‘A lockdown facility … with the feel of a small, private college’: Liberal politics, jail expansion, and the carceral habitus
| Author | Judah Schept |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612463113 |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
17(1) 71 –88
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480612463113
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‘A lockdown facility … with the
feel of a small, private college’:
Liberal politics, jail expansion,
and the carceral habitus
Judah Schept
Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Abstract
While scholarship has identified neoliberalism, punitive and racialized public policy, and
a supportive culture of punishment as giving rise to mass incarceration in the United
States, little work has examined how communities come to participate in the production
of the carceral state. Using an ethnographic case study of a proposed ‘justice campus’,
a carceral expansion project in a politically progressive Midwestern city, this article
illuminates the capacity of mass incarceration to structure individual and community
dispositions and, in doing so, to imbue even oppositional politics. At the same time,
communities may adopt, reformulate, and rearticulate the symbolic work and material
manifestations of mass incarceration in order to fit specific political-cultural contexts.
As such, this article argues that mass incarceration is both more forceful and more
subject to diverse and context-specific formulations than has been previously argued.
The corporal and discursive inscription of carcerality into individual and community
bodies suggests the presence of a carceral habitus and offers one way to comprehend
not only mass incarceration’s pervasive presence, but also its hegemonic operations
even among and through people and communities who purport to reject it.
Keywords
County jails, ethnography, habitus, mass incarceration, punishment
Corresponding author:
Judah Schept, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Stratton Building 467, Richmond, KY
40475, USA.
Email: Judah.schept@eku.edu
Article
72 Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
Introduction
Extensive carceral expansion in politically liberal communities would seem to contradict
the extant literature on mass incarceration. The rich and compelling work examining the
rise of the carceral state indicts punitive public policy and political ideologies (Clear,
1994; Currie, 1998; Garland, 2001), neoliberal globalization (Gilmore, 2007), the bar-
rage of cultural representations of crime and punishment (Brown, 2009; Kappeler and
Potter, 2004), and various combinations thereof (Donziger, 1996; Simon, 2007; Western,
2006) as instantiating an American hunger for more prisons.1 Recent slight declines in
the prison population notwithstanding, the implications of this oeuvre point toward a
body politic responsive to punitive imprisonment discourses and practices and to contin-
ued carceral growth.
Some scholars have observed that liberal politicians have often advocated for contin-
ued prison expansion and harsh legislation in their efforts to match or outdo conserva-
tives on punitive criminal justice policy. Alexander (2010: 7) and Gottschalk (2006: 10)
offer historical perspectives on the complicity of liberals in both opening the door for and
then actively championing penal growth. Feldman et al. (2001) offer a particular (and
particularly poignant) focus on Bill Clinton as ‘the Incarceration President’. Simon
(2007: 59) also notes Clinton’s strategy to match or outdo George HW Bush on punitive-
ness.2 The role of liberal politicians, it would seem, has been to support carceral growth
through endorsing the same rhetoric and policy as the Right.
Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Midwestern and politically
liberal Lincoln County,3 this article examines one community’s attempt at dramatic
carceral expansion in the form of a ‘justice campus’. In the county, which is home to the
city of Springfield and the large University of Springfield, the liberal and leftist com-
munity leaders at the forefront of advocacy for the justice campus were also unabashed
and informed critics of mass incarceration. In their words, the justice campus would
express the distinct nature of local progressive politics, eschewing punishment for reha-
bilitation, and in the process, reduce recidivism, heal drug addiction, and provide much
needed education. Indeed, in the very name ‘justice campus’, officials mapped the
bucolic and collegiate identity of the community onto their proposal for the most drastic
expansion of carceral control in county history. In their constructions of the campus and
the population imagined to reside there, officials articulated that county carcerality
existed outside of, and in resistance to, the practices of mass incarceration that they
disdained.
Utilizing ethnographic content from my time in the field, this article theorizes the
apparent discontinuities in politics and discourse between mass incarceration in the
United States and local carceral expansion in Springfield and the surrounding Lincoln
County. Borrowing from Carolyn Nordstrom’s (2007) concept of il/legal, the term she
employs to describe the permeable and even collapsed borders between legal and illegal
channels through which commodities travel, I argue that local officials’ abilities to advo-
cate carceral expansion and simultaneously criticize the prison industrial complex dem-
onstrate a dis/juncture: a disposition toward incarceration and punishment that is at once
distinct and, crucially, bounded by and inscribed with the logics and practices of mass
incarceration.
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