Vesla M. Weaver

Political Consequences of the Carceral State

Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government. To test this argument, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how criminal justice involvement shapes the citizenship and political voice of a growing swath of Americans. We find that custodial involvement carries with it a substantial civic penalty that is not explained by criminal propensity or socioeconomic differences alone. Given that the carceral state has become a routine site of interaction between government and citizens, institutions of criminal justice have emerged as an important force in defining citizen participation and understandings, with potentially dire consequences for democratic ideals.

Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy

Civil rights cemented its place on the national agenda with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fair housing legislation, federal enforcement of school integration, and the outlawing of discriminatory voting mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less recognized but no less important, the Second Reconstruction also witnessed one of the most punitive interventions in United States history. The death penalty was reinstated, felon disenfranchisement statutes from the First Reconstruction were revived, and the chain gang returned. State and federal governments revised their criminal codes, effectively abolishing parole, imposing mandatory minimum sentences, and allowing juveniles to be incarcerated in adult prisons. Meanwhile, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 gave the federal government an altogether new role in crime control; several subsequent policies, beginning with the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and culminating with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, ‘war on drugs,’ and extension of capital crimes, significantly altered the approach. These and other developments had an exceptional and long-lasting effect, with imprisonment increasing six-fold between 1973 and the turn of the century. Certain groups felt the burden of these changes most acutely. As of the last census, fully half of those imprisoned are black and one in three black men between ages 20 and 29 are currently under state supervision. Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts in western Europe, the United States imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita.

Staying out of Sight? Concentrated Policing and Local Political Action

In some urban neighborhoods, encounters with police have become one of the primary points of contact between disadvantaged citizens and their government. Yet extant scholarship has only just begun to explore how criminal justice interventions help to shape the political lives of the urban poor. In this article, we ask: What are the consequences of the increased use of stop-and-frisks (Terry stops) in disadvantaged neighborhoods for communities’ engagement with the state? Relying on a novel measure of local citizen engagement (311 calls for service) and more than one million police stops, we find that it is not concentrated police surveillance per se that matters but, rather, the character of police contact. The concentration of police stops overall is associated with higher levels of community engagement, while at the same time, a high degree of stops that feature searches or the use of force, especially when they do not result in an arrest, have a chilling effect on neighborhood-level outreach to local government. Our article marks a first step toward understanding what concentrated policing means for the democratic life and political agency of American communities.

Detaining Democracy? Criminal Justice and American Civic Life

“W Mail books to prison.” So reads the sign adorning the window of a bookshop tucked away in a struggling corner of trenton, New Jersey. It communicates the obvious—an available service—but also something less innocuous: many of the shop’s customers have loved ones in prison. It communicates something else, too: the effects of prison are not as distant from this troubled neighborhood as the prison itself might be. Following the opposite course of the books, the effects of incarceration feed back into the communities from which prisoners come and to which most of them will return. In a nation where the capacity to punish and surveil has witnessed stunning expansion over the last generation, “We Mail books to prison” is a reminder that the state’s role as arbiter and enforcer of criminal law now represents one of the most powerful influences on the social and civic fabric of communities across the nation, affecting everything from the socialization of children to the political participation of residents. We live in the midst of what may be the most visible and transformative government intervention since the 1960s. the number of prisoners has multiplied fivefold in just 35 years. At

Between Reconstructions: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1891–1940

Prior analyses of congressional action on the issue of black civil rights have typically examined either of the two major Reconstructions. Our paper attempts to fill the large five-decade black box between the end of the First Reconstruction and the beginning of the Second, routinely skipped over in scholarship on Congress, parties, and racial politics. Using a variety of sources—bill-introduction data, statements by members in the Congressional Record , roll-call votes, and newspaper reports, among others—we challenge the common assumption that civil rights largely disappeared from the congressional agenda between 1891 and 1940, documenting instead the continued contestation over racial issues in Congress. By examining several failed anti-lynching initiatives, this article uncovers a largely untold story about how and when the Republican and Democratic Parties reorganized around race, finding that the realignment began earlier than is commonly understood.

Destabilizing the American Racial Order

Are racial disparities in the United States just as deep-rooted as they were before the 2008 presidential election, largely eliminated, or persistent but on the decline? One can easily find all of these pronouncements; rather than trying to adjudicate among them, this essay seeks to identify what is changing in the American racial order, what persists or is becoming even more entrenched, and what is likely to affect the balance between change and continuity. The authors focus on young American adults, who were raised in a distinctive racial context and who think about and practice race differently than their older counterparts. For many young Americans, racial attitudes are converging across groups and social networks are becoming more intertwined. Most important, although group-based hierarchy has not disappeared, race or ethnicity does less to predict a young adults life chances than ever before in American history.

Is the significance of race declining in the political arena? Yes, and no

The significance of class is increasing in the USA, in the sense that economic inequality is rising within the black and Latino populations as well as among whites. Growing inequality is associated with increasing disparities in lived experiences. Is class also increasingly significant in political life? Survey evidence shows that the answer is yes: compared with previous decades, well-off blacks and Latinos are less strongly liberal in some policy preferences and feel more politically efficacious, while poor blacks and Latinos tend to move in the opposite direction. Well-off non-whites have not, however, lost any commitment to racial justice or identity, so the USA is not becoming ‘post-racial’. Given the complex patterns of change and persistence in opinions, Wilsons arguments about when and how race is significant remain as important and controversial as when first expressed.