Judah Schept

(Un)seeing like a prison: Counter-visual ethnography of the carceral state

While prisons proliferate in the rural landscape and sites of penal tourism expand, the carceral state structures the available visual and analytic vantages through which to perceive this growing visibility. Using examples from fieldwork in Kentucky, including Appalachian prison communities and a site of penal tourism, this article proposes ‘counter-visual’ ethnography to better perceive the ideological work that the carceral state performs in the spatial and cultural landscape. A counter-visual ethnography retrains our eyes to see that which is not ‘there’ but which structures the contemporary empirical realities we observe, record, and analyze: the ghosts of racialized regimes past, the sediment of dirty industry that seeps into and imbues the present, and the trans-historical and trans-local circulation of carceral logics and epistemologies. In addition, this article suggests the important role images play in shaping alternative vantages from which to better perceive the carceral state with historical, spatial, and political acuity.

‘A lockdown facility … with the feel of a small, private college’: Liberal politics, jail expansion, and the carceral habitus

While scholarship has identified neoliberalism, punitive and racialized public policy, and a supportive culture of punishment as giving rise to mass incarceration in the United States, little work has examined how communities come to participate in the production of the carceral state. Using an ethnographic case study of a proposed ‘justice campus’, a carceral expansion project in a politically progressive Midwestern city, this article illuminates the capacity of mass incarceration to structure individual and community dispositions and, in doing so, to imbue even oppositional politics. At the same time, communities may adopt, reformulate, and rearticulate the symbolic work and material manifestations of mass incarceration in order to fit specific political-cultural contexts. As such, this article argues that mass incarceration is both more forceful and more subject to diverse and context-specific formulations than has been previously argued. The corporal and discursive inscription of carcerality into individual and community bodies suggests the presence of a carceral habitus and offers one way to comprehend not only mass incarceration’s pervasive presence, but also its hegemonic operations even among and through people and communities who purport to reject it.

New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral studies:

Criminology has been slow to open up a conversation about decarceration and abolition in comparison with other disciplines, including history, geography, and gender, race, and critical ethnic studies. Scholars from these areas and actors on the ground—close up to confinement—have done most of the organizing against mass incarceration and theorizing of alternative possibilities. Why those experiences—and the theoretical traditions that inform their work—have been less recognized and developed in criminology is of pivotal concern as more criminologists move forward with the political project of decarceration. The extent to which criminology can sustain an alternative or abolitionist politics remains an open question. Amid growing conversations about decarceration and shifting rhetorics on punishment, we address some of the obstacles that limit criminology as a site from which to engage the abolitionist project, asking where criminologists might turn for interventionist models that move away from imprisonment and the violence of the carceral state. In this article, we advocate for and discuss the contours of critical carceral studies, a growing interdisciplinary movement for engaged scholarly and activist production against the carceral state. We discuss the imperatives for criminological engagement with critical carceral studies and sketch some of the terrain on which the discipline can contribute to the project, including important work to counter criminological discourses and knowledge production that reify and reproduce carceral logics and practices.

Layers of Violence: Coal Mining, Convict Leasing, and Carceral Tourism in Central Appalachia

The growth of the prison economy in Central Appalachia complicates attributions of the rise of the carceral state to the imperative to punish (Clear and Frost 2014; Garland 2001). While the prison-building binge is certainly enabled by policies that incarcerate more people for longer periods of time, the region that the demographer Calvin Beale (1998) observed as shouldering a disproportionately large share of the prisons built in the United States since 1980 continues to grow amidst bipartisan calls for reform. Four federal prisons have been built in eastern Kentucky since 1992; two of those were completed in the 2000s. A fifth federal prison, currently in the siting process for Letcher County, Kentucky, may be in construction by the time this chapter appears in print. Prisons are often marketed to rural communities as tools for economic development, despite dubious evidence of the success of this economic strategy (Hooks et al. 2004, 2010; Huling 2002; Ryerson 2013). A more capacious sense of what constitutes the carceral state further illuminates both the reliance on this strategy and the entrenchment of the prison economy in the region. In Morgan County, Tennessee, an hour northwest of Knoxville, the Brushy Mountain Development Group—a self-described “small team of three Tennessee entrepreneurs with extremely successful careers as business owners, restaurateurs, marketing experts and start-up incubators”—is looking to “revitalize” the rural area through building distilleries, orchards, and other forms of ecotourism on the grounds of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, a prison recently decommissioned in 2009. Best known perhaps as the prison that housed James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr., the prison closed in 2009 and the Brushy Mountain Development Group secured some creative financing from the state and county and began planning for a multi-use tourist site.

Penal abolition and the state: colonial, racial and gender violences

The present issue of Contemporary Justice Review constitutes the first of three issues on the topic of penal abolition, assembled by us in an effort to bring the history and current character of penal abolition research to readers both familiar with and new to such work. The focus of this issue is ‘Penal Abolition and the State: Colonial, Racial and Gender Violences,’ and it is followed by another two issues, themed on ‘Penal Abolition Praxis’ (Critical Criminology 2018) and ‘Penal Abolition: Challenging Boundaries’ (Social Justice 2018). The historical and social production of ‘crime’ has fabricated a theory, a set of practices, and a dominant discourse that collectively is understood as the paradigm of ‘criminal justice’ (Coyle, 2013; Hulsman, 1997; Mathiesen, 2015). This paradigm recognizes a trifle of the transgressions humans complete, labels these chosen transgressions as ‘crimes,’ and names their chosen actors ‘criminals’ (Bohm, 1986; Coyle, 2010, 2016; Hulsman, 1986). In time, a sprawling ‘criminal justice’ system has been produced, and it is recognizable as the penal process through which a ‘criminal’ traverses: from law, to police, to courts and finally to prisons. This historic rise has important genealogies and justifications, from the enclosing of the commons (Linebaugh, 2014) to the necessity of reinforcing racial capitalist social order following reconstruction (Blackmon, 2009; Oshinsky, 1996) to the rise of the neoliberal carceral state in response to the multiracial struggles for freedom in the 1960s and 1970s (Camp, 2016). Alongside these institutions have developed intellectual disciplines rationalizing and promoting theories of ‘crime’ (Criminology) and responses to it (Criminal Justice). This way of seeing, this paradigm, and all the work done in its name, produces an interpretation, or better yet, a logic: the ‘criminal justice’ logic (Coyle 2018). The power of this logic is considerable: it overwhelmingly dominates intellectual circles concerned with transgression (‘crime’), conservative as well as progressive political ideology, and consequently, social policy (Brown & Schept, 2017). As is everywhere observable (in news media, entertainment formats, and public discourse), the shadow of ‘criminal justice’ logic is almost complete. Thus, our age is one of the carceral society, characterized both by the ‘anti-state state’ (Gilmore & Gilmore, 2008), that is, a state organized around police and penal power, as well as the broader circulation of the logic of law, police, courtrooms and prisons. Against this society stands another imagined one, the post or non-carceral society (Tyson, 2014), which much like the slave-free society of antebellum America that existed only in

Todd R Clear and Natasha A Frost, The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America:

Contradictions characterize the contemporary landscape of the carceral state. On the one hand, there are indications that 40 years of prison growth and concurrent punitive policy have peaked and may, in fact, be declining. In 2012 alone, six states closed 20 prisons, reducing prison beds by over 14,000, repeating similar figures from 2011 (Porter, 2012). The majority of states have passed legislative and administrative reforms designed to divert some people away from prison and into alternatives and to reduce the sentences of others. Politicians in both major parties, including several high profile conservatives, have expressed their support for prison reform. And yet these indications of change are dubious. First, it is not clear that declines to state prison populations actually reduce the total number of people incarcerated. Between increases to the federal prison system and some indications that states may simply devolve the responsibility for incarceration to municipal governments, the total number of incarcerated persons may be rather stable. Second, the deployment of so-called alternative sanctions such as electronic monitoring, as well as the policing of ‘‘threats’’ to the aesthetic of capitalist urban revitalization, ensnare more people—including undocumented immigrants (Kilgore, 2015) and those urban poor residents experiencing homelessness and mental illness (Beckett and Herbert, 2009)—into the ‘‘wider, stronger, and different nets’’ observed over 30 years ago (Austin and Krisberg, 1981). These developments complicate what might otherwise be a bright outlook for reform. These incongruities suggest a disjuncture as well as an opportunity for intervention in the genealogy of US punishment. The direction of our pivot—toward decarceration and substantive reform or the restructuring and instantiation of the carceral state—remains to be seen. Into this period of change has stepped Todd Clear and Natasha Frost’s The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration to illuminate how we have arrived at the current historical moment, sketch the contours of what they call the ‘‘grand social experiment’’ in mass incarceration, lay out what we stand to lose or gain based on where we go from here, and what, following their expertise, might constitute a way forward. Readers already familiar with the works of Clear and Frost will be neither surprised nor disappointed: without a doubt, The Punishment Imperative is a substantial contribution to the study of mass incarceration. While the book confronts everything from crime rates to sentencing guidelines to inequality and racism, there is a central focus on public policy that threads the story tightly across seven strong chapters. As the authors note in concluding Chapter 4, ‘‘The policies of the punishment imperative’’, the chapter that performs the most heavy lifting in the book: