When Safety for You Means Danger for Me: Carceral Logics within Public Safety Discourse

• In Event: Lightning Talk: The Criminalization, Marginalization, and Experiences of Racial/Ethnic Groups in the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

How do public policies dictate which groups get to feel vs. be safe? In this conceptual paper, we explore how public safety is a political project that reflects dominant ideologies and serves state interests. We first discuss three dominant ideologies that are embedded within public safety discourse: permanent bad guy syndrome, victimization-fear paradox, and politics of ideal victimhood. Together, these ideologies help to shape carceral public safety frameworks. We then illuminate some of the underlying assumptions within carceral public safety frameworks and their implications for responses to public safety concerns, including elevating the safety concerns of dominant groups while criminalizing undesirable bodies, legitimizing suspicion and surveillance, and altering public spaces. In doing so, we highlight how carceral public safety frameworks reflect and reinforce existing injustices while also contributing to the stigmatization, marginalization, and manufactured precarity of social groups deemed undesirable and therefore unworthy of protection. We conclude with a discussion of alternative models of public safety which are rooted in life-affirming frameworks (Gilmore, as cited in Davis et al., 2022, p. 51), which focus on improving people’s material conditions as a means of lessening and preventing the likelihood and impact of interpersonal violence.

Authors

• Vero Rabelo, San Francisco State University

• Jerome Stewart, University of San Francisco

• William Snowden, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law

• Sarah Fathallah, Independent Researcher