The Punishing State: Punishment, Social Control, and Social Services

• In Event: Race and Gender Theories of Punishment, Predation, and Political Imagination

Abstract

The United States is excessively punitive. More people are held in prisons in the U.S. than in any other country on record. Public assistance programs are deeply restrictive. The U.S. has the highest rate of initiated eviction proceedings among all OECD countries. As attention to punitive exposures has grown, researchers have presented theories to explain how, why, and when the U.S. made this turn. Common explanations tend to focus on singular sites of punishment or a specific set of policies at a specific time. This project tells the story of how North Carolina evolved over a century to punish its residents across multiple domains. Specifically, I outline four distinct time periods when social services were developed and demonstrate that the combination of anti-black and pro-capitalist policies resulted in a web of systems that simultaneously punish black and poor people. By moving beyond the criminal legal system as the primary site of punishment, I demonstrate that though political science has done a fantastic job in being able to document the inequalities of the legal system, in order to better understand the range of ways in which the state imposes violence and social control on its residents, we must expand our imagination to include punishments that haven’t been counted as such within the profession.

Author

• Kaneesha Johnson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill