The punishment marketplace: Competing for capitalized power in locally controlled immigration enforcement

Abstract

Neoliberal economics play a significant role in US social organization, imposing market logics on public services and driving the cultural valorization of free market ideology. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around the social control of the underclass—among them unauthorized immigrants. This work lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace: a conceptualization of how US systems of punishment both enable the neoliberal project of inequality, and are themselves subject to market colonization. The theory describes the rescaling of federal authority to local centers of political power. Criminal justice policy activism by local governments is punishment entrepreneurship: an accumulative approach to securing fiscal gain, political hegemony, security, and capitalized power. Local immigration enforcement entrepreneurship targets unauthorized and other deportable immigrants. This punitive immigration control reinforces racially structured social relations by obscuring the diminishing returns neoliberal globalization provides working class whites.

The Politics of Punishment and Protection: A Comparative Historical Analysis of American Immigration Control, 1990–2017

“…When immigration becomes a “criminal” problem that entails punishment and control, immigration governance opens up a “punishment market” in which local immigration enforcement and private prison companies operate (Stageman ). Since the late 1990s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS; located in the Department of Homeland Security) has thrown a bone to the financially troubled private prison industry and offered prison contracts to detain and incarcerate undocumented immigrants.…”

Enhancing Police Accountability and Legitimacy

“…Governance structures that protect the power and privilege of private interests and promote White supremacy have historically designed and empowered policing agencies that do the same (Brucato, 2014;Hawkins & Thomas, 1991/2013. Socially harmful actions and deviant behaviors on the part of the wealthy, White, and politically enfranchised are routinely overlooked, while crime and criminality are defined expressly to control the activities of immigrants, the poor, and communities of color-and in particular to facilitate the exploitation of these groups, as laborers and in more novel ways (Stageman, 2019).…”