Mapping Carceral Landscapes

• In Event: 20401 - Incarceration and the Long Shadow of Punishment

Abstract

The criminal legal system is formally responsible for crime control in the U.S. However distinct ideological and governance shifts extended the controlling, surveilling, and punishing arms of the criminal legal system (i.e., carceral logics) across other social institutions, including the child welfare system, welfare, immigration, education, and healthcare. The integration of these policy ideologies and practices across a range of social institutions blur their respective boundaries (and goals) with those of the formal criminal legal system. Using 11 sources state-level data, the present study explores how states construct their “carceral landscapes” and utilize these carceral logics across institutions that compose the carceral state. Results reveal that states mobilize carceral logics across institutions to varying degrees. Moreover, using a broader measure of the carceral state reveals diverging patterns that contradict traditional measures of the carceral state (e.g., incarceration). Findings offer support to the growing effort to de-exceptionalize incarceration and the criminal legal system.

Author

• Kendall Riley, University of Iowa