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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
100867
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
What can the disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies tell us about the character of American liberalism? Felony disenfranchisement reveals a dark face of American liberal democracy that is distinct from two more familiar narratives: the Tocquevillean story of a triumphal and inclusionary liberalism and the "multiple traditions" account proposed by Rogers Smith that sees liberalism battling with racial and other exclusionary ideologies. The history of felony exclusion points to a third perspective: a hyphenate American liberalism (liberal-ascription; liberal-republicanism) in which an exclusionary politics is embedded within liberalism itself. We develop this argument with specific reference to the ways in which liberalism as an abstraction is reflected in concrete advocacy debates over reform, in court decisions, and in the legislative domain. We identify three strands of liberal argumentation-the conceptualization of discrimination that relies on intentionality; the paradigmatic liberal belief in the social contract; and the liberal-republican adherence to norms of individual responsibility. The three strands show how the purportedly universal and impartial liberal embrace of individuality, contract, and responsibility, that ostensibly transcends the ascriptive barriers of birth has nevertheless fostered laws and policies that buttress the boundaries of an exclusionary American citizenship.
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| 2 |
ID:
141307
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the last decades, the American state has radically enlarged the array of policy instruments utilized in today’s governance of the poor. Most recently, through a process of outright “seizure,” the state now exacts revenue from low-income families, partners, and friends of those individuals who in very large numbers cycle in and out of the nation’s courts, jails, and prisons. In an analysis of legislation, judicial cases, policy regulations, blog, chat-line postings, and survey data, we explore this new form of taxation. In doing so, we endeavor to meet two objectives: The first is to document policies which pressure individuals (mostly men) entangled in the court and prison systems to rely on family members and others (mostly women) who serve as the safety net of last resort. Our second objective is to give voice to an argument not yet well explored in the sizeable incarceration literature: that the government is seizing resources from low-income families to help finance the state’s own coffers, including the institutions of the carceral state itself. Until now, no form of poverty governance has been depicted as so baldly drawing on family financial support under the pressure of punishment to extract cash resources from the poor. This practice of seizure constitutes the very inversion of welfare for the poor. Instead of serving as a source of support and protection for poor families, the state saps resources from indigent families of loved ones in the criminal justice system in order to fund the state’s project of poverty governance.
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| 3 |
ID:
165474
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| 4 |
ID:
182052
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| Summary/Abstract |
In recent decades, public prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. By the early 2000s, private equity-owned corporations had entered the core sectors of prison and jail operations, creating “markets behind bars” in telecommunications, commissary sales, health provision, and a range of other services. Two decades later, they have become a quasi-oligopolistic market force across the carceral economy. Reacting to these developments, scholars and activists have explored how private firms generate profits by extracting resources from families of the incarcerated. Less explored is the fact that it is often and particularly private equity firms that partner with public carceral institutions in these extractive practices. In this reflection, we propose a three-part schematic for understanding how such partnerships, with their attendant predation on the poor and people of color, have become normalized. We focus, first, on the mechanism of bureaucracy through which mutual profit-making by public and private entities becomes regularized; second, we explore the legal mechanisms—the apparently small but potent and politically unexamined legal maneuvers—that enable the redirection of family resources beyond the support of a loved one to the operational needs of jails and prisons; finally, we trace the role of gender as a social mechanism through which private equity and its prison/jail partners rely simultaneously on women’s traditional role as caretaker and non-traditional role as primary breadwinner. We show that all three mechanisms are crucial to the economic functioning of the carceral state.
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| 5 |
ID:
165477
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