Diminished citizenship in the era of mass incarceration
| Author | Susan Starr Sered |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474520952146 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Diminished citizenship
in the era of mass
incarceration
Susan Starr Sered
Suffolk University, USA
Abstract
This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the
experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their
relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement
of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy.
The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical
and social context, moving ideas about “criminals” away from the individual focus of
mainstream criminology and providing a useful framework for considering how a variety
of marginalized groups navigate the American landscape. At the same time, the frame of
mass incarceration offers insights into a crucial mechanism for constructing, diminishing
and enforcing citizenship in the United States. Our argument draws on our decade-long
ethnographic research with a cohort of women who had been released from prison in
Massachusetts in 2007–2008.
Keywords
carceral citizenship, citizenship, diminished citizenship, criminalization, gender
Introduction
This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding
the experiences of large numbers of people who, often by virtue of their relations
with criminal justice policies and institutions, do not benefit from the full comple-
ment of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern
Corresponding author:
Susan Starr Sered, Suffolk University, 73 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02108, USA.
Email: ssered@suffolk.edu
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(2) 218–240
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520952146
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democracy. The lens of diminished citizenship centers analyses of criminalization
and other forms of marginalization and subordination firmly in the realm of the
state rather than individual failure or deviance, and highlights connections between
criminal justice apparatuses and other social, civil and political institutions.
Intersecting class, race and gender inequalities continually inform the processes
by which citizenship is created, operationalized and undermined in the United
States, and elsewhere.
Citizenship carries a commonsense if contested meaning in the contemporary
world – citizenship is a legal and bureaucratic status, and a citizen is a legitimate
and publically acknowledged member of a particular nation state to which the
citizen owes some degree of allegiance and from which the citizen receives certain
rights and protections. In that citizenship is uniquely constitutive of lived experi-
ence in modern nation states, questions of who is excluded and who is included
under the citizenship umbrella, who has the power to determine and enforce these
inclusions and exclusions, and what are the processes by which this happens are of
great importance (cf. Fredrickson, 2003; Glenn, 2000).
1
An embodied social category, citizenship dictates where, how and even if one
may live. Evelyn Glenn argues that, “Citizenship ... [is] fundamentally a matter of
belonging, including recognition by other members of the community. In this
conception, citizenship is not simply a fixed legal status, but a fluid status that is
produced through every day practices and struggles” (Glenn, 2011: 1; cf. Ong, 2006
on disarticulation of state and citizenship in the era of neo-liberal governance and
values). Thus Rose and Novas (2005) describe processes of “making up citizens” in
terms of the power and practices of political, medical, legal and other authorities to
construct and enforce categories such as the ill, the disabled, the child abuser, the
criminal and so on.
The notion of diminished citizenship grew out of our ongoing work with a
cohort of 47 women who had been released from prison in Massachusetts in
2007 – 2008. The women are diverse in terms of race, age, education, family back-
ground, sexual orientation, personality traits, and extent of contact with the crim-
inal justice system. Yet, a decade after exiting prison, none have attained their oft-
stated and explicitly desired goals of “regular, normal” American lives of safety,
independence, steady employment, secure housing and stable family life. We have
come to understand that while criminalization played and continues to play pow-
erful roles in terms of restricting their freedom, the reality is that state-facilitated
(or at the least disregarded) poverty, discrimination and physical and sexual abuse
diminished their standing as citizens long before they formally became involved
with the criminal justice system.
2
Building on conceptualizations of citizenship developed by Glenn, Fredrickson,
Ong and others, we identify diminished citizenship in terms of processes by which
various populations, at various times, can experience some but not all of the rights
of citizenship. We opt for the verb “diminished” rather than the adjectival “second
class (citizen)” in order to get at the dynamic and often inconsistent nature of these
processes. Linda Bosniak correctly emphasizes that citizenship “may not be
Sered 219
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