Carceral Citizenship: Race, Rights and Responsibility in the Age of Mass Supervision
| Author | Reuben Jonathan Miller,Forrest Stuart |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617731203 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
731203TCR0010.1177/1362480617731203Theoretical CriminologyMiller and Stuart
research-article2017
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2017, Vol. 21(4) 532 –548
Carceral Citizenship: Race,
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617731203
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the Age of Mass Supervision
Reuben Jonathan Miller
The University of Chicago, USA
Forrest Stuart
The University of Chicago, USA
Abstract
Scholars have shown how formal processes of legal exclusion coupled with ubiquitous criminal
justice contact relegate the largely black poor targets of the carceral state to second-class
citizenship. Building upon but departing from this work, we reveal how carceral expansion
has not just produced new forms of second-class citizenship for poor black Americans,
but an alternate citizenship category and a distinct form of political membership—what
we call carceral citizenship. The criminal record does this work through a process we call
translation, marking the conventional citizen and making them legible, as a carceral citizen,
for governance through institutions of coercion and care. We delineate the features of
carceral citizenship and discuss its implications for how we understand the role, force, and
consequence of the state in the lives of the raced and criminalized poor.
Keywords
Citizenship, Criminality, Criminalization, Critical Theory, Social Theory, State, Race,
Punishment and Society, Public Welfare
It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its
population is beneath them.
(James Baldwin, 1965)
Corresponding author:
Reuben Miller, Assistant Professor, The University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration,
969 E. 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: reuben@uchicago.edu
Miller and Stuart
533
Introduction
The waning decades of the 20th century and the burgeoning years of the 21st were
marked by three key developments in the United States. First, law and order crime con-
trol policies led to the racially disparate swelling of the US inmate census. Second, a less
well-documented but equally historic expansion in the number of formerly incarcerated
people living in segregated urban, rural and suburban neighborhoods further concen-
trated social and material hardship (Eason, 2017; Simes, 2017). Third, the advent of new
laws, sanctions and regulatory penalties, numbering in the tens of thousands shaped the
social, civic and economic participation of people with criminal records. These develop-
ments changed the nature of social life for the raced and criminalized poor inaugurating
what we call carceral citizenship, a novel form of citizenship emergent in the carceral
age (see Loyd, 2015; see also Miller and Alexander, 2016).
Citizenship is broadly understood as membership of a political community with atten-
dant rights, privileges and responsibilities (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994). Carceral citi-
zenship is a distinct form of political membership experienced by and enacted upon
people convicted of a crime. It is not like second-class citizenship, where the state fails
to guarantee the rights of a subgroup that under normal circumstances would be consid-
ered full and equal members of a free society (i.e. absent practices of racial, gender,
class-based and other forms of domination). Nor is it like “custodial citizenship”, a
“diminished form of citizenship” where criminal justice involvement teaches the sub-
jects of criminal justice intervention their place in US democracy (Lerman and Weaver,
2014). Rather, carceral citizenship begins at the moment of a criminal conviction and is
distinguished from other forms of citizenship by the restrictions, duties and benefits
uniquely accorded to carceral citizens, or to people with criminal records.
Citizenship is constituted at the intersection of legal standing, social interaction and
experience, and consists of responsibilities, laws and entitlements (Glenn, 2011;
Kymlicka and Norman, 1994). Carceral citizens are subject to laws that conventional
citizens are not, and they have responsibilities that conventional citizens do not have.
These include “collateral consequences” that constrain their geographic and social
mobility and the expectation that they pay an ambiguously defined “debt to society”.
Like other forms of citizenship, carceral citizenship has benefits. These include access to
goods and services reserved for formerly incarcerated people and the symbolic benefits
of public regard for those who have “made good” (see Maruna, 2001). The combination
of laws, duties and entitlements associated with carceral citizenship provides evidence
that people convicted of crimes live in an alternate legal reality. Yet we know little about
how their unique social situation shapes their experience of US democracy.
The consequences of carceral citizenship deepen with the progression of a criminal
record from accusation through conviction to incarceration and release. There are real
material differences at each stage of this process that vary by the kind of crime commit-
ted and the kind of person presumed to have committed the crime. For example, white-
collar criminals have vastly different experiences than people convicted of “street
crimes” (Hagan, 2012), and “sex offenders” experience forms of regulation that exceed
most other offense categories, including murder. Furthermore it is well known that there
are racial disparities at every level of criminal justice intervention and with the severity
of a given criminal sanction. A full treatment of this variation is beyond the scope of this
534
Theoretical Criminology 21(4)
article. It is, however, important to our analysis to note that the criminal record activates
carceral citizenship by making the presumed “essence” of the “offender” legible to third
parties, and that there are different consequences at each stage of criminal justice inter-
vention and for different “kinds” of carceral citizens. We call this process translation.
Carceral citizenship is not necessarily inferior to conventional citizenship, in a norma-
tive sense, or even more-or-less punitive, though one could scale its “pains” (Sykes,
1958). It is instead an alternate legal reality where people convicted of crimes live out a
distinct form of political membership. Theorizing citizenship in this way allows us to
identify how crime control shapes the social landscape, the role that third parties play in
contemporary modes of governance, and how the proliferation of these practices recon-
figure the US state.
In the pages that follow we delineate the features of carceral citizenship and present
the mechanisms through which it is enacted. We conclude by discussing its implications
for how we understand the role of the state in the lives of the criminalized poor.
Crime control and the remaking of the US state
The number of formerly incarcerated people living in disadvantaged urban neighbor-
hoods has increased precipitously since 1973, when roughly 1 million US residents were
on probation or parole. Today that figure is 4.7 million. They join the 19.6 million people
estimated to have a felony conviction, two-thirds of whom are poor, one-third of whom
are black (Shannon et al., forthcoming). This population is over nine times the size of the
US inmate census, but it does not account for the 12 million people processed through
local county jails each year or the 79 million Americans that have criminal records.
These records, which can be accessed through electronic background checks, have grave
and long lasting consequences.
The American Bar Association curates a national database on the collateral conse-
quences of a criminal conviction. It lists over 48,000 laws, regulations and administrative
penalties that constrain the mobility of people with criminal records. But if all politics
are local, carceral politics are hyper-local. Over half of the 35,000 inmates annually
released from Illinois prisons return to just six neighborhoods in the city of Chicago
(Vigne et al. 2003). Each has poverty, crime and unemployment rates triple the national
average, with black and Latino residents exceeding 90 percent of their resident popula-
tions. This is part of a national trend. It is therefore unsurprising that nearly half of all
black men will be arrested by their 23rd birthday or that a third of black men are esti-
mated to have a felony conviction (Brame et al., 2012; Shannon et al., forthcoming).
Furthermore, the incarceration of black women has increased 10-fold since 1980 and one
in nine black children now has an incarcerated parent (Wakefield and Wildeman, 2013).
These figures reveal one way that crime control has transformed black family life and
altered urban sociality. But they further reveal how mass incarceration has changed the
relationship between the state and the criminalized poor (Lerman and Weaver, 2014).
Beyond second-class citizenship
Some of the most provocative work on crime and punishment in the United States comes
from scholars who study racial disparities in criminal justice intervention. They argue
Miller and Stuart
535
that poor black Americans experience citizenship through their interactions with the
criminal justice system (Lerman and Weaver, 2014). We know, for example, that black
people are twice as likely to be arrested as whites, and comprise a...
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