The Problem with “Mass Incarceration”
Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it….[I]t is important for us to recognize that violence in our communities is serious and that historically, in fact, the African American community oftentimes was under-policed rather than over-policed. Folks were very interested in containing the African American community so it couldn’t leave segregated areas, but within those areas there wasn’t enough police presence.[i]
-President Barack Obama, Remarks to the NAACP in 2015
It is the moment in which the organic intellectuals and figureheads of the racist state—even and especially in its post-racialist and multiculturalist forms—begin to use the ostensibly critical language of “mass incarceration” that we must admit to ourselves that the term may have reached its point of explanatory and analytical obsolescence (that is, if it ever adequately explained and analyzed anything to begin with). The reformist narrative of mass incarceration endorses a statecraft of policing that skillfully links liberal post-Civil Rights racial sympathy and the long historical fact of racist (anti-Black) state repression to adamant demands for carceral downsizing and a kinder, gentler, expanded cultural and martial infrastructure of law-and-order policing. As a consequence, the logic of mass incarceration reform is generally symbiotic with demands for more and better policing, sometimes issued by ostensible spokespeople of police-occupied communities themselves.
Consider a different critical activist task, undertaken for the sake of offering an insurgent, radical story against the reformist rhetoric of “mass incarceration”: to define “incarceration” against its juridical-cultural normalization as such.
Defining “Incarceration”
Incarceration is legitimated state violence, mobilizing the power of law, policing, and (gendered racial) common sense to produce, fortify, and/or militarize the geographic isolation and (collective) bodily immobilization of targeted human groups.
A strategic focus on the particular US carceral formation of jails, prisons, and detention centers in the late-20th and early-21st centuries enables a historically supple and geographically dynamic understanding of incarceration that can be utilized across different historical conditions and sociopolitical/cultural contexts. By any historical measure, the institutional formation of incarceration within the specific purviews of US criminal justice statecraft has produced a social logic, jurisprudence, cultural structure, and militarized policing apparatus that naturalizes the condition of state captivity for criminalized people, populations, and geographies.[ii]
All available empirical and archival accounts affirm that the institutional capacity, racialized asymmetry, geographic scale, multi-generational impact, and sheer longevity of US incarcerating technologies stand alone in recorded human history, particularly in the realm of jails and prisons. Further, the astronomical growth of this carceral regime since the 1970s cannot be attributed to any growth in “crime rates” (which have in fact declined over the period in question).[iii] A vast archive of criminological data consistently demonstrates that this institutional form of incarceration is structured in gendered racist state violence,[iv] suggesting that there is a much longer story to be told.
Modern US incarceration is structured by a long, overlapping history of complex interactions between gendered racist chattel and colonial power. The roots of the US carceral regime are global, emerging through two fundamental relations of dominance: 1) the historical technologies of captivity that structured the Transatlantic Middle Passage and the hemispheric racial chattel enslavement of African-descended peoples; and 2) the geographic-ecological production of the Western Civilizational project via the Treaty of Tordesillas, Manifest Destiny, and the manifold forms of conquest that have produced the (continuing and continuous) carceral subjection of Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples via reservations, nation-state borders, notions of “the frontier,” and other incarcerating measures.
Thus, “incarceration” is not a self-contained or historically isolated practice of legitimated state violence. Incarceration is not reducible to the particular institutional forms of jails, prisons, detention centers, and other such brick-and-mortar incarcerating facilities (and their corresponding juridical protocols). Rather, incarceration is best understood as a systemic logic and institutional methodology that produces and coheres spatial, cultural, and juridical structures of human dominance within specific social and state formations:[v] incarceration takes the form of narrative, juridical, spatial, and sociopolitical processes through which criminalized or otherwise (ontologically and socio-culturally) pathologized populations are rendered collective targets of state-sanctioned social liquidation and political neutralization. This may or may not involve premature physiological death and militarized killing. Crucially, the immediate and accumulated individual and collective experiences of incarceration, however, are consistently articulated by (formerly) incarcerated people in the vernaculars of domestic war, survival, and involuntary intimacy with constant bodily and spiritual vulnerabilities to violence and degradation.[vi]
Contrary to being a scandalous excess of the racial/racist state in the post-civil rights period, incarceration is thus more accurately understood as a form of normalized warfare against those (human) beings that embody the gendered-racial symbolic orders of death, pathology, and unassimilability into the order of Civilization, an order that thrives in the long historical disordering, immobilization, and/or (attempted) destruction of other human societies. Any attempt to conceptualize the ongoing formation and geographic metastasizing of incarcerating regimes requires that the labors of dynamic critical theorization and conceptual reflection be situated in the radical possibility that the historical targets of incarceration are also the complex embodiment of its imminent undoing, hence its abolition as such.
References
[i] Ibid.
[ii] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
[iii] Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics. “Estimated Crime in the United States: Total (1970-2014).” Washington, DC: US Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/ucrdata/Search/Crime/State/RunCrimeStatebyState.cfm (accessed January 30, 2017).
[iv] The Sentencing Project, “Criminal Justice Facts.” http://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ (accessed January 31, 2017). Christopher Hartney and Linh Vuong, “Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the US Criminal Justice System.” National Council on Crime and Delinquency report. March 2009.
[v] See Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Joy James, Ed.) (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) p. 74-95; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Group, 2007); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1995); David Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; Nils Christie. Crime Control As Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style. London: Routledge, 2000; Loyd, Jenna M, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
[vi] See by way of recent example: Bukhari, Safiya. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York City: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2010. Conway, Marshall, and Dominque Stevenson. Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther. Oakland: AK Press, 2011. Peltier, Leonard. Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Live from Death Row. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1995. Rosenblum, Nina. Through the Wire (film). New York: New Video Group, 1991. Shaylor, Cassandra. “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex.” N.e. J. on Crim. & Civ. Con. 24 (1998). 385-416. Childs, Dennis. Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 2015. Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Rodríguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Rodríguez, Dylan. “‘Allow One Photo Per Year’: Prison Strikes (Georgia 2010, California 2011-2012) as Racial Archive, from ‘Post-Civil Rights’ to the Analytics of Genocide.” The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants. John S. W. Park and Shannon Gleeson, eds.. New York: Routledge, 2014. 70-91.
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Workers in food service, maintenance, clerical and technical services are central to the university, but occupy lowest the rungs of the university, often paid a low hourly wage, or with salaries that top out below $50,000 in most cases. This inadequate pay is most felt during the summer breaks as many nonprofessional employees have to find another job in the summertime when campus operations are significantly scaled back. In recent years, outsourcing and subcontracting food services and maintenance have exacerbated these poor conditions. A 2014 study showed that the substantial reduction in wages caused by outsourcing and contracting exacerbates both the gender and race pay gaps. On the clerical and technical side, a model of “shared services” is used to cut costs by centralizing business and IT offices. This practice often results in layoffs of workers and more work for the same pay for those who are left to work in the shared services centers.
As on the academic side, labor in university-hospitals is hierarchically structured and locates women of color in marginalized positions where they do much of the daily care work. Among Registered Nurses, which tend to be the most professionalized care workers, are 91% women, 79% are white, 11% are black, 8% are Asian and 5% Latina. Their average pay is about $71,000/year. In contrast, among “nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides” are 54% white, 37% black, 13% Latina, 5% Asian, and 87% women. These positions tend to pay in the range of $10-12 an hour. The stratified nature of healthcare has proven a difficult place to organize workers and the absence of broad based union drives (as is the case on the academic side) tend to diminish the power of organized labor.
As college and university becomes increasingly unaffordable, work-study programs through which students meet their “student income contribution” are central to financing higher education. For universities, relying on student workers is often a source of casualized labor. For instance, students working in UCLA Dining Halls make $10.50 while the starting wage for full-time workers is $16.32. At wealthier schools with large endowments, student workers have argued that the student income contribution reproduces class inequalities among students as wealthier students do not have to work. In addition to work-study, student athletes also share the conditions of other campus workers. From the contracts they sign before attending the recruiting university to the 50-60 hours of training and game time a week and the profits their sportsmanship brings, there is little difference between college and professional athletes who are understood as workers and unionized in the NFL and NBA.
Almost three quarters of the faculty are currently contingent workers with no access to tenure, a disproportionate number of whom are women and people of color. Women now constitute 51-61% of contingent faculty, a stark contrast to their continued underrepresentation among the ranks of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Underrepresented groups also continue to see increased representation in contingent academic jobs with the pay disparity to match. For instance, part-time black faculty earn significantly less than other racial and ethnic groups. The growing rates of contingent workers along with the central role graduate students play in the work of teaching demonstrates a move towards cheaper sources of instructional labor.
Given the connections between militarism and higher education discussed above, the “global turn” in universities and colleges has largely followed US strategic interests with universities prioritizing the Middle East and China in particular as sites for intellectual exchange and collaboration. In keeping with the marginalization of the African and African Diasporic world in the Americas in US foreign policy, these areas have seen comparatively little engagement from US universities. The global university thus remains only partially global and the consequences of this partiality can be seen in curriculum, faculty hires, and the distribution of resources.
There are over 150 military-educational institutions and according to the American Association of University Professors and hundreds of colleges and universities receive Pentagon funding for research, provide classes to military personnel, create special programs designed to lead to employment in defense industries and support military operations. In the context of limited funding resources, the Pentagon and Department of Defense have stepped up research support and their relationships to Universities now extend to the social sciences and humanities. For example, the Pentagon’s controversial “Human Terrain System” recruited anthropologist and Middle East experts to “decipher” Iraqi and Afghani society at the height of US’s wars in these countries. At times these relationship with the military-industrial complex are parasitic on universities’ rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, a leaked memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Baruch College-CUNY and the Central Intelligence Agency reveals that the CIA has sought recruitment relationships with colleges and universities that have a diverse student body.
As the University physically expands across the world, the creation of new campuses and degree-granting programs has created opportunities for intellectual engagement and interaction, but has also raised a number of ethical questions. For instance, faculty and students criticized Yale’s creation of a liberal arts program in collaboration with National University of Singapore both because of concerns about freedom of speech at the campus and because the decision to create a campus, the costs involved, the nature of the partnership were not subject to faculty oversight, review and/or approval. More recently, an investigation into labor practices during the construction of NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus found that almost 10, 000 workers were not protected by the university’s labor guidelines that set standards for fair wages, hours and living conditions.
Since the calls for divestment from apartheid South Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, student activists have highlighted the deep interconnections between university endowments and systems of injustice and exploitation at home and abroad. Most prominently, campaigns to divest from private prisons and fossil fuels demonstrate the ways that universities investments reproduce logics of inequality and help to bolster an unsustainable economy. These divestment campaigns often face an uphill battle as the structure of investments are often mediated through complex financial arrangements and lack transparency.
Given the racialized disparities in inherited wealth, a history of discrimination by lending agencies and higher borrowing, the dependence on debt to finance higher education places distinctive burdens on students of color and particularly black students. According to Demos, “While less than two-thirds (63%) of white graduates from public schools borrow, four-in-five (81%) of Black graduates do so. Latinx graduates borrow at similar rates and slightly lower amounts than white students.” The same study finds that black and Latinx students are dropping out with debt at higher rates than white students. Moreover students of color are more likely to be delinquent on loan repayments. A study by the economists Marshall Steinbaum and Kavya Vaghul found that zip codes with a high concentration of black and Latinx residents had far higher delinquency rates.
While the expansion of universities is often presented a jobs-creation program, but often the opportunities afforded to residents are low wage jobs with few protections. Due to the monopoly on the surrounding labor market that universities often enjoy, they exploit the labor of neighboring residents, resist the demands of campus-based labor unions, and depress wages. For more information on the labor see the University as Employer section.
With increasing expansion, universities perpetuate and reinforce the criminalization of black and Latinx communities. Urban universities maintain large police and security forces and lobby for city police forces to increase their presence in surrounding neighborhoods. Communities of color near universities are thus subject to the overlapping jurisdictions of university and city police forces, which reinforces the over-policing and surveillance of communities of color. While claiming to be working in service of protecting university property and affiliates, police on campuses have also directed violence towards Black staff, faculty, and students, with little or no recourse for violating their rights.
Private, resource heavy universities engage in a form of hyper-gentrification by using local ordinances, capitalizing on their tax-exempt status, and benefitting from state and federal dollars as well as from private sector partnerships to reshape communities. Through these institutional and financial advantages, universities have widened their neighbor footprints by aggressively purchasing properties in predominantly poor and working class black neighborhoods. Moreover, universities fail to intervene when their students perpetuate housing inequality. In many of the neighborhoods adjacent to urban universities, and within the walls of the amenity-rich, planned apartment communities in smaller college towns, students can often afford to pay higher rents than locals. Landlords seeking to profit from the steady stream of student renters become motivated to push out locals, who increasingly will not be able to afford rising rents. Rarely do residents have the political or economic capital to confront and resist this type of gentrification, and universities have little incentive to stop it, particularly if the private rental market fulfills their student housing short falls.