Cumulative Punishment: The Carceral State Expanded

• In Event: Making and Unmaking Carceral Power: Imagining New Modes of Justice

Abstract

In recent decades, levels of incarceration and interactions with the law enforcement system have reached unprecedented heights and have subsequently garnered increased attention among social scientists. In seeking to understand the causes and consequences of punishment, scholars have paid acute attention to the law enforcement system—the courts, the police, and incarceration. However; the existence and practice of punishment have long been a feature of multiple systems in the United States. In order to understand the full extent of punishment and the impact that it has on people who experience it, it is necessary to look at the way that punishment cumulates across various systems, including, but not limited to, capitalist structures, welfare services, child services, and immigration enforcement.
In this paper, I will join the line of community organizers and university-based scholars who wish to better understand and combat the multiple vantage points of punishment and how it shapes the lives of those most harshly affected by it. There are three specific aims of this paper; first, by tracing trends of punishment across different systems and the rules and laws that impose punishment, I will show that punishment has become and remains a key character of multiple systems that people in the United States interact with. Second, I will show that punishment both within and across various systems tend to be concentrated on Black people and those living in lower-income neighborhoods, exhibiting a cumulative effect. Finally, I will discuss the implication that this has on the academic study of the causes and consequences of punishment in the United States.

Author

• Kaneesha Johnson, Harvard University