A Juneteenth Collection: Examining the Structure and Consequences of Carceral State

Farah Godrej

A growing public consensus in the legal, policy and scholarly arenas in the United States provides incontestable evidence that the system known as mass incarceration is patently unequal and unjust. The specific features of this system need little rehearsing: the exponential rise in the penal population; the explosion in incarceration of minorities, immigrants, and the poor; the criminalization of nonviolent drug-related offenses; the maintenance of a racialized regime in which the structural rules guarantee discriminatory results; and the legalized discrimination and disenfranchisement that typically follow incarceration, leading to “pernicious gradations of citizenship” (Gottschalk 2016, 260). Whether in absolute numbers or in percentage terms, the United States holds more people in prisons and jails than any other country, by a long margin. In addition to the staggering numbers of persons incarcerated, the majority of those con­fined and controlled in such institutions hail from low-income communities and communities of color, which often overlap. Black, brown and/or poor citizens are incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than their rel­atively affluent or white counterparts, which automatically and systematically diminishes their life-chances. One scholar has called this phenomenon a “serious normative blight” on American democracy (Isaac 2015, 610; See also Murakawa 2014; Gottschalk 2016; Lerman and Weaver 2014). We mark the occasion of Juneteenth with the release of this special virtual issue exploring the contours of what is now routinely referred to as the “carceral state.”

Writing in 2010, Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver rightly noted that “political scientists ha[d] been slow to evaluate the supervisory provision of government compared to its redistributive role” (Lerman and Weaver 2010, 832). Since then, scholarship in the discipline addressing the many dimensions of the carceral state has grown.  Here, we highlight recent scholarship from APSA journals—all published within the past decade or so—that broadly discusses the structure and consequences of the carceral state. The articles reproduced here take a critical perspective on unjust outcomes, asking and answering questions such as:  How does the carceral state operate? What inequities and disparities does it give rise to? How are citizens’ lives shaped by it, and how do they respond to it?  How might its myriad consequences be empirically analyzed and normatively evaluated? This work falls into three broad categories: scholarship on political engagement, broadly-conceived; scholarship on political disenfranchisement; and scholarship on the carceral state’s reliance on prisons, both public and private.

Political Participation, Knowledge and Action

We begin with three articles that address the depoliticizing effect of carceral contact, highlighting the relationship of incarceration to political knowledge, behavior, action, or mobilization.  Lerman and Weaver’s influential 2010 article argues that contact with “criminal justice”[i] is an important source of political socialization, undermining democratic participation, imparting lessons, and inspiring negative orientations toward government.  This scholarship, later extended in an award-winning book (Lerman and Weaver, 2014), was pivotal in establishing terms such as “carceral contact” and “custodial citizen” as part of the political science lexicon.  Lerman and Weaver’s article sets the bar for much of what follows, persuasively arguing that the “carceral state has emerged as an important force in shaping American mass politics” (818).

The authors conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how involvement with the criminal justice system shapes the citizenship and political voice of many Americans. They assess how encounters with the system influence political attitudes and behaviors, using two unusual data sources that allow for a more comprehensive analysis than was previously possible. Their multivariate models of regression analysis suggest a strong and consistent causal relationship between punitive interventions and depressed political engagement.  They challenge existing understandings of political involvement to go well beyond the traditional focus on individual interests and resources, by acknowledging the crucial role that “carceral contact” plays in shaping civic capacities and participation, teaching some citizens to internalize messages of stigma, disempowerment, inequity, and subordination.

Owens and Walker (2018) and Cohen and Luttig (2019) further develop this analysis, problematizing and broadening traditional definitions of political participation and political knowledge. Owens and Walker take up Lerman and Weaver’s challenge for political scientists to “explore if punitive contact has a community level dimension” (Lerman and Weaver 2010, 831), offering both individual and community-level analysis for the metropolitan Chicago area.  Employing statistical analysis based on a combination of survey data and criminal conviction records, the authors demonstrate what they call a “paradox of participation:” personal connections to civil society organizations appear to have substantive effects on non-voting political engagement, such as protesting, signing petitions, contacting officials, attending local political meetings or involvement in campaigns.  Simultaneously, however, criminal justice contact continues to depress voting, even in communities where connections to such organizations are strong, and when voting rights have been restored for formerly-incarcerated citizens. Owens and Walker’s findings challenge the notion that communities characterized by extensive contact with the carceral state are weak or politically disengaged, pointing to a more expansive notion of political participation that includes a variety of non-voting behaviors.  This in turn requires political scientists to “rethink how we understand and measure the political lives of marginalized people and their communities” (1005), moving beyond simply participation in electoral dynamics.

Cohen and Luttig (2019) continue in this direction, troubling conventional assumptions that those from marginalized communities lack political awareness or expertise. They argue that traditional measures of political knowledge—derived from liberal-democratic categories of “rules, people and institutions”—are limited, because they neglect knowledge generated by experiences with carceral state violence. This is a specialized, yet under-recognized,form of knowledge particularly salient and accessible to those from Black or brown communities.  Once this knowledge is accounted for, previously-established findings that white persons have more political knowledge than Black persons or Latinx individuals are reversed.  Cohen and Luttig draw on a nationally-representative survey of youth, including measures of traditional political knowledge (electoral politics, political parties, office holders), as well as measures of carceral violence (knowledge of victims of police or state violence).  The results demonstrate statistically significant differences in expertise among different communities: whites answer more traditional knowledge questions correctly, while African Americans do best answering questions about victims of state carceral violence. Conversely, white youth with high levels of traditional political knowledge are not especially effective at answering questions about state carceral violence and repression.  Moreover, increased knowledge about carceral violence is associated with depressed levels of voting and non-voting political participation among Black youth. Cohen and Luttig’s findings suggest that prior measures of political knowledge will lead to erroneous assessments about the knowledge base of different communities.  Their findings challenge political scientists to “broaden the conception of what politics is, and for whom” (815). What “counts” as valid political knowledge expands to include the experiences and beliefs of those from communities that disproportionately encounter the threatening, repressive and violent aspects of the state.

 

Incarceration and Political Disenfranchisement

The second group of articles addresses the relationship between incarceration and voting, a critically important area of inquiry.  Legalized discrimination and disenfranchisement are among the most obvious and politically salient consequences of incarceration—many states either permanently or temporarily disenfranchise those who are currently serving time (or have previously served time) on a felony conviction.  Such rules fun­damentally alter the shape of American democracy by creating a permanent underclass left to “civil death” (Gottschalk 2016, 2). The articles in this section explore both the legalized and formalized as well as the more voluntary and informal mechanisms through which such exclusion and disenfranchisement operate. Katzenstein et al. (2010) represents earlier work on this issue, approaching the question of felony disenfranchisement through the lens of political theory.  More recent work such as White (2019) and Morris (2021) explores empirical dimensions of the question, using quantitative methods to support claims that carceral contact negatively impacts voter behavior in a systematic and generalizable way.  These articles provide significant empirical evidence of the starkly racialized nature of these harms, which disproportionately impact minority communities.

Katzenstein et al. (2010) employ an empirically-inflected theoretical account that engages legal analysis, political discourse analysis, and storytelling to argue that an exclusionary politics is embedded within American liberalism itself, rather than constituting an anomaly or perversion of its supposedly universal ideas.  Felony disenfranchisement in fact relies upon philosophical pillars of liberal thought such as choice, contract, and agency, all of which entail exclusionary interpretations. While the founding ideas of American liberalism may appear to repudiate racialized exclusion, Katzenstein et al (2010) demonstrate that they paradoxically also provide support for laws and policies that result in continued exclusion and disenfranchisement.

White (2019) explores the involuntary and informal mechanisms of civic exclusion through a statistical analysis showing that receiving even a short jail sentence decreases individuals’ likelihood of voting in the next election by several percentage points. Crucially, Black defendants’ turnout appears substantially decreased after serving time, while white defendants show no equivalent evidence of demobilization. White’s contributions are remarkable for several reasons.  First, in contrast to much research which focuses on prison sentences resulting from felonies, this article treats misdemeanor cases resulting in short jail stints. Because hundreds of thousands of short jail terms are issued each year for common misdemeanors, studying these events produces a more comprehensive and fine-grained representation of the impact of carceral contact on voter turnout, underscoring how significant even “minor” criminal justice interactions can be. Second, while previous scholarship has not successfully proved a causal relationship between incarceration and voter turnout, this article takes important steps in establishing this causal relationship through reliance on random courtroom assignment (which serves as a source of exogenous variation) and administrative records (which corrects for misreporting).  Finally, while much research addresses the impact of legal disenfranchisement, White’s focus on misdemeanors provides a measure of “voluntary” withdrawal from politics, in contrast to legally-mandated voting restrictions.

One important mechanism for counteracting such demobilization is changing laws that bar voting by formerly-incarcerated individuals. The 2018 midterm elections introduced such change in Florida, via a ballot initiative promising re-enfranchisement.  However, Morris (2021) demonstrates that legislative change alone cannot address these disparities.  Using prison release records, Morris studies voting history in communities and neighborhoods with a concentration of formerly-incarcerated individuals, finding no evidence that voter turnout in these communities increased following the ballot initiative.  Morris’ findings suggest that ending felony disenfranchisement is a necessary but not sufficient condition for addressing gaps in voter turnout, which have as much to do with histories of policing and incarceration as with laws on the books.  Consistent with other scholarship highlighted here, Morris suggests that these longer histories are a likely mechanism of political withdrawal in these communities, requiring “greater investment and engagement” (805) to address political demobilization.

Reliance on Prisons, Public and Private

The third set of articles broadly explores the carceral state’s reliance on prisons, in both their public and privatized forms. Baumgartner et al. (2021) provide an important historical and chronological overview demonstrating what has brought us to this point. Meanwhile, Swanson and Katzenstein (2021) and Gunderson (2020) illuminate the public-private partnerships that now characterize the carceral state, which has increasingly outsourced the work of incarceration to private prisons.  While most scholars agree that mass incarceration is still mainly driven by publicly-owned and -operated facilities, a range of private industries continue to profit from it.  While private prisons are scarcely the root of the problem, understanding the role that private sector forces play in bolstering the massive public face of incarceration is crucial. 

Baumgartner et al (2021) walk us through a broad sweep of policies that have radically changed the demographics of prison populations.  The use of extremely long sentences over the past several decades, including and especially life without parole, has caused the prison population to grow not only exponentially larger but also correspondingly older, leading to  “a new class of geriatric prisoners posing little threat to public safety as they age into their seventies and beyond” (1233).The authors use a multi-method approach that includes historical review, a review of policy frames (including the stoking of “tough-on-crime” rhetoric by scholars, media and policy experts), mathematical simulation, a review of prison statistics, and personal stories from inside prisons. Taken together, these elements paint a broad and comprehensive picture of the current state of affairs.  Notably, one of the article’s co-authors is currently incarcerated.  The personal stories and vignettes shared here give us the briefest glimpse inside the lives and worlds of incarcerated persons. They offer a mode of scholarship that identifies and repudiates the false, racially dehumanizing assumptions undergirding support for draconian sentencing policies.

Gunderson (2020) explores the foundational logic of prison privatization, arguing that it has relatively little to do with ideological or fiscal concerns about small government.  Rather, privatization of prisons is best predicted by the legal pressure on state corrections systems, an unintended consequence of the administrative and legal costs associated with litigation by incarcerated persons.  Gunderson constructs a unique dataset through painstaking use of SEC files, along with analysis of close to a million lawsuits filed by incarcerated persons over the past three decades, substantially improving on available information and offering more detail. Existing theories suggest that privatization arises from partisan ideological interests, fiscal stress, or lower rates of unionization by correctional officers.  Gunderson’s statistical analysis provides support for a compelling alternative explanation: under pressure from litigation by incarcerated persons challenging the conditions of confinement, states seek to avoid legal and political accountability for these deplorable conditions by transferring responsibility to private companies.  Gunderson warns that such findings may encourage us to re-examine the efficacy of using courts for social change, highlighting the unintended and undesirable consequences of ostensibly progressive efforts to resist the carceral state.

Finally, Swanson and Katzenstein (2021) draw attention to a central aspect of private sector investment in incarceration: equity firms that partner with carceral institutions in extracting resources from families of the incarcerated, by providing a range of services behind bars such as telecommunications, commissary sales, and healthcare. Using case studies, Swanson and Katzenstein explore the legal, bureaucratic and social mechanisms through which such predatory resource extraction is normalized. They show first that the law’s “sometimes-façade of fairness” (1250) allows carceral facilities to use funds earmarked for the welfare of incarcerated persons to instead enrich the institution and its staff.  This occurs through profit-sharing with private vendors, and verbal gymnastics that distort the meaning of “inmate welfare.”  Second, they demonstrate that bureaucratization and routinization of rules without public scrutiny ensures that the financial burden of incarceration rests on those innocent of criminal activity: family members and loved ones. Third, they demonstrate that while men are the primary targets of policing and incarceration, overwhelmingly women—and disproportionately women of color—bear the burden of this financial extraction, attempting to make their loved ones’ prison terms more bearable through expenditures on basic necessities, phone calls, educational materials and technologies, and so on. Taken together, these cases illuminate the extractive monetization of “care-based experiences” by the “exploitative, oligopolistic, prison-profit complex” (1252, 1253). 

Conclusions

The articles reprinted here are by no means exhaustive in addressing the full scope of interesting questions or innovative approaches to answering them.  Crucially, this list does not include special issues or symposia that have appeared in APSA journals within the last decade on topics such as the American politics of policing and incarceration, teaching politics in jails and prisons, and the death penalty. We also wish to acknowledge other important work which we have not been able to include due to space constraints: scholarship on “crimmigration” (the intersection of immigrant detention and the carceral state—see Stevens 2015; Wong et al 2020; Leach 2021); prison governance (how gangs and other alternative structures maintain order inside prisons—see Skarbek 2011; Lessing 2020); explorations of policing and law enforcement more broadly (as well as protest movements relating to such matters); along with global and/or comparative studies of law enforcement.  All these areas of inquiry are flourishing in their own right, and deserve to be spotlighted as such.

This special issue, while far from comprehensive, serves as provocation for political scientists to both deepen and broaden their study of the many facets of the carceral state.  Among other things, we hope to inspire further research on the inner workings of prisons and/or the experiences of incarcerated citizens, centering their views, voices, lives, and communities.  Baumgartner et al. (2021)  is notably exemplary in including an incarcerated scholar among the paper’s many co-authors, allowing academic research to be shaped by an insider to the prison system, while bringing the reader, albeit briefly, into the life-histories and lived experiences of incarcerated persons.  Swanson and Katzenstein (2021) also give us a fleeting glimpse inside the carceral economy, largely from the perspective of family members attempting to ameliorate the pains of imprisonment on behalf of loved ones.

Certainly, the structure of the carceral system presents significant barriers to forms of qualitative, immersive, or interpretive inquiry allowing for direct engagement with those who are forced to live in prisons. American prisons are characterized by a remarkable lack of transparency and oversight, and access for researchers is a rarity.  Still, scholars in disciplines such as critical criminology, critical legal studies, sociology, and anthropology have produced scholarship that amplifies to whatever extent possible the voices and experiences of the incarcerated.  

More broadly, political scientists would do well to interrogate the limits of scholarship centered solely around questions answered through the discipline’s predominantly quantitative tools and methods.  They may wish to consider how forms of interdisciplinary, qualitative, and participatory inquiry such as interviewing or fieldwork might enrich our understanding of these crucial matters by engaging the actual human beings whose lives and experiences we purport to theorize (see Lerman and Weaver 2014).  We hope this special issue encourages collective reflection on how our scholarship might be disciplined by thinking together with them, rather than treating them merely as distanced objects of study and analysis.

- Farah Godrej, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Riverside

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[i] I place this term in quotation marks in order to suggest it is something of a misnomer, serving to label those incarcerated as “criminals,” and perpetuating the fiction that this constitutes “justice.”

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References

Gottschalk, M. (2016). Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton University Press.

Isaac, J. C. (2015). The American politics of policing and incarceration. Perspectives on Politics, 13(3), 609-616.

Leach, B. R. (2022). At the Borders of the Body Politic: Fetal Citizens, Pregnant Migrants, and Reproductive Injustices in Immigration Detention. American Political Science Review, 116(1), 116-130.

Lerman, A., & V. Weaver (2014). Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control. University of Chicago Press.

Lessing, B. (2021). Conceptualizing criminal governance. Perspectives on Politics, 19(3), 854-873.

Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right: How liberals built prison America. Oxford University Press.

Skarbek, D. (2011). Governance and prison gangs. American Political Science Review, 105(4), 702-716.
    
Stevens, J. (2015). Forensic Intelligence and the Deportation Research Clinic: Toward a New Paradigm. Perspectives on Politics, 13(3), 722-738.

Wong, T. K., Kang, S. D., Valdivia, C., Espino, J., Gonzalez, M., & Peralta, E. (2021). How interior immigration enforcement affects trust in law enforcement. Perspectives on Politics, 19(2), 357-370.