Book Review: Judah Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion
| Author | Michelle S Phelps |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724913 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews for the state of the State Special Issue |
554 Theoretical Criminology 21(4)
Judah Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral
Expansion, New York University Press: New York, 2015; 320 pp., 2 tables: 9781479808779,
$27.00 (soft), 9781479810710 (cloth)
Reviewed by: Michelle S Phelps, University of Minnesota, USA
The story of progressive criminal justice reform gone awry is as old as the prison. Yet
while previous scholars have blamed these failures on the challenges of implementation
or the thwarting of liberal penal goals, a new wave of scholarship lays the blame squarely
on the failures of liberalism itself. These writers identify the potential of radical, rather
than liberal, reform. Judah Schept’s Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and
the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion is an innovative and important entrée into
this argument, focusing on a jail and juvenile detention expansion project in Bloomington,
Indiana, in the late 2000s.
Schept enters this scene as both a co-founder of an activist group challenging the
county’s plan and a doctoral student in Criminal Justice—using a “committed subjectiv-
ity” perspective to analyze county leaders’ push for the new sites and the critical resist-
ance they faced. The state in question is local political and judicial leaders, who are
predominantly white, with the struggle among various shades of liberal Democrats
(rather than between Democrats and Republicans). During the course of the fieldwork,
county leaders propose a “justice campus” that will include a new jail (with double the
capacity of the current facility), together with a new juvenile detention facility and com-
munity corrections space, all located on the site of an abandoned television factory.
Ultimately, that proposal is deemed too expensive and unnecessary; county political and
judicial elites instead propose and implement renovations to the local jail and take own-
ership of a local youth services provider, locating several juvenile probation officers at
the site and using part of the space for housing adjudicated juveniles.
The book centers the theoretical perspectives of both Foucault and Bourdieu, as
Schept explores the knowledge-construction behind Monroe County’s carceral habitus,
or “the corporal and discursive inscription of penal logics into individual and community
bodies” (p. 10) that allows liberal policy-makers to support local jail expansion even as
they critique mass incarceration nationally. Instead of presenting a timeline-based narra-
tive, Progressive Punishment is structured thematically. The first section traces the “neo-
liberal geographies” of the town. The proposed location for the new justice campus is an
almost too poetic representation of broader economic and structural dislocations: county
planners buy a once-booming television manufacturing facility that decimated local
employment after corporate leaders moved the plant to Mexico. The second section
develops the concept of carceral habitus, describing how key political and judicial actors
understood the reform projects in Bloomington as liberal efforts that would better allow
the state to respond to the “needs” of the community (i.e. the “unsocialized” poor who
needed carceral programs and services).
The third and fourth sections of the book feature the discourses of the other key actors
involved in this policy debate. Schept first argues that the forums for public comments
on the proposals paradoxically served as sites of domination where county elites staked
out their territory as the experts on criminal justice and sought to educate the public
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