates whether international human rights law has settled for preventing and mitigating deprivations without changing the terms under which that suffering is not only made possible but is reproduced, including by reinforcing the structural features that engender it. Human rights exist within an extreme capitalist global economy and their deployment needs to be considered against that backdrop, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it. Taking the inquiry one step further, this chapter considers the ways in which human rights work against a transformative or radical agenda, to the detriment of their own aims and objectives. It explores how international human rights law is not limited to redistribution, but has not gone so far as to effecting ‘predistribution’, that is, making international law just, ex ante, in a structural sense. Moreover, its demands for redistribution in order to realize human rights can also serve to drive the possibility of predistribution further away.

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 concluding chapter argues that undermining adolescence in cultural production has its greatest cultural impact not only on how Americans think about youth but also on how they have grown to accept the logic of rehabilitative citizenship as normal. Post-1970s youth culture naturalized endless self-management and transformation by mapping it onto “normal” teen bodies that everybody regards as already changing. This cultural transition from post-World War II externalizing sociologies of juvenile delinquency toward post-1968 internalizing psychological understandings of teen angst took root within a broader cultural turn from collective bargaining toward a neoliberal model of personal responsibility. In this sense, teens became convenient figures for (mis)managing the neoliberal capitalism.

This concluding chapter makes the general case for grounding a twenty-first-century critical Latina/o urbanism in something provisionally called the “cultural political economy” in an attempt to resolve lingering theoretical tensions between socioeconomic (structural) and culture-based (semiotic) approaches to the neoliberal present. This postdisciplinary interpretation reaffirms the centrality of capitalist formations in the study of the Latino urban question by embedding social and cultural categories in the lived spaces of the macroeconomic order. Using this approach, the chapter sketches a few strategic lines to confront changing class formations and deindustrialization in neoliberal capitalism's period of indefinitely prolonged crisis. It then explores the ways the current economic crisis implicates the scholarly projects of Latina/o and Chicana/o urban studies and how these interpretations of cultural political economy might reconfigure these projects to answer the continued attacks from the populist Right.

Chapter 1 charts the origins of freeganism in anarchist movements committed to “dropping out” of capitalism by living off its waste. It shows how the rise of movements with a political program of “prefiguring” a post-capitalist world has been facilitated by the increasing waste produced by neo-liberal capitalism itself.

This introductory chapter proposes hermeneutic communism as an alternative to the current capitalist and neoliberalist strategies that currently dominate the political landscape. Communism cannot be translated into a particular philosophical stance, nor can hermeneutics be translated into a political position, yet both draw our attention to a current lack of emergency, that is, the increasing homologizing of the political, economic, and social structures of power. As the political alternative to the impositions of neoliberal capitalism and the philosophy of the interpretative nature of truth, communism and hermeneutics have become alternative responses for the losers of history, that is, the weak. South American communism and philosophical hermeneutics in particular are shown to be effective examples of emergency, alternative, and change—and it is these models that will be discussed in succeeding chapters.

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.

The conclusion looks beyond freeganism towards more recent efforts to reduce food waste. By studying freegans, we see one part of where these new initiatives concerning waste originated, while also raising doubts about how much waste we can eliminate without a more profound change to our economic and political system.

This chapter focuses on the figure of the neoliberal dictator in Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman, arguing that the white captain and first mate are capitalist dictators who use a marooned ship in an abandoned Brooklyn pier as their technology of domination. The novel depicts the shipowners as modern-day explorers, slave owners, and filibusterers who employ a group of Central Americans but never pay them and keep them trapped on the ship in fear of deportation. The shipwreck functions as a metaphor for the crew’s situation as well as a narrative device, and the novel’s discourse is structured through breakage and stranded temporality. The chapter ends by considering the multiple significations of scraps and holes in the novel, demonstrating how the ruinous holes of the shipwreck are repurposed and repaired in the novel through the narrative form as the crew piece together scraps of their narrative testimonies for a migrant community that offers them safe harbor.

The final chapter draws together the theoretical and empirical insights advanced in this book. The author justifies the claim that the probation service, criminal justice system, and penal policy, have been subjected to systematic political incursions since 1997 that constitute modernising monstrosities and transformational traumas. In fact, criminal justice reflects and reproduces the organisational logic of neoliberal capitalism, supported by the new public management. These monstrosities and traumas have serious implications for probation staff and their practices, the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies, community supervision, the prison system that continues to expand, and the moral foundations of criminal justice. This theoretical and empirical excavation of criminal justice from 1997 to 2015 is a detailed case study of politico-economic, ideological and material reconfiguration under the harsh realities of the neoliberal order.

This chapter introduces readers to the maquiladoras of Mexico and some of the earliest labor uprisings in the factories. It also tells the story of neoliberal capitalism in Mexico as a political economy and shows that the history of labor organizing in the maquiladoras is rooted in the dawning of neoliberal capitalism and accompanies the restructuring of two economic sectors, one legal and the other extralegal, in the last half of the twentieth century. It considers how the economy on the Mexican side of the border is controlled by the maquiladoras and the drug cartels, whose interests range over a web of overlapping investments and institutions. The chapter first reviews the history of labor unrest that frames the inauguration of the maquilas and women workers’ little-known organized resistance before discussing how the histories of the maquiladoras and the drug trade converged and set the context for maquiladora workers’ lives and organizing efforts.

This chapter explores how visual documentation of civil crises in the Global South reinscribe a digital colonialism, focusing on the representations of gender and sexuality in videos about the Oaxaca teachers' strike of 2006 and the Myanmar protests of 2007. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Internet has become the preeminent medium from which international human rights campaigns have been publicized. Indeed, many human rights organizations now consider the Internet as the primary venue for exposing human rights abuses and mobilizing public opinion against them. Digital media generate among viewers the capacity for flexible attachments to more than one community. They facilitate a cosmopolitanism that asserts and abstracts “universalism” and a form of activism, which corresponds with key principles of neoliberal capitalism.

This introductory chapter argues that what has come to be called the Marxian tradition takes shape around a long series of disavowals of Karl Marx's critical-political project. It takes Marx and his closest readers to have had their critical-political project in all its radicality in mind: as an account of wild mediation with every bit of edge ground into it. Because it does not sit well with mechanisms of capture, of value-production, of universal translation, of disciplinarization; with mechanisms that link, however dialectically, the “world” with the “local;” this project has remained a peripheral, contested, mostly unrecognized aspect of the Marxian tradition.

Slovene literature since 1990 has been characterized as post-Yugoslav, postcommunist, postindependence, transitional, and postmodern literature; modernist and postmodernist literature; literary eclecticism, new emotionality, and transrealism. Out of these sociological, culturological, and literary labels, this chapter argues that literary eclecticism, new emotionality, and transrealism are most useful for understanding Slovene literature today. Literary eclecticism recognizes the heterogeneous nature of recent Slovene literature with regard to different trends and poetics, while new emotionality relates to the shaping of personal identity and a new type of feeling shown by the literary subject. Finally, this chapter suggests that transrealism best describes Slovene literature since 1990, stressing the continuing prevalence of a realistic technique, method, and style.