Making and Unmaking Carceral Power: Imagining New Modes of Justice

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel offers novel, cutting-edge scholarship that critiques and conceptualizes carceral power, while also imagining non-carceral or abolitionist alternatives. These papers ask and answer a series of interrelated questions: How has the power of the carceral state been exerted, sustained or solidified through carceral reform? How can we understand the full extent and impact of punishment, through its multiple vantage points, and how it shapes the lives of those most harshly affected by it? How do personal experiences with racial threat produce abolitionist commitments? How do those imprisoned by the carceral state resist and transform its exclusionary effects through collective political action? The papers in this panel represent a diversity of qualitative and normative methodological approaches and perspectives. Kirstine Taylor uses archival work and case studies in the U.S. south to demonstrate how carceral modernization and reform leads to the expansion of the punitive power of the state. Jenn M. Jackson uses interviews with 100 Black Americans to show us how radical abolitionist ideals are shaped, highlighting in particular the role of Black women. David Knight draws on participation-observation and interviews in a prison to show how political education and collective action unfold among incarcerated Black Americans. Kaneesha Johnson theorizes how punishment in the U.S. cumulates across various systems, including capitalist structures, welfare services, child services, and immigration enforcement. Crucially, this panel features the work of emerging and established Black scholars, who themselves center the lived experience of Black life as a key component of conversations around justice, abolition and political action.

Sub Unit

• Division 42: New Political Science

Individual Presentations

• Mobilizations from Within: Black Political Organizing in Prisons - David Jonathan Knight, University of Chicago

• Cumulative Punishment: The Carceral State Expanded - Kaneesha Johnson, Harvard University

• Southern Carceral Power From the Chain Gang to the Modern Carceral State - Kirstine Taylor, Ohio University

• Speaking Truth to Power: How Racial Threat Shapes Political Beliefs - Jenn M. Jackson, Syracuse University

Chair

• Deva Woodly New School for Social Research

Discussants

• Farah Godrej University of California, Riverside

• Naomi Murakawa Princeton University