Towards a Conceptualization of the University & the Carceral State

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Coloniality and Carcerality

Abstract

For some, the carceral state is a powerful heuristic to articulate how “institutions, people,
and processes embody logics, practices, and technologies of prison” (Martensen 2020: 1).
Yet, for others it remains imprecisely or inadequately defined, inconsistently employed,
and ‘political’. Some have sought to develop ideas such as the ‘shadow carceral state’
(Beckett and Murakawa 2012) to advance conceptualizations and account for how carceral
logics and practices have become enmeshed with other state agencies and institutions. In
this paper, I develop a conceptual understanding of the carceral state that accounts for the
co-constitutive force of the university, and particularly the discipline of criminology.
Specifically, I work to bridge scholarship within the fields broadly understood as critical
carceral studies and critical university studies to account for the nexuses between
institutions and actors that operate within these spaces. To do this, I ground these
conceptualizations in scholarship on settler colonialism and racial capitalism. This work
seeks to advance criminological scholarship on legitimations of carcerality, and seeks to
extend scholarship on the university as a state entity. I argue that criminology is part of the
carceral state – both through its development as a discipline, and through its institutional
home in the neoliberal university.

Author

• Mitra Mokhtari, University of Toronto