I appreciate the thoughtful and generous reviews of my book by Naomi Murakawa, Amy Lerman, and Vesla Weaver, whose work has done so much to further our understanding of the carceral state. They raise some important issues regarding the role of race in my analysis that I seek to clarify here.
Caught sets out to explain why the carceral state is so intractable and why some of the leading penal reform strategies are not up to the task of dismantling it. Race is integral to my account, not incidental as Lerman and Weaver suggest.
The opening pages assert that “race matters and it matters profoundly in any discussion of how to dismantle the carceral state” (p. 4). Throughout the book, I take to heart the observation that “the racial character of the contemporary system is more than just a legacy of our troubled racial past” (Soss, Fording, and Schram Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011, 3).
Racial and other disquieting disparities in the penal system do not automatically flow from that troubled past. As Caught demonstrates, they are a specific product of politics—how key politicians, other public figures, interest groups, the media, and social movements choose to draw from that past, reinvent that past, and discard pieces of that past as they adjust their political strategies to the political, social, and economic realities of the present. In the process, they create new institutional and political arrangements and new frameworks that inscribe the past in new ways onto the present. The emergence of color-blind racism in the post–civil rights era is one such adaptation that poses a major obstacle to dismantling the carceral state (Alexander Reference Alexander2010). So is “racial liberalism” (Murakawa Reference Murakawa2014). But there are others, including the ascendancy of neoliberalism in American politics and policymaking.
Much of the literature on race is not attentive enough to the sinews of the political economy and how they shape policy and politics. Likewise, much of the work on neoliberalism is not attentive enough to the role of race, gender, and ethnicity in shaping economic policies (Spence Reference Spence2012). Caught builds on Michael Dawson’s (2010, p. 17) insight that the U.S. version of neoliberalism is heavily race inflected.
Only by considering the role of racial factors and neoliberalism can we fully appreciate, for example, why the 3 Rs—reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism—have come to dominate the penal reform agenda today in elite circles and why this approach is woefully not up to the task of dismantling the carceral state. The enthusiasm for the 3 Rs is blithely detached from a deeper understanding of important shifts in the U.S. political economy since World War II that have disproportionately harmed African Americans and that have helped to build the carceral state. As I elaborate in my book, these shifts include the incomplete economic incorporation of African Americans, especially black men, after the Great Migration; the deindustrialization and hollowing out of wide swaths of urban America; the push to build up human capital rather than address the disappearance of good jobs; and the evisceration of the public sector, which had been an important avenue of upward mobility for African Americans. Another critical factor is the growing political clout of economic actors who have vested interests in maintaining and expanding the carceral state.
Reform agendas based on the 3 Rs and framed around the purported economic burden of the carceral state generally do not acknowledge, let alone address, these deeper structural issues. They also are not up to the political task of challenging the fundamental legitimacy of the carceral state and the hyper-incarceration of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups in the United States. The 3 Rs is a self-consciously color-blind strategy for criminal justice reform that keeps at arm’s length the racial and other injustices on which the carceral state rests. It is thus incapable of tapping into the growing political ferment and anger at the local level—especially in many African American urban neighborhoods—to address these injustices.
Why the carceral state has not faced more organized opposition until recently—especially from the people most directly harmed by it—is another major theme of Caught in which racial factors are deeply implicated. I contend that the Republican Party’s southern strategy, the racialization of public opinion on crime and punishment, and the entrenched history of racial intransigence in the United States cannot on their own explain why the carceral state has been so tenacious.
The book identifies some of the deeper historical and institutional factors that have stood in the way of forging a broad social and political movement with the wherewithal to mount a serious challenge to the carceral state. They include the varied ways black elites have responded to the growing public and political association between blackness and criminality since the late nineteenth century, and major shifts within leading identity-based civil rights organizations with the atrophy of more radical civil rights groups and the demise of the Black Power movement. Caught also examines the political impact that escalating rates of violence and substance abuse have had on poor urban communities; important shifts in public opinion among African Americans on issues related to race, crime, and punishment; and significant electoral and party developments at the local and state levels with the demise of Jim Crow that were influenced by the Republican Party’s southern strategy but not wholly determined by it.
Another key development is the emergence of new patterns of racial inequality in the wake of the civil rights movement. The predominant pattern of racial exclusion yielded to selective incorporation in the context of widening education and income gaps among blacks and greater residential mobility for more affluent blacks (Katz, Stern, and Fader Reference Katz, Stern and Fader2005). This has fostered the fragmentation of black politics and widening political disparities among African Americans.
Taken together, these factors help explain why mainstream identity-based civil rights organizations have been slow to challenge the growing tentacles of the carceral state. They also help explain why some leading “postracial” politicians and public figures have supported the punitive turn rhetorically and substantively at key moments in the debate over U.S. penal policies. Black communities have long engaged in a “politics of respectability, attempting to win acceptance into the mainstream white society by demonstrating their worth and adherence to dominant norms” (Cohen Reference Cohen2010, 4). The antielitist rhetoric of the Black Power movement helped to mute the “politics of respectability” somewhat (Harris Reference Harris2012, 115). But it came roaring back due to a number of factors discussed in my book.
The emergence of postracial black politicians is part of the grand narrative of race and the carceral state. But that narrative has played out in varied ways depending on the specific institutional and political context. As I demonstrate, the downfall of the Jim Crow regime transformed electoral incentives and institutional arrangements in ways that have been consequential for the carceral state. These transformations help explain considerable local- and state-level differences in the punitive turn.
I do not, as Murakawa suggests, reject Michelle Alexander’s (Reference Alexander2010) new Jim Crow framework for understanding some of the key causes and consequences of the carceral state. Rather, I see my book as a friendly amendment that situates the new Jim Crow in a more complex economic, political, and institutional framework. I recognize the new Jim Crow as a leading pillar of the carceral state, but not the only pillar.
Caught acknowledges that the historical evidence is overwhelming that racial animus and the quest to preserve white supremacy have been central factors in the development of the U.S. penal system. But it also draws attention to the neglected reality that as the racial order continues to invent new ways to target blacks, it has generated punitive policies and practices that diffuse to other groups in the United States, including immigrants, impoverished whites, and people charged with sex offenses. I devote a whole chapter to the ways that the law enforcement and immigration enforcement systems are converging and how mass incarceration has facilitated mass deportations in which Latinos are the leading targets. Excavating the ways in which the cruel, dehumanizing, and unjust policies and institutions of the carceral state have diffused to other groups does not negate the stark fact that blacks have been and remain key targets of the carceral state.
In her review, Murakawa asks whether Caught is a call to “decenter analysis of racism from agendas to dismantle the carceral state.” My answer is an emphatic no. As I note at several points, racial disparities and racial factors more broadly must remain a central part of analyses of the carceral state and mobilizations against it. But as I discuss at length in Chapter 6, establishing the fact and extent of racial disparities in punishment often comes at the cost of understanding the underlying causes of those disparities and why they can persist or deepen in the face of dramatic changes in the political, economic, social, and institutional context.
Sociologist Barrington Moore once railed against political culture explanations that assumed a cultural inertia and that neglected how political conflicts, institutional developments, and shifting elite interests transmit certain values from one generation to the next. He said: “To maintain and transmit a value system, human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology” (Moore Reference Moore1967, 486). Ditto for the maintenance and transmission of racial disparities and racial hierarchies.
Racism tells us everything about American political development and yet tells us very little. The racially disparate mistreatment of blacks is a primordial stain on the United States that long predates the country’s founding. But proclaiming that fact on its own will do little to change that reality or end the prison boom.
Dismantling the carceral state depends on having a nuanced understanding of what created it in the first place and what sustains it today. As I show in Caught, racial factors have trumped economic or institutional factors at certain moments. At other times, it has been vice versa. But in many instances, it is misleading to consider any one of these factors to the neglect of the other two.
As for solutions, Caught ends on a call for convulsive politics from below, not presidential salvation from above, to roll back the carceral state. Murakawa makes too much of my brief reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the concluding pages. FDR was but one thread in a tapestry dominated by a discussion of the vital role that social and political movements must play if we are to dismantle the carceral state. In this and other works (Gottschalk Reference Gottschalk2000; Reference Gottschalk2006), I have repeatedly emphasized the critical role that radical, nonparty organizations have played in pushing mainstream political leaders and organizations to take bolder steps toward addressing racial, economic, and other injustices.
Massive numbers of Americans mobilized in unions, women’s organizations, veterans’ groups, senior citizen associations, and civil rights organizations to ensure that the country switched course during the 1930s. These movements were essential in forcing FDR to embrace confrontational “bring it on” politics, rather than pursue Obama-esque split-the-difference-without-making-much-of-a-difference politics. Yes, Social Security was flawed at its inception, and yes, FDR’s silence on antilynching legislation was reprehensible. But the New Deal political moment opened up important institutional and political space over the long term to establish a wider social safety net and to expand the role of the federal government in the enforcement of civil rights (for example, with the creation of the Civil Liberties Section in the Department of Justice under Frank Murphy, FDR’s second attorney general). These developments greatly benefited many African Americans. Without pressure from more radical movements, the New Deal would have been even more truncated and its consequences even more racially disparate.
The three most successful periods of black political mobilization—Reconstruction, the Progressive era, and the combined civil rights and Black Power era—“were all marked by innovative initiatives in black civil society, a growing and robust black public sphere,” and an active radical flank (Dawson Reference Dawson2011, 166). These movements did not single-mindedly focus on the problem of racial disparities and inequities but sought to forge a broader political agenda centered on racial, social, and economic justice.
Since publishing The New Jim Crow, Alexander has become an outspoken advocate of forging a political movement to challenge the carceral state that is more encompassing than the race-centered approach she appeared to be endorsing in her book (Alexander Reference Alexander2013; Reference Alexander2015). In an article she wrote in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she called for a more ambitious movement to end mass incarceration (2013). She said that the movement needs to “connect the dots” between racial injustice and economic and social injustice. Otherwise, even if we do end mass incarceration, a “new system of racial and social control will simply be erected in its place.”
