The Interinstitutionality of Carceral Continuity: A New Perspective on Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Race, Social Structure, and Collateral Consequences

Abstract

Aging U.S. prison populations present an empirical puzzle, as criminology has long held that most people stop offending by their late 20s. “Graying” prisons are part of a broader phenomenon - mass incarceration - which arguably endures not because of crime, but due to institutional linkages that create and sustain long-term criminal legal involvement. I introduce interinstitutionality as a framework for explaining “carceral continuity,” drawing on new institutionalism and research on criminal legal expansion and carceral governance. This perspective reveals how prisons function as part of a ubiquitous system of control extending into education, healthcare, social services, and other institutions ostensibly designed for support and reintegration. I distinguish between structural interinstitutionality, which captures the formal and informal pathways through which people, resources, and logics flow between institutions, and constructivist interinstitutionality, referring to the reciprocal process through which institutions, organizations, and actors are shaped by the interpretation of ideas, identities, and resources as they flow across institutional boundaries. Thus, as an analytical tool, interinstitutionality enables both quantitative and qualitative inquiry into the institutional structures that perpetuate carceral continuity. By theorizing interinstitutionality as a driver of carceral continuity, this study provides a new framework for understanding why mass incarceration endures despite reform efforts.

Author

• Zachary Psick, We Are All Students