The United States is covered by an extensive, overlapping, and expanding policing apparatus. This has produced the world's largest prison population: every day more than 2 million people--mostly black, brown, or poor--are barred somewhere within the nation's vast archipelago of prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Unsurprisingly, mass incarceration has had cascading implications for urban and suburban spaces, family lives, national borders, and the shape of the U.S. economy and American democracy. This special issue of the Journal of American History examines how the carceral state emerged in the early republic, was consolidated in the nineteenth century, and underwent phenomenal expansion during the twentieth century. The contributors to this special issue take an expansive approach to the historical drivers of the carceral state and consider topics including the role of incarcerated black women, the rise of undocumented Latinos in the prison system, the role of white suburban drug use and the crack epidemic in the racialized war on drugs, and how prison building drove the political economy of the sun belt.Full content (gated) is available here.
Articles
"Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State," by Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson
"African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection," by Kali Nicole Gross
"Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America," by Jeffrey S. Adler
"Youth of Color and California's Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility," by Miroslava Chávez-García
"Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States," by Timothy Stewart-Winter
"We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners' Rights Movement," by Robert T. Chase
"Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States," by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
"'A War within Our Own Boundaries': Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State," by Elizabeth Hinton
"Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State," by Alex Lichtenstein
"Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs," by Matthew D. Lassiter
"Deportability and the Carceral State," by Torrie Hester
"Objects of Police History," by Micol Seigel
"Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs," by Donna Murch
"The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post-World War II America," by Edward J. Escobar
Friday, July 3, 2015
June Issue of the Journal of American History: Historians and the Carceral State
The June 2015 issue of the Journal of American History is a special issue on Historians and the Carceral State, produced in consultation with guest editors Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson. From the Journal:
