Browsing by Subject "Incarceration"

Is imprisonment democratic? On the one hand, incarceration is a space of democratic inequality. Disenfranchised from voting, left off juries, and restricted in speech, the prisoner is excluded from the democratic community. On the other hand, incarceration has a long association with democratic self-rule, a place where the demos (or people) have condemned the guilty and strived to reform the redeemable. By turning to accounts of incarceration and democracy in Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Y. Davis, I analyze the prison as both a site of democratic inequality and constitutive of democratic politics. This dissertation reconstructs the long history of incarceration in democratic political thought, showing how the prison has been thought to instantiate democracy (Plato) and enhance democratic citizenship (Tocqueville), yet also criticized as violating norms of political equality (Du Bois) and political freedom (Davis) latent in democratic self-rule. I argue that this paradoxical relationship raises broader questions about the meaning of democracy and the future of incarceration in democratic politics.

The dissertation considers how young people in northern Uganda navigate post-conflict life through participant observation, interviews, and ethnographic focus groups with youth working as security guards, current and formerly incarcerated youth, and young people seeking employment in South Sudan. It offers a detailed, sustained view into the everyday practices young people undertake to envision a future after prolonged civil conflict despite intense social, political, and economic constraints. I worked extensively with individuals who occupied different positions of vulnerability and security in order to investigate how these categories overlapped and intertwined in their daily lives. By doing so, the research makes broader interventions into theories of youth and of post-conflict recovery including how individuals encounter post-war legal authority, how humanitarian interventions impact intergenerational and familial relationships, and what strategies young people employ when the resources and opportunities afforded to them through the expansive humanitarian network that once surrounded them leaves the region, or transforms into something else entirely. I argue that the constraints young people face, coupled with the state’s attempt to securitize them as a potentially destabilizing political and economic force, generate impossible predicaments which often require them to take on increasingly dangerous risks, which in turn open them up to further securitization in a cycle that leaves young people unable to build anything but fraught futures despite being the future of the nation. A central aim of my research was to destabilize the "post" in post-conflict, not only to point to the ways in which conflict has afterlives (which is well treaded territory in anthropology) but also to disrupt the clean temporality the term presumes. I argue that young people do not take the “post” as a new dawn from which to build possibility, but instead draw on their past experiences to make sense of the present despite the uncertainty of the future. Building on other recent scholarship, my research interrogates the durability of the "post" as a way of opening up pathways which young people (and others) draw on to make sense of their daily lives.

“Silencing the Cell Block” examines the relationship between imprisoned activists and civil liberties lawyers from the 1960s to the present in order to solve a puzzle central to the United States’ peculiar criminal justice system: Why do American prisons, despite affording inmates expansive due process protections, continue to punish more harshly than their counterparts in any Western country? To answer this question, “Silencing the Cell Block” begins by tracing the emergence of an interracial movement to unionize imprisoned workers in North Carolina and across the nation. Inspired by robust public sector labor and Black Power organizing campaigns, inmates sought a wide range of improvements, including freedom from racism and violence, fair wages, the abolition of large penal institutions, and a voice in prison governance. It then demonstrates how lawyers’ efforts to establish due process protections for prisoners unintentionally undermined inmates’ ability to organize and secure more substantive victories. In the early 1970s, civil liberties lawyers, moved by the broader due process revolution, shielded inmates from the worst abuses behind bars by winning cases compelling prisons to institute disciplinary hearings, grievance procedures, and other procedural protections designed to curtail arbitrary authority. At first, state officials adamantly opposed such improvements. But as the prisoners’ movement garnered strength and courts threatened increased intervention, they came to embrace internal grievance procedures as weapons to defeat inmates’ more sweeping demands. Ultimately, procedural reforms allowed state officials to convince judges that state penal institutions operated as modern bureaucracies that complied with the rule of law. By advocating for new procedural protections that offered the appearance—though not always the reality—of justice, civil liberties lawyers sympathetic to the prisoners’ cause helped make America’s severe prison practices more difficult to dismantle.

This dissertation is a social history of the city of Detroit in the 1970s. Using archives official and unofficial - oral histories and archived document collections, self-published memoirs and legal documents, personal papers and the newspapers of the radical press - it portrays a city in flux. It was in the 1970s that the urban crisis in the cities of the United States crested. Detroit, as had been the case throughout the twentieth century, was at the forefront of these changes. This dissertation demonstrates the local social, political, and economic circumstances that contributed to the dramatic increase in prison populations since the 1970s with a focus on the halls of government, the courtroom, and city streets. In the streets, unemployed African American youth organized themselves to counteract the contracted social distribution allocated to them under rapidly changing economic circumstances. They organized themselves for creative expression, protection and solidarity in a hostile city, and to pursue economic endeavors in the informal economy. They sometimes committed crimes. In the courts, Wayne County Juvenile Court Judge James Lincoln, a liberal Democrat long allied with New Deal political alliances, became disenchanted with rehabilitative solutions to juvenile delinquency and embraced more punitive measures, namely incarceration. In city hall, Coleman Young, the city's first African American mayor, confronted this crisis with a form of policing that concentrated predominately on the city's unemployed African American youth, and the result was the criminalization of poverty and race we have come to understand as mass incarceration.