User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Carceral state (United States)

The carceral state (United States) or penal state refers to actors and institutions that shape carceral or penal policy and practice. The penal state is the "criminal justice institutions that adjudicate and sanction criminal wrong-doing." TThe "custodial power of the state" includes, but it not limited to the prison-industrial complex. The carceral state is an "amalgamation of the various branches and actors in charge of punishment". Various actors have different opinions on policies and practicies. The penal state, the carceral state, unlike the penal state, is "sometimes construed as reflecting only that which is formally carceral: jails and prisons."

Criminal law and criminal justice institutions only represent a part of the carceral state.

Definitions of carceral state
Dan Berger says that the phrases carceral state, mass incarceration, and prison-industrial complex can be interchanged. They describe the "brutal history of extreme state punishment" in the United States that has increased since the mid-1970s. Berger admits that as "a critique of punishment has grown popular, clarity has become more elusive in some quarters. Even among scholars, researchers often invoke the "carceral state" without defining what they mean. The only constant in these analyses is that the United States has a lot of people in prison, that a disproportionate number of them are people of color, that police exert too much power with too much weaponry, and that the country’s prison system is held together by an overriding investment in harsh and degrading punishment." Dan Berger examined definitions of the carceral state in his his review of Anne E. Parsons, 2018 book, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945, Berger's work concerns the carceral state, including the diverse ways in which imprisonment has shaped social movements, racism, and American politics since World War II. Bergers said that the "carceral state is one of the subject areas—conservatism and capitalism being perhaps the other leading contenders—in which historians can best ply a critical interrogation of change over time to address matters of great social and political urgency in the present."

Technologies
In the carceral state in the United States, public space was transformed into defendable space, with the installation of walls, gates, fences, surveillance cameras and security checkpoints. These installations provide control over urban space. In these spaces, gatherings of strangers to the area are discouraged, and barricades of various forms prevent people from entering or passing through.

Background
The rise of the carceral state began in the mid-1970s—when the incarceration rate in the United States began an "unbroken climb". In the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment was 90 out of 100,000 free—by 2000 the number had increased to 500 per 100,000. By 2014, nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in the United States were incarcerated, which is "5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. From the mid-seventies to 2014, "the rate of imprisonment in the United States more than quadrupled". "The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world."

In her 2016 book entitled From the war on poverty to the war on crime: the making of mass incarceration in America, Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, traced the roots of the modern carceral state to the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. In a May 1964 speech, Johnson introduced his "The Great Society" project—which incorporated urban renewal, modern transportation, clean environment, anti-poverty, healthcare reform, crime control, and educational reform. In March 1965, President Johnson declared a "War on Crime", ushering in a "new era of American law enforcement" in which crime control became a "federal priority."

In the 1970s, a "disproportionate numbers of young African American men were imprisoned as first-time offenders and drug addicts.

During the August 2014 Ferguson unrest, when local law-enforcement authorities armed with military grade weapons and technology—that police forces had begun using during their War on Drugs—to confront protesters, "Ferguson looked like a war zone. According to Hinton, through the 1965 federal legislation which created an agency within the Department of Justice that would provide millions of dollars in grants so that police departments could purchase "bulletproof vests, helicopters, tanks, rifles, gas masks and other military-grade hardware. Hinton noted that the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and other military equipment used in Ferguson against the protesters,had been used by the military in Vietnam, Latin America, or Iraq.

Hinton describes how interactions between well-meaning federal government policies under then-President Johnson and the dynamics of the states lay the groundwork for the prison industrial complex.

Federal policy contributed to the increase in the "number of people incarcerated by or under the supervision of the criminal-justice system." She traced the origins of the current prison industrial complex to the well-meaning policies of the War on Poverty during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The 1960s social welfare programs She revealed that the grassroots efforts to expand social welfare programs in the "New Deal to communities of color" resulted in a "battleground of ideas and policies" encountered those who wanted to "construct the foundations of the urban carceral state."

Both liberals and conservatives share the blame for mass incarceration in the United States.

There are over 7 million Americans incarcerated or on parole or probation

During the tenure of President Johnson, "federal authorities--regardless of political affiliation--systematically constructed a criminal justice regime that targets, criminalizes, polices, and imprisons staggering numbers of young black men, especially in urban areas."

Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, the federal government slowly" created the "conditions for the mass incarceration of black youth."

Ta-Nehisi Coates traced how the contemporary carceral state is deeply entrenched in slavery and is inextricably linked with the "racial, political, social, and economic fabric of the U.S." Coates points out the "important parallels between the abolition of slavery and of mass incarceration."

Parsons described how even in the late 2010s, the term "carceral state" had not been clearly defined even by researchers in the field. Its parameters, institutions, and ideologies had not been clarified. A fellow researcher investigated an "earlier modality of state formation, the welfare state" to answer these questions. She asked how is the "carceral state different from the welfare state? Where and when does one end and the other begin? Do they coexist or compete?"

By the late twentieth century there had been "colossal growth of incarceration" in a "relatively short period of time" in the United States. Researchers, including historians, began to undertake "contextual analysis on political, social, economic, and cultural fronts."

Researchers approached the topic of carceral state "intuitively". The field of carceral state scholarship expanded, researchers showed that the "path the U.S. took toward mass incarceration was multifaceted and multidirectional." Carceral state scholarship revealed that "the carceral state to be bigger than prisons."

It also revealed that those who were caught in the carceral state routinely resisted and contested it.

Disciplines that have undertaken studies on mass incarceration include in Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and more recently, historians.

Historians began to examine the "history of prisons, policing, and surveillance" with an interdisciplinary approach.

In 2015, flagship journals, such as the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, "dedicated themed issues to the carceral state.

The June 2015 Journal of American History special issue entitled "Historians and the Carceral State", included contributing editors, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson. The goal for these historians is to redefining "criminal justice" as the "carceral state" to include "public safety, surveillance, and security infrastructure of the United States." They said that the Bureau of Justice (BJS) uses a "narrow, technical" definition of the criminal justice sector. The "size and scope" of the carceral state, is one of the areas historians are examining. Scholars have just begun to collect data on the "full dimensions of the financial resources and human capital dedicated to the policing and punitive projects of the carceral state detailed in this special issue."

Heather Ann Thompson is the author of Blood in the Water (2016)—the history of the 1971 Attica rebellion. Parsons described Blood in the Water, as "the most visible example of what has been a growing and often stunning list of titles investigating how it is that the US came to incarcerate so many people for so long in such cruel conditions. As abusive conditions, prisoner strikes, and policy reforms dot the current political landscape, a number of historians—myself included—have penned op-eds connecting our research to matters of ongoing public concern."

"Historians have productively followed the story of the carceral state across a variety of places and times. As U.S. criminal justice is largely a state-based affair..."

In her 2007 law review journal, Marie Gottschalk reviewed Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy by Jeff Manza, Christopher Uggen; Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear by Jonathan Simon; Crime, Punishment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective: Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol. 36 by Michael Tonry; Punishment and Inequality in America by Bruce Western.

By 2018, Tony Platt lists events that were catalysts in prison reform in the 1960s and 1970s—"Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail, the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago, the death of George Jackson, the trial of Angela Davis, and the Attica rebellion in 1971. He said that the "recent changes in the carceral state are so extraordinary that most people today either have no memories of the 1970s prison movement or only distorted memories of a movement reduced to violent extremism. I think this problem of amnesia is rooted more generally in the absence of a stable, oppositional party that can serve as a repository of historical memory and make sure that there is inter-generational communication. "Look," as Obama wryly observed, "America is famously ahistorical. That's one of our strengths—we forget things." Meanwhile, functionaries in the carceral state learned their lessons and didn't forget the past. Their response to the prison movement was to creatively disperse activists, reinforce the colorline, build remote supermax prisons in which solitary confinement became the norm, and cheer for law and order. Now, their order is revealing fissures, and we have an opportunity to hopefully do more than fail better. It won't be easy."

Two policies that are extreme examples of exclusion and control are increasingly used in the American carceral state. Life-without-parole (LWOP) statutes that were instituted in the 1990s, had been "promoted by prosecutors" to avoid capital punishment, and "enacted by law-and-order legislators who were fearful of facing a punishment scheme without a capital option". In the 1990s, supermax confinements that were also instituted, had "originated out of a desperate attempt by officials in one federal penitentiary to regain control of an out-of-control facility."

Parameters
By 2012, researchers in the area of theoretical criminology, concluded that as the carceral state in the United States expanded, a problematic "shadow" carceral state had emerged, which operated "beyond the confines of criminal law and justice institutions" that expanded "penal power through institutional annexation and legal hybridity." "Civil and administrative pathways to incarceration" had increased. "Civil 'alternatives' to invalidated criminal statutes" were created. Criminal law was incorporated into "administrative legal processes in ways that enhance state carceral power."

Carceral state power includes politics, institutional innovations, and policy developments, that shape penal practices and outcomes. The nature, operation, and effects of carceral state...

A definition of the penal state, cannot be limited to a narrow definition of "what is and is not punishment and legal technicalities that distinguish 'civil' incarceration and 'administrative' criminal justice sanctions from 'real' criminal punishment.

Institutions
In his 2019 book entitled Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America, Wesleyan University associate professor, Anthony Ryan Hatch included prison industrial complex with its jails and prisons, but also "foster homes, immigrant detention centres, nursing homes and the military." .

Ideologies
Hatch said that the carceral state as it currently exists in the United States requires dehumanizing forms of political ideology.

Yochelson and Samenow's 1976 publication The Criminal Personality which introduced the concept of the "criminal mind", and James Q. Wilson's 1985 publication Thinking about Crime in which he described "wicked people," provided support for a "biological theory of criminality". This contributed to "solidify the move to abandon prison rehabilitation programs" and "to provide indirect support for substituting increasingly harsh and more painful prison policies."

"This ideological framing" of criminality as stemming from being different, having a criminal mind which makes you "wicked". The wicked can be subjected to "social exclusion and state control." This ideology helps "explain why "people who have not committed serious or violent crimes" are still targeted by the carceral state "for repeated or extended exclusion and control.' It explains why the carceral state keeps "people who arguably pose little risk of recidivism" in prison. From this ideological framework, it is not unfair or gratuitous to overinclude people based on their criminal record, it is deemed to be a "sensible and judicious preemptive action" taken against "people who, by their own criminal conduct, have already sufficiently demonstrated the inherent danger they pose. If their crimes have as yet been nonviolent or otherwise relatively nonserious, it is of no account, since-again, from this perspective-the fact of their criminality shows it to be only a matter of time before they commit serious violent offenses."