Really interesting piece from Reuben Jonathan Miller, a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago, reblogged from the “Discovering Desistance” website related to Fergus McNeill, Stephen Farrall, Claire Lightowler and Shadd Maruna’s ESRC Knowledge Exchange Project.
Carceral Politics are Local too: Racial geography and prisoner reentry in the USA.
Some scholarly attention has been given to the historic increase in the U.S. prison population, the selective targeting of poor Black (and Latino) men, and the historic prison expansion project, with more prisons being built in the last three decades than in the entire history of the country. Scholars and activists alike have long attributed this “race to incarcerate” to backlash from the civil rights movement, “law and order” politics, and the unlikely agreement of policy makers and academics that rehabilitation has been “utterly abandoned.” These “truths” about mass (or hyper) incarceration have been taken for granted for nearly two decades. I argue, however, that there’s more to this story. Rehabilitation did not die in the U.S., the U.S. has simply changed the way it rehabilitates, increasing the already long reach of the penal state into the lives of the urban poor….
Read more here
Carceral Geography 