Joshua Page

Eliminating the enemy The import of denying prisoners access to higher education in Clinton's America

This article investigates why Congress passed legislation in 1994 that denied Pell Grants - the primary source of funding for postsecondary correctional education (PSCE) - to prisoners, despite evidence that PSCE helped reduce recidivism and bolster carceral order. Analysis of the congressional debates and relevant media texts shows that lawmakers, in concert with the popular media, produced a legislative penal drama in which they spoke to key audiences’ - particularly white, working and middle class voters’ - mistrust of penal practitioners and criminal justice experts, prejudices toward (black and brown) street criminals, fears about crime and anxiety over the economy, the transformed labor market and access to higher education. The article contends that the timing and texture of the Pell Grant affair were symbiotically related to a confluence of developments in the political and related fields during the 1980s and early 1990s. It extends Emile Durkheim’s communicative theory of penality to encompass notions of class power and political interest. By producing such legislative penal dramas, lawmakers simultaneously tap into and legitimize collective sentiments of particular audiences, highlight symbolic boundaries between in-and out-groups and shore up political electoral support for punitive policies.

The long struggle: An agonistic perspective on penal development

Bringing together insights from macro-level theory about “mass imprisonment” and micro-level case studies of contemporary punishment, this article presents a mid-level agonistic perspective on penal change in the USA. Using the case of the “rise and fall” of the rehabilitative ideal in California, we spotlight struggle as a central mechanism that intensifies the variegated (and sometimes contradictory) nature of punishment and drives penal development. The agonistic perspective posits that penal development is fueled by ongoing, low-level struggle among actors with varying amounts and types of resources. Like plate tectonics, friction among those with a stake in punishment periodically escalates to seismic events and long-term shifts in penal orientations, pushing one perspective or another to the fore over time. These conflicts do not occur in a vacuum; rather, large-scale trends in the economy, politics, social sentiments, inter-group relations, demographics, and crime affect—but do not fully determine—struggles over punishment and penal outcomes.

The state of the job: An embedded work role perspective on prison officer attitudes

Although the United States has grown increasingly punitive in the last three decades, there is considerable variation across states. On a variety of indicators, California is much more punitive than Minnesota. Using data from two original, large-N surveys, we analyze whether these differences in the orientations of state correctional systems are reflected in the attitudes of workers who are tasked with the day-to-day oversight of state prisons. With respect to the purpose of imprisonment, we find that California prison officers are significantly more punitive than those in Minnesota. In contrast, officers in each state express similar levels of support for basic rehabilitation programs. Based on these findings, we propose an embedded work role perspective, which posits that officers across states reflect a shared position within the prison organization, but that the prisons in which they work are embedded in broader penal and political environments that predict differences in attitudes across state contexts. This conceptualization of prison officer orientations has implications for policymakers, prison administrators, and scholars concerned with the politics and practice of work and incarceration.

Desperation and Service in the Bail Industry

In a cutthroat business, bail bond agents leverage their clients’ unmet needs for information and support to get a leg up on the competition. Service is entwined with aggressive, even predatory profit-seeking.

Creative disruption: Edward Bunker, carceral habitus, and the criminological value of fiction:

Drawing on Edward Bunker’s semi-autobiographical novels, this article argues for the criminological value of fiction. Drawing inspiration and extending core insights from “narrative criminology” and “popular criminology”, we posit that novels and other creative sources can disrupt scholarly commonsense, pushing scholars to reconsider and extend theoretical perspectives. Specifically, Bunker’s fiction encourages re-thinking of overly cognitive (i.e. “mentalist”) understandings of “prisonization”, which do not sufficiently capture the embodiment of carceral culture and routines. Through Bunker’s work, we flesh out the concept of “carceral habitus”—itself deeply gendered and raced—to extend theories of prisonization, deepening understandings of how incarceration transforms people. We affirm that literary devices provide scholars innovative paths to communicating full-bodied accounts that breathe new vitality into criminological theory.

Context is Everything

Sociologist and food critic Joshua Page talks with New York Times food critic about the sociological work of reviewing restaurants.

Bureaucrats on the Cell Block: Prison Officers’ Perceptions of Work Environment and Attitudes toward Prisoners

US prisons represent an important site for the delivery of social services—even in light of the punitive policy shifts of recent decades—because a significant segment of the nation’s low-income, minority population is incarcerated every year. Prison officers interact daily with prisoners and are responsible for maintaining prisoners’ security and welfare. As a result, this group of workers can be understood as street-level, front-line bureaucrats who implement penal policy and play a role in distributing needed resources to millions of society’s most vulnerable citizens. We examine prison officers through this lens to assess how officers’ perceptions of prison resources, work stress, and work support are associated with their attitudes toward the prisoners in their care. We find that work stress and work support operate as mediating pathways between prisoner officers’ assessments of available resources and their attitudes toward prisoners.

Beyond the Trial: The Disproportionate Imprisonment of African Americans

The United States’ unprecedented expansion of imprisonment since the late 1970s has disproportionately affected African Americans, intensifying inequality and transforming the very meaning of race. Understanding the dynamics of criminal punishment is now essential for teaching about race. This chapter describes a common epistemological obstacle students encounter as they study the relationship between race and imprisonment – the “logic of the trial.” As they assign blame to the “culture” of the “underclass” or to “racist actors” in the legal system, students do not see the historically rooted, systemic nature of racial domination in American punishment. We propose three related strategies for getting “beyond the trial” and deepening students’ understanding of race in an era of mass incarceration. These strategies can help students transcend individual-level analysis and wrestle with the extensive, complex sociological factors that explain the causes and consequences of the hyper-incarceration of African Americans.