Jordan T Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal Carceral State
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516675567 |
| Author | Judah Schept |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
265
Green DA (2015a) The re-humanization of the incarcerated Other: Bureaucracy, dis-
tantiation, and American mass incarceration. In: Eriksson A (ed.) Punishing the
Other. London: Routledge, pp. 87–130.
Green DA (2015b) US penal-reform catalysts, drivers, and prospects. Punishment &
Society 17(3): 271–298.
Kilgore J (2016) Opposing mass incarceration is ‘‘Trendy,’’ but can we stop the train of
piecemeal reform? Available at: www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36277-opposing-
mass-incarceration-is-trendy-but-can-we-stop-the-train-of-piecemeal-reform
(accessed 5 October 2016).
Matthews R (2014) Realist Criminology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Murakawa N (2014) The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Ryan M and Ward T (2015) Prison abolition in the UK: They dare not speak its name?
Social Justice 41(3): 107–119.
Schept J (2015) Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic
of Carceral Expansion. New York: New York University Press.
Simon HA (1982) Models of Bounded Rationality: Empirically Grounded Economic
Reason. Boston: MIT Press.
David A Green
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, USA
Jordan T Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal Carceral
State, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2016; 268 pp. (including index): 9780520281813,
$29.95 (pbk); $65 (cloth)
It has become commonplace in sociological and criminological studies of mass
incarceration to argue for understanding its origins in the hardening punishment
regime characterized broadly as the punitive turn. Particular treatments have laid
the growth of mass incarceration at the feet of a grand social experiment known as
‘‘the punishment imperative’’ (Clear and Frost, 2014) or as part of a broader
‘‘culture of control’’ (Garland, 2001). Such analyses are helpful in demonstrating
that it was largely changes to policy, not in crime rates, which facilitated the rise of
the prison state. Indeed, the ‘‘common sense’’ of these analyses can be measured by
the degree to which they have migrated into the realm of public opinion and
mainstream political analysis, with architects of the carceral state weighing in on
the need for reform.
Jordan Camp’s masterful new book, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles
and the Rise of the Neoliberal State, extends and intervenes in this common sense
understanding of the carceral state. Rather than arguing that mass imprisonment
was a product of changing policy priorities and cultural norms, Camp finds the
266
Punishment & Society 20(2)
carceral state emerging as a political tool that helped to produce and secure those
changes, situated as they were in the political-economic patterns of neoliberalism
that shifted the composition of the state itself. Camp pays important attention to
the ways that everyday actors, frequently proximate and subject to the violence of
confinement and police power, offered important cultural and political counter-
narratives of the growing carceral state and the shrinking social wage. Camp argues
convincingly for centering the emergence of mass incarceration as a response to the
freedom demands of the long civil rights movement and as the political arm of
neoliberalizing racial capitalism.
Camp’s challenges to the common attribution of the rise of the carceral state to a
seemingly apolitical punitive shift in the country mark the book’s first major con-
tribution. In line with recent work by Naomi Murakawa (2014), Camp first looks
to the bipartisan consensus around security emerging during the Cold War, or what
Murakawa has called ‘‘Cold War racial liberalism’’ which, over the ensuing dec-
ades and through ideological struggle by the state, calcified into the political
common sense of relying on carceral solutions to various crises arising out of
deindustrialization, capital flight, and radical challenges to the social formation.
In this way, Camp argues, the state accomplished its withdrawal from the social
wage and its reorganization around growing police and carceral power through
defining challenges to it—meaning demands from social movements for democ-
racy, freedom, living wages, and redistribution—as disorder. Thus, Camp argues
convincingly, the rise of the neoliberal carceral state marks an important victory in
the...
To continue reading
Request your trial