Expanding carceral geographies: challenging mass incarceration and creating a "community orientation" towards juvenile delinquency

Abstract

Abstract. Increasingly, governments are adopting alternative strategies to mass incarceration and drawing on the rhetoric of community to create softer and less restrictive sanctions. This paper argues that this transition provides an opportunity for geographers concerned with incarceration to consider a more expansive understanding of the carceral state. To call for a more geographically expansive consideration of incarceration, this paper draws upon a study of one juvenile court that sought to end racialized over-incarceration by promoting a "community orientation". As a consequence, juvenile detention now acts as a single node in a broader process of sorting, placing, and punishing, but the carceral aspects of juvenile court involvement did not lessen. Instead, the community orientation encapsulated a range of practices that are traditionally outside the state, yet extended the power of the state over a broad geography that resulted in the coerced mobility of children and subjection to greater insecurity. By tracing how the carceral apparatus extends into neighborhoods, community programs, probation practices, and residential placement, I argue that paying more attention to variegated carceral practices is necessary to more fully consider how incarceration has permeated places outside the prison.

Law, necropolitics and the stop and search of young people

“…He identifies stop and search, and the policing of the young in general, as liable to result in such deprivations and pains. There is some convergence with the observations of other scholars, such as Hannah-Moffat and Lynch (2012: 119), who have called on criminologists to think beyond ‘what counts as punishment’ (see also Zedner, 2016), and with calls for a more ‘geographically expansive understanding of the carceral’ to explain carceral spaces that extend beyond the prison (Brown, 2014).…”

Relocating the “inmate”: Tracing the geographies of social reproduction in correctional supervision

“…Critical carceral studies have rightly demonstrated the broad reverberations of a racially disparate system of mass imprisonment throughout the prison and far beyond (Beckett and Western, 2001;Brown, 2014;Clear, 2009;Crenshaw, 2012;Davis, 2003;Gilmore, 2007;Stanley, 2011). Mass imprisonment is complexly intertwined with housing segregation, as scholars such as Rashad Shabazz (2015) demonstrate the logics of confinement are in no way limited to the prison.…”

“…Instead, mass imprisonment is a new manifestation of a broader culture of surveillance, confinement, and Jim Crow in the United States (Alexander, 2010;McKittrick, 2011;Sudbury, 2005). Collectively, this body of work makes clear the porous nature of the prison (Garland, 2002;Sudbury, 2005) and the capitalistic impulses and neoliberalizing logics that drive its ever-growing expansion to a wider swath of the population (Brown, 2014;Martin and Mitchelson, 2009;Schept, 2015). The drive for austerity will transform the prison, but will it eliminate it?…”

“…Through shifting care, the state can contract with companies to surveil in new, more technologically sophisticated ways that are not as visible as the prison walls but insidious nonetheless (Alexander, 2018). Through her study of juvenile justice reforms, Brown (2014) argues this creates a carceral society as carceral power moves into the community. Parole supervision in Pennsylvania has parallel effects.…”

The rise of the tent ward: Homeless camps in the era of mass incarceration

“…Thus, the prison is a model that influences a variety of "quasicarceral spaces" (Moran, et al, 2017, p. 14). Based on this understanding, geographers have highlighted the diffuse nature of carceral space itself (Gill, 2103;Brown, 2014;Moran, 2015). Indeed, entire neighborhoods can become quasi-carceral when residents are subjected to intense and targeted policing (Davis, 1990;Peck and Theodore, 2008).…”