We enter this symposium after a year of unprecedented public attention to “episodes” of police and prison violence. Tens of thousands marched in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., to protest state failure to admonish the police officers who killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Based on its four-month investigation, the New York Times reported chronic guard brutality at Rikers Island, the nation’s second largest jail, where in 2014 alone correctional officers beat one inmate until they broke his jaw, another until they broke his eye socket, and another until they perforated his bowel. But bold protests have produced meek proposals for change, modest reforms tailored to contain “extreme incidents.” Perhaps we need police body cameras and independent prosecutors (to review officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown and to check deceptive practices from the likes of Robert McCulloch in Ferguson). Maybe we need rigorous criminal prosecutions of abusive prison guards and more federal oversight (for case-by-case evaluation of questionable incidents). Grander proposals demand an end to stop-and-frisk and the drug war (to check the “worst” sites of racial profiling).
The two books with which I engage in this “trialogue” force a singularly powerful intervention in the national conversation: The problem is not just brutal police, abusive guards, broken windows policing, the drug war, or even mass incarceration; the problem is the carceral state—sprawling and adaptive, woven into the fabric of American political life. Combining large-n surveys with more than a hundred face-to-face interviews in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and Trenton, Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver’s Arresting Citizenship persuasively demonstrates that the ever-growing carceral state is producing a new form of citizenship. While conversations on citizenship and punishment tend to highlight felon disenfranchisement, Lerman and Weaver take us from the voting booth to “the everyday machinery of our modern democracy,” where a class of what they call “custodial citizens” might retain voting rights but nonetheless “move through their daily lives with the expectation and experience of police contact” and “experience firsthand being a suspect, convict, inmate, or offender” (p. 56).
Mostly black and Latino, custodial citizens tend to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and concentrated carceral surveillance. By listening to “custodial citizens,” the authors document in painful detail the ways in which the carceral state constrains freedom, humiliates and threatens, and mutes political efficacy, trust, and participation. Of their interviewees, one black man avoided carrying a backpack, and one black woman discouraged friends and family from visiting her home too often—these acts raised suspicions of drug dealing. These are not anomalous cases. In attempts to protect themselves from unwanted police attention, interviewees avoided “wearing certain clothes, donning a certain hairstyle, driving a nice car, playing loud music, standing on the sidewalk texting, being in a group of young people, being with whites in a black neighborhood, being black in a white neighborhood, being with too many other blacks, being homeless, being in poor areas/being in rich areas” (pp. 113–14).
Lerman and Weaver demonstrate nothing less than how the carceral state “teaches” race and citizenship co-constitutively. In this sense, their portrait of the black or Latino “custodial citizen” struck me as a grotesque fun-house mirror reflection of the black “soldier-citizen” in Christopher Parker’s Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (2009). According to Parker, military service during World War II empowered black veterans to fight white supremacy and raised their normative expectations for full citizenship. Donning the uniform announced their equal standing in the political community. More than 70 years after black veterans and the larger civil rights movement fought for “Double V”—victory against fascism abroad and racism at home—the carceral state teaches the opposite lesson. Everyday carceral surveillance deflates normative expectations for full citizenship, teaches civic lessons of “shame, separate status, and unequal worth,” and alienates custodial citizens from political engagement (Arresting Citizenship, p. 128). With admirable care, Lerman and Weaver explain that the carceral state teaches race in ways more “subtle and complex” than previous regimes of racial caste. Not “categorical marginalization” of the entire racial group, the carceral state operates through the intersectional marginalization of “race combined with other minority statuses—being poor, being a convicted felon, having dark skin color, living in a ‘bad’ neighborhood” (pp. 24, 157; see also Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, 1999; Dara Strolovitch, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, 2007).
In their concluding chapter, “Where Do We Go from Here,” the authors recommend three broad reform goals. First, reforms should increase democratic voice for custodial citizens, for example, restore voting rights, encourage civil engagement through prisoner-run newspapers and inmate unions, and invest in programs to incorporate “ex-offenders back into civic life” by having them, for example, head AmeriCorps—style volunteer teams to work in food pantries and clean up vacant lots (pp. 238–41). Second, reforms should increase the democratic accountability of carceral institutions, for example, create independent oversight bodies of state corrections departments, establish fair complaint procedures for prison abuse, and give adequate funding and substantial powers to police civilian oversight agencies (pp. 241–46). And third, reforms should increase racial equality throughout the entirety of the U.S. political and economic system (p. 236). Lerman and Weaver illuminate this third recommendation by echoing David Simon, writer and producer of HBO’s The Wire, after someone pressed him for details on how to counteract the drug war’s decimating consequences in already decimated deindustrialized poor black neighborhoods. Simon answered, “The solution is to undo the last thirty-five years, brick by brick” (Interview in Reason Magazine, 2004). Lerman and Weaver (and Simon) are no doubt correct that the most crucial interventions are the least amenable to bullet points.
By virtue of being young, black, and poor, one interviewee in Arresting Citizenship explained that he and his friends “got that bull’s eye on our back as soon as we’re born” (p. 2). Would felon re-enfranchisement, fair complaint procedures for prison abuse, full transparency of arrest data, or civilian review boards remove the target from his back? The book advocates democratic process in decisively anticonsequentialist terms (i.e., “our zeal to praise states for reducing their correctional populations” should not mask the unacceptable fact that “anti-democratic practices have become standard operating procedure” in carceral institutions; and “designing policies that reduce prison populations” is easier than designing policies to “make criminal justice institutions serve the cause of democracy” (pp. 237–38)). I wonder, then, if democratic values would reduce the actuality of high arrest rates for black youth. If not, is it possible that democratic institutions like civil review boards might give high black arrest rates the imprint of legitimacy, that “bull’s eye target” seemingly placed on the black teenager’s back by the ostensible assent of the democratic polity?
In its recommendations to improve democratic practices, this book calls to mind the much-cited The Struggle for Justice written by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in 1971. With its vision for maximizing “democratic values of self-determination,” the AFSC recommended full restoration of voting rights; fair complaint procedures and independent authorities to adjudicate prison abuse; programs to build civic capacity by encouraging “released convicts [to] work together to improve their own lot”; civilian review boards and court-watching programs; and overall transparency of police, court, and prison operations to “mak[e] the system visible” (pp. 159–73). Throughout the 1970s, radical criminologists like Tony Platt and Paul Takagi critiqued Struggle for Justice as premised on a beautiful misconception that democratic ideals, when fully and sincerely operationalized, would neutralize racialized state violence (“Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New ‘Realists,’” Crime and Social Justice, 1977). In reality, they argued, democratic “rule of law” is perfectly compatible with policing the poor and caging people of color. Democratic rule of law does not reduce racialized state violence; it ritualizes it. We might ask of Arresting Citizenship the same questions that Platt and Takagi asked of The Struggle for Justice nearly four decades ago. Is democratic practice the means to any particular end?
Marie Gottschalk’s admirably bold Caught begins by telling us the end: our ultimate goal should be to “dismantle the carceral state” (p. 2). It might be tempting to forecast optimistically about prospects for reaching this goal, as we watch conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist join with liberal standard-bearers like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress to call for decarceration and de-escalation of the drug war. But in her sobering and timely assessment, Gottschalk demonstrates that the goal of dismantling the carceral state is unachievable through our two predominant reform paradigms—one aimed at ending punishment’s fiscal burden, the other at ending the drug war as the “new Jim Crow.”
In her persuasive critique of fiscal burden frameworks, Gottschalk demonstrates that cost cutting to satisfy our “deficit fetishism” ultimately concedes the moral soundness of carceral machinery. Our “punishment fetishism” goes unexamined as we stare at the bottom line. Moreover, setting cost cutting as the highest value justifies “pay-as-you-go” punishments like charging people for the Tasers used against them ($26 in St. Joseph, Missouri) and for the legal fees to process their punishment (median $1,110 per felony conviction in Washington State) (p. 36; see also Alexes Harris, Heather Evans, and Katherine Beckett, “Courtesy Stigma and Monetary Sanctions: Toward a Socio-Cultural Theory of Punishment,” American Sociological Review, 2011). Gottschalk also disabuses us of the fantasy that ending the drug war will change everything. A black person is four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person despite comparable rates of use, but outrageous racial disparity cannot eclipse what should be equally outrageous facts of carceral scale. Drug offenses comprise roughly 20% of state prison populations. The incarceration rate still would have quadrupled over the past 35 years even if all drug convictions were eliminated (pp. 127–28; see also James Forman, Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review, 2012).
Overall, Gottschalk’s brilliance is in illuminating the adverse consequences and ideological complicities of reformist paradigms. Indeed, her critique of Grover Norquist-esque calls for cheap decarceration is reminiscent of her critiques of liberal social reformers. As Gottschalk explained in Prison and the Gallows (2006), death-penalty opponents entrenched carceral legitimacy by positing life imprisonment without parole as (comparatively) humane punishment, and mainstream antiviolence women’s groups facilitated carceral growth through pro-police and prison-oriented “solutions” to rape and domestic violence. Taken together, Prison and the Gallows and Caught challenge actors across the political spectrum to relinquish carceral investments, whether corporate investments in private prisons or mainstream feminist investments in mandatory imprisonment for domestic violence.
In this sense, Gottschalk’s analysis contributes to the most trenchant critiques of Right on Crime conservatives and liberal “carceral feminists” and “carceral humanists.” They share reformist fantasies that carceral America can be redeemed by cutting costs (Deborah Small, “Cause for Trepidation: Libertarians' Newfound Concern for Prison Reform,” Salon, 2014), by imprisoning “real evil doers” like those who attack women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State, 2011; Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation, 2012; Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, 2011; Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, 2011), and by “softening” prison with more counseling and education programs (James Kilgore, “Repackaging Mass Incarceration,” Counterpunch, 2014; Judah Schept, “‘A Lockdown Facility… with the Feel of a Small, Private College’: Liberal Politics, Jail Expansion, and the Carceral Habitus,” Theoretical Criminology, 2013).
When reformers tinker with carceral machinery, adding a reentry program here and tweaking a drug law there, they miss the fact that “the pathologies” of the carceral state are endemic to American politics writ large, especially, as Gottschalk tells us, “the uncritical acceptance of neoliberalism in all aspects of public policy, the stranglehold that economic and financial interests exert on politics and policy-making, [and] the growing political and economic disenfranchisement of wide swaths of the population” (Caught, p. 20). While she centralizes economic and political inequality, Gottschalk simultaneously critiques what she sees as a narrow perspective on racial inequality. In her critique of the new Jim Crow framework, she states unequivocally: “A penal reform agenda defined primarily by attacking racial bias and racial disparities in the criminal justice system, especially the war on drugs, racial profiling, and stop-and-frisk, will also not bring about the demise of the carceral state” (p. 261). It is undeniable that our carceral leviathan would live strong without the drug war, profiling, and pat downs, but I wonder about the outer limits and implications of Gottschalk’s critique of the new Jim Crow framework. Is the argument that we cannot explain carceral development and carceral intransigence with dominant epistemologies of racism, grounded as they are in the black—white binary and fixation on ever-sophisticated models for measuring disparity (pp. 20, 261)? Or is the argument that we overemphasize racism, full stop?
It is crucial to note that Caught rejects “the new Jim Crow” framework on grounds of inclusion: Carceral cruelties for immigration offenses and sex offenses, levied heavily against Latinos and whites, respectively, become mere sidebars because they do “not fit neatly into a black—white racial disparities framework” (p. 120). It is almost an academic meme to say we must move beyond the black—white binary, a call that provokes knowing nods and exasperated eye rolls. But within this collective frustration are rhetorically slippery but politically distinct logics. Some logics expand the black—white binary, recognizing that eschewing it altogether would make it all but impossible to understand the myth of Asian American model minorities (Claire Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society, 1999), the reason that Republican campaigns use Latinos but not African Americans to signal the party’s postracial inclusivity (Luis Fraga and David Leal, “Playing the ‘Latino Card’: Race, Ethnicity, and National Party Politics,” Du Bois Review, 2004), and the mutually reinforcing binaries of the indigenous—settler binary (Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, 2012). Some rejections of the black—white binary, however, slip into a land of racial pluralism, where the repeated emphasis on race’s complexity ultimately forecloses opportunities to discuss racial hierarchy (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, 2006; Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 2012).
In bringing together these argumentative threads, I was left with this question: Does Caught urge us to decenter analysis of racism from agendas to dismantle the carceral state? The urgency of this question became clear in the final pages, where Gottschalk unfavorably compares President Barack Obama’s meager, myopic post—Great Recession agenda to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transformative politics after the Great Depression. “Squander[ing] an exceptional political moment,” President Obama and Democratic leadership maintained their uncritical neoliberal disdain for “big government” and their pandering, profitable deference toward the financial sector. They therefore missed the opportunity to confront endemic threats to safety and security—excessive financialization and deregulation, the upward redistribution of wealth, and the deepening of gendered, racialized poverty. President Obama indeed deserves full-throated censure for perpetuating what Gottschalk calls “the preeminent problem facing the United States today”—“vast and growing economic inequality rooted in vast and growing political inequalities” (p. 280).
By way of contrast, Gottschalk celebrates the post—Great Depression maneuverings of President Roosevelt, unions, and mobilized Americans who shamed “banksters” as gangsters and forced “a clean break with the past” (pp. 280–81). If we decenter racism from this moment, we might forget that the quasi-populist, cross-regional coalition that denounced white banksters also condoned white lynchers. Gottschalk rightly applauds the 1933–34 Senate Banking Committee for exposing the deceptive practices and lavish executive salaries of National City Bank (known today as Citibank), but in those same years the Senate Judiciary Committee heard the NAACP’s testimony of 3,513 black people lynched since 1882. The former “compelled Roosevelt to support stricter regulation of the financial sector,” Gottschalk tells us, but the latter led to nothing (p. 281; see also Robert Zangrando, “The NAACP and a Federal Antilynching Bill, 1934–1940,” Journal of Negro History, 1965).
If we decenter racism from our analysis of “vast and growing economic inequality,” then we open ground for color-blind reforms that entrench racial disadvantage and widen racial gaps. On this ground we find, for example, the Social Security Act of 1935, which southern members of Congress supported on the condition of excluding farm and domestic workers. Fully 65% of African Americans fell outside of the safety net, as did many Latino and Asian American workers, as well as female workers of all races. Many white workers were excluded, too. But scholars do not characterize the New Deal welfare state as reflective of an antifarmer or antiegalitarian ethos that just so happened to have racially disparate impact. Instead, scholars rightly call the Social Security Act “discrimination by design,” crafted within the limits of antiblack capitalist interests and administered in predictably nativist and antiblack fashion (Robert Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State, 2001; Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal, 2012; Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942, 1995; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, 2005).
Likewise, the present-day carceral state injures many white people, but we should not characterize it as reflective of a general pro-prison and pro-punishment ethos that just so happens to have racially disparate impact. Subsuming racial inequality under economic and political inequality does not broaden the conversation, and the New Deal’s deepening of racial inequality is brutal case in point. We could draw a similar lesson from the present, observing how quickly “Black Lives Matter” becomes “All Lives Matter,” gutting the twenty-first century’s renewed black freedom struggle while it is still inchoate, all in the name of inclusion.
