Progressive sheriffs as counter-insurgency: Carceral humanism and state care

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Policing

Abstract

According to research by the Vera Institute, rates of imprisonment in the U.S. over the past ten years have dropped or leveled off in many jurisdictions; yet jail growth has expanded, with jail capacity growing an astonishing 277 percent since 1970. Jailing and unjailing care examines how county sheriffs, faced with a political crisis of legitimacy from below and an economic crisis from above, are incorporating narratives and practices of “care” into the material and discursive labor of human caging. These efforts recast the jail as a form of community care. This is what formerly incarcerated organizer and scholar James Kilgore calls “carceral humanism.” Using ethnography, archival research, and interviews with activists and sheriffs, I study these state-organized efforts to recast the role of the jail as a “caring institution,” thereby co-opting language that is frequently deployed by organizers to argue for the demise of the jail altogether. Thinking dialectically, I take as a point of departure Saidiya Hartman’s claim that “care is the antidote to violence.” This paper builds on my theory of “insurgent safety” (McDowell 2017) to consider the biopolitical duplicity of care, as both a tool of state violence and as a form of refusal.

Author

• Meghan G. McDowell, Northern Arizona University