Interinstitutionality as a Mechanism of Carceral Continuity and Carceral Control

• In Event: Roundtable: (Re)Theorizing "The Prison" as an Institution

Abstract

My paper advances a theory of interinstitutionality to analyze the prison not as an isolated institution, but as a node within a wider network of organizations that together sustain carceral governance. While Loïc Wacquant has theorized the “carceral continuum,” Stanley Cohen mapped the dispersal of control across institutional domains, and Jonathan Simon describes how American society is being “governed through crime,” this paper extends such insights by offering a framework for analyzing how ideas, cases, and resources flow across institutional boundaries—linking prisons to sites like hospitals, housing programs, and welfare offices. Interinstitutionality highlights how the prison boom created not only more prisons, but deeper and more durable institutional entanglements that reproduce carceral logics beyond the penal sphere. Using aging incarcerated populations as a case study, the paper shows how carceral institutions have grown interdependent with institutions ostensibly outside the criminal legal system. This perspective reframes the study of mass incarceration, revealing how institutional linkages enable the persistence of carceral control even in the face of decarceral reforms.

Author

• Zachary Psick, We Are All Students