ABSTRACT
The criminalization of poverty has been central to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. Due to its size, scope, and most likely target population, carceral expansion has been alternatively labeled mass imprisonment, racialized mass incarceration, hyper-incarceration, the prison industrial complex, the new Jim Crow, or neoliberal penality. The carceral techniques of the current age, however, are not new. Since the birth of the prison, penal institutions have been used to manage poverty (Wacquant, 2009). From its humble origins as the Poor House, Work House, and the House of Corrections in Europe, to the development of its more magisterial, if foreboding, structures erected to ensure the penitence of dishonored and criminalized populations, the penal state has attempted to correct the “rogues,” “sturdy beggars,” and “hardened criminals” it houses. These stigmatized groups were believed to have bypassed the formal economy, choosing to live a life of crime, vice, and dependence. Mirroring contemporary practices, there are long-standing racial disparities in the arrest and incarceration of supposed “offenders” even with the helping institutions of the welfare state imbricated in the punishment of these groups (Miller, 2013). W.E.B. DuBois was among the first scholars to explore the relationship between punishment, poverty, and social welfare policy (DuBois, 1935). Turning his lens toward reconstruction in America, DuBois (1901 and 1935) highlights the importance of the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (The Freedmen’s Bureau) in the lives of former slaves. As the first federally administered social welfare institution (Goldberg, 2008), the bureau expanded the civil rights of former slaves by appointing specialized courts to mitigate disputes, registering Black voters, opening some of the first public schools in the south, and providing for the basic human needs of former slaves and poor, dispossessed Whites (DuBois, 1935; Goldberg, 2008). At the same time, Black freedmen and women were expected to take the most “immediate and available jobs” at the threat of being labeled a vagrant by local constables and agents of the Bureau. Subsequently many emancipated former slaves were forced into long-term sharecropping relationships on the plantations they just left (Farmer-Kaiser, 2004). The expectation of labor and peonage (working in harsh conditions to pay off debt) crossed genders and was indeed hostile to the entrepreneurial initiatives of freedmen and women who often sought to establish their own farms and businesses (DuBois, 1935; Taylor, 2009). Refusal to work the fields of the plantation was policed at the threat of the vagrancy conviction. These practices foreshadowed the stigma of the “welfare queen” for poor mothers who “refused” to
work low-wage jobs, and “deadbeat” to Black fathers who were not “formally” employed. They raise important questions about the similarities of this period with the current one, given the draconian work requirements of welfare reform. Conviction as a vagrant meant lengthy terms of confinement and forced labor under the chain gangs and convict leasing system of the “new” south. As a result, by the end of the 19th century, Blacks comprised more than 90 percent of all leased convicts in the United States (Gorman, 1997). The southern prison system rapidly expanded in just under a generation. Prisoners were sentenced at younger ages for longer periods of time and in exponentially greater volume. For example, between 1865 and 1890, Georgia’s prison census increased tenfold, while Mississippi’s quadrupled and Alabama’s more than tripled (Mancini, 1978). We can therefore see that a kind of “mass incarceration” was well underway during the post-bellum period, mirroring many of the carceral techniques rolled out in the neoliberal age to discipline, manage, and contain the dispossessed (i.e., the hyper policing of poor people of color, racial disproportionality in arrest and sentencing, and a disciplinary logic in welfare administration). What then do we make of neoliberal penality? What makes it novel? How can we distinguish it from previous penal forms? While there is significant continuity between old and new forms of penal governance, neoliberal social and economic policy has more deeply embedded the carceral state within the lives of the poor, transforming what it means to be poor in America (Miller, 2014). The contributions that follow capture fundamental changes in the ways in which poor people are managed by state-sanctioned institutions, the novel forms of social life that have emerged in the wake of neoliberal penalty, and the consequence of carceral expansion for poor people across categories of difference. Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert’s chapter, “Managing the Neoliberal City,” examines the ways in which ordinances and the stigma of criminality have been deployed to effectively “banish” former prisoners from full participation in social, civic, and economic life. Jessica Camp and Eileen Trzcinski’s contribution walk us through a brief history of de-institutionalization in “The Rise of Incarceration Among the Poor with Mental Illnesses,” while shedding light on the scale and consequence of incarceration in the current age. Turning our attention to the dual-sided nature of neoliberal penality, Spencer Headworth’s chapter, “Class, Crime, and Social Control in the Contemporary United States,” highlights the regulatory mechanisms that facilitate the overpolicing of “crime in the streets” and the simultaneous underpolicing of “crime in the suites.” Furthermore, Shaun Ossei-Owusu’s chapter, “A People’s History of Legal Aid,” demonstrates the contribution of the legal aid society to race, gender, and ethnic relations, and contemporary modes of citizenship. Cesraéa Rumpf’s chapter, “Surviving Gender-Based Violence in the Neoliberal Era,” exhibits a paradox: the state often plays dual roles, to protect and to punish, in the lives of domestic violence survivors caught in the penal dragnet. Enora Brown’s chapter, “Systematic and Symbolic Violence as Virtue: The Carceral Punishment of Adolescent Girls” examines the racialization and symbolic dimensions of “girl violence,” displaying it as an instrument of symbolic violence that pathologizes and dehumanizes black girls in the United States, justifying their over-incarceration and substantiating longstanding tropes of their aggressive natures. We conclude with Colleen Casey’s interrogation of entrepreneurship’s underside. In “The Paradox of Entrepreneurship as a Policy Tool for Economic Inclusion in Neoliberal Policy Environments,” Casey argues that the promotion of entrepreneurship, in its current form, exacerbates inequality. Taken together, these chapters help us to think carefully and critically about neoliberal penality, drawing our attention to the ways in which it has radically changed the daily lives of poor and marginalized populations.
