Policing the Carceral State: Prisons and Panic in an Upstate New York Prison Town

Abstract

Following the massive prison expansion in New York State in the 1980s, there has been a growing panic that families of men incarcerated in two state prisons in Elmira, New York are relocating to Elmira and utilizing the city's welfare benefits and causing crime. Like in many other Rust Belt towns, prisons were constructed as economic development projects in this small, multi‐racial city, but failed to fulfill the promise of economic recovery. I highlight prison expansion and maintenance as a site of racialization that obscures the history of Black Elmirans and renders people outsiders in their own places. I show how prison workers extend and limit the practice of carceral state making in order to show how the carceral state takes shape in the post‐Fordist era.

Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID‐19 in British prisons

“… 3 3 ‘The carceral aspects of the state – or what we call simply the carceral state – is the state at its most coercive: cement and steel bars, cuffs, batons, and an arsenal of weapons held by police, parole officers, and prisons to maintain control over those members of society deemed most in need of containment’ (Morrell, 2018, p. 51). …”