A State of Disruption: Crime Control, Social Welfare Policy, and the Construction of “Carceral Citizenship"

• In Event: Criminal Justice Involvement as Disruption

Abstract

This paper draws on data from life history interviews with “repeat offenders” to show how repeated terms of confinement alter their social lives and at the same time demonstrate the role, force and consequence of the state in the lives of the urban poor. I interviewed men held in a large “closed” prison facility in Belgrade, Serbia; men recently released from custody who cycle between the pub, prison and their disadvantaged postal code in the city of Glasgow and the former shipping town of Greenock, Scotland; and male “detainees” and “parole violators” in Detroit, Michigan. Tracking the lives of these men across two continents and three nations, each with vastly different approaches to crime control and social welfare policy, I show how the state, through its presence and absence has rendered the criminalized poor as a materially and symbolically stranded cast-away social category (i.e. the offender), and signaled the emergence of a new form of citizenship activated by the presumption of legal guilt. I use the narratives of these men to trace the contours of what I refer to as “carceral citizenship,” and detail its implications for how we understand poverty, criminality, social difference and the “state.”

Author

• Reuben J. Miller, University of Michigan