Contesting the “Justice Campusâ€: Abolitionist Resistance to Liberal Carceral Expansion

Judah Schept

Abstract


"In this essay, it is this disjuncture—the embrace of liberal carcerality and the rejection of the carceral state and nation—that forms my starting point of examination and a point of departure for the central exploration of these pages: resistance to liberal carceral expansion. I draw on interviews and participant observation to illustrate the diverse ways in which community activists intervened in the narrative of carceral expansion.1 I try to convey my observations through both “thick description†(Geertz 1973) and through the critically important project of locating analysis of the “local†amidst the moving and implicating currents of mass incarceration and the broader political-economic and cultural flows of which it is a part (Appadurai 1996; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Smith 2001)."

1All place, personal, and organizational names are pseudonyms.


Keywords


Prisons; Incarceration; Campus; Education; privatization; ethnography

Full Text:

HTML PDF

References


Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Austin, J. & Irwin J. (2001). It’s about time: America’s imprisonment binge. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Ball, J., Caldwell, W., & Pranis, K. (2010). Doing democracy with Circles: Engaging communities in public planning. St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The logic of practice. New York, NY: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2005). Habitus. In J. Hillier & E. Rooksby, (Eds.). Habitus: A sense of place (pp.43-52). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Clear, T. (2007). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged neighborhoods worse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Clifford, J. & Marcus, G.E. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Currie, E. (1998). Crime and punishment in America: Why the solutions to America’s most stubborn social crisis have not worked—and what will. Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Donziger, S.R., (Ed.) (1996). The Real war on crime: The report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Garland, D. (2001). The Culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of culture. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Gilmore, R. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York, NY: Anchor Books.

Graeber, D. (2007). Democracy emerges from the space in between, in Fletcher, R. (Ed.) Beyond resistance: The future of freedom (pp.75-109). New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Gupta, A. & Ferguson, J., (Eds.) (1997). Culture, power, place: Explorations in critical anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hallet, M.A. (2006). Private prisons in America: A critical race perspective. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

James, J. (Ed.) (2002). States of confinement: Policing, detention, and prisons. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

James, J., (Ed.) (2007). Warfare in the American homeland: Policing and prison in a penal democracy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches by Audre Lorde. Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press

Loury, G. (2008). Race, incarceration, and American values. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Marcus, G.E. & Fischer, M.M.J. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mauer, M., & Chesney-Lind, M. (Eds.). (2002). Invisible punishment: The collateral consequences of mass imprisonment. New York, NY: New Press.

Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Mitchell, D. & Staeheli, L. A. (2005). Permitting protest: Parsing the fine geography of dissent in America. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(4), 796–813.

Muhammad, K.G. (2010). The Condemnation of blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Paley, J. (2004). Accountable democracy: Citizens’ impact on public decision making in post-dictatorship Chile. American Ethnologist, 31(4), 497-513.

Piché, J. & Walby, K. (2010). Problematizing carceral tours. British Journal of Criminology, 50(3), 570-581.

Reiman, J. (2000). The Rich get richer and the poor get prison: Ideology, class, and criminal justice (6th edition). Allyn and Bacon

Rodriguez, D. (2001). “The “Question’ of prison praxis: Relations of force, social reproduction, points of departure,†in S. Martinot, & J. James, (Eds.) The Problems of resistance (pp. 46-68). Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.

Schiffman, J. (1991) “Fight the power’: Two groups mobilize for peace. In M. Burawoy, (Ed.). Ethnography unbound: Power and resistance in the modern metropolis (pp. 58-79). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Scott, J.C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Scott, J.C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Shelden, R. (2010). Our punitive society: Race, class, gender and punishment in America. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Sloop, J. (1996). The Cultural prison: Discourse, prisoners, and prisons. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press

Smith, M.P. (2001). Transnational urbanism: Locating globalization, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Thompson, J.B. (1984). Studies in the theory of ideology. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Wacquant L.D. (2002). The Curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incarceration. Ethnography 3, 371-97

Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press


Refbacks



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Attribution to include the author or artist's name, date of first publication,
and the name of our journal: Radical Criminology.
ISSN 1929-7904 (Print) | ISSN 1929-7912 (Online)

SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave