13: Mass Incarceration Pt. 1 Flashcards
who were the victims of mass incarceration?
primary victims as young black men
explanations for mass incarceration
political
- electoral politics incentivising tough on crime politicians/candidates
- idea of governing through crime
economic
- increased rates of crime because of broader economic circumstances like stagflation, labour market saturation, prison privatisation, etc.
cultural
- penal populism, broader culture of control
institutional/organisational explanations
Wacquant’s explanation/argument for mass incarceration
political economy explanation
not crime but the need to shore up an eroding caste cleavage, while buttressing the emergent regime of de-socialised wage labour as the main impetus behind the expansion of the American penal state
America’s peculiar institutions
peculiar to America
- only society where race functions in the specific way it does within the broader political economy
slavery, Jim Crowe, ghetto, carceral continuum
- race-making peculiar institution
produce/reproduce ideological/symbolic and material/social boundaries between black and white
primary functions of slavery, Jim Crowe and the ghetto
labour extraction
- making bodies/labour available for the needs of capital and the economic system
ethnoracial closure
- social ostracisation/containment of an ethnically dishonoured group
institutions as a vehicle to extract black labour while also keeping black bodies at a safe distance from the material and symbolic benefit of white society
slavery
ends of procuring low-cost labour for large-scale agriculture
in the early 1600s, primarily European indentured servants
- sign a contract for a stipulated period of time, work in colonies uncompensated and eventually earn their freedom with promises of transport to the New World, land, etc.
1619 - greater importation of black African people
1640s - proliferation of new slave laws
- restriction of the types of freedoms new black African labourers had
- chattel slavery growing by the late 1600s
how did race get looped into the institution of chattel slavery?
wealthy white colonial landowners in the 17th century saw this extremely wealthy and powerful economic system that was dependent on the use of forced/uncompensated labour
black African and white European labourers realised their labour was being highly exploited to the benefit of wealthy white landowners
- 1675 Bakers rebellion
best way to demobilise the burgeoning threat of organised labour to maintain profitability and power was to divide and conquer
- invention of the conceptualisation of race we call biological/scientific which was a convenient ideological and symbolic tool to drive a wedge
also served the ideological function of buttressing the new institution of chattel slavery as different from indentured servitude where you gain freedom eventually
fundamental paradox of slavery in the post-enlightenment period of thinking/politics
how to reconcile ideas of freedom and universal rights of man with the obvious material fact that a certain facet of the society can be owned?
- embraced the biological notion of race saying that Africans did not qualify as men in the sense they were talking about by virtue of their race
US government structured around this to accommodate the institution of chattel slavery
end of slavery
emancipation in 1865 under the law after the civil wr
Jim Crowe in the south
brief period of relative black flourishing
racial system still deeply institutionalised and the south is a largely agrarian economy requiring a lot of cheap and low-cost manpower
13th amendment banned slavery except as punishment for a crime
- south decided to erect the institution around the constitutional legal loophole
laws passed criminalising things and behaviours which freed black people were likely to be busted for
- once arrested and convicted, the 13th amendment allows them to be forced back into involuntary uncompensated labour
formerly enslaved people who were freed and evaded criminalisation were still landless and in a socially marginalised role of sharecroppers
- re-entrenchment of the racialised caste system in the south
Jim Crowe in the north
peak of industrialisation in cities in the North and Midwest (Detroit, Chicago, Pennsylvania, etc.)
- industrialisation around Fordism with mass production and assembly lines requiring a lot of labour
high demand for unskilled/semi-skilled labour so mass migration of freed black people moving from the south to the north
- period historically associated with high wages, good benefits for workers and strong, organised labour
growth of the social welfare state particularly like FDR’s new deal
- black people benefitting from these social programs
- ghetto
distinct space containing an ethnically homogenous population, which finds itself forced to develop a set of interlinked institutions that duplicates the organisational framework of the society from which it’s been banished
4 important qualities: stigma, constraint, territorial confinement, institutional encasement
black people experiencing greater social mobility within the black ghetto society and not within white mainstream society
- poor black residents benefit from the growth of these opportunities and new institutions within the community, but also the broader growth of the social welfare state under the new deal which further facilitates upwards social mobility
- neoliberalism
ideology and policies of economic deregulation associated with Reagan, Nixon and Thatcher in the 1970s
efficiency of private enterprise over the inefficiency of the government and state-managed programs
transfer of control of economy and society away from the public/government to the private sector
- broader goal to decrease government influence in the economy and social relations
implications of neoliberal labour policies
rise of more contingent forms of labour (no job security, no wage guarantee/protection)
drop in real wages
drop in purchasing power
shortening in job tenure
reduction in workers’ rights
social anxiety and insecurity
