Punitive Dispossession: Neoliberalism and the Route to Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Dissent and detention: resisting the mass incarceration model

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of punitive dispossession to provoke some reflections about the effects of the prison industrial complex in Mexico. To this day, most scholarly discussions of imprisonment practices in the U.S. revolve around issues of slavery, racism, and the creation of de-nationalized subjects through mass production of “felons.” Yet, little has been said about the ways in which contemporary practices of incarceration function as an effective mechanism of wealth transfer from the poor working classes to the elites. I advance this argument by drawing on contemporary critical approaches to Neoliberalism and by applying the insights of my critical engagement with this concept to the analysis of the prison industrial complex, its constitutive elements and logics, to a specific case of female incarceration in the state of Guanajauto, Mexico. As a neoliberal device, mass incarceration extracts wealth from poor families not only by using prison and the so-called detention centers as endless sources of cheap labor, but also by creating a prison economy sustained by lawyers, police authorities, judges, bailout agencies that work in concert, albeit not in coordination to extract wealth from the poor.

Author

• Elva F Orozco Mendoza, Drexel University