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19 - Politics, Institutions, and the Carceral State

from III - The State and Its Political Organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2020

By
Joachim J. Savelsberg  and
Amber Joy Powell
Edited by
Thomas Janoski ,
Cedric de Leon ,
Joya Misra  and
Isaac William Martin
Thomas Janoski
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
Cedric de Leon
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Joya Misra
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Isaac William Martin
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

Carceral states rely on incarceration of an exceptionally large number of their citizens, typically accompanied by a diversity of supplemental methods of criminal justice control. The United States of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is such a carceral state. In the words of political scientist Marie Gottschalk (2015: 1): “a tenacious carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons, but also the far-reaching and growing range of penal punishments and controls that lies in the never-never land between the prison gates and full citizenship.” And indeed, jails and prisons in America today are supplemented by expanding probation and parole systems, community sanctions, drug courts, immigrant detention and deportation, public stigmatization of released sex offenders, and the disenfranchisement of ex-felons.

Keywords

incarcerationpenal statepunishmentcriminal justicecultureinstitutionalism
Type
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Information
The New Handbook of Political Sociology , pp. 513 - 537
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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