Judah Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516644319 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Author | Lydia Pelot-Hobbs |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Punishment & Society
2018, Vol. 20(2) 255–279
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474516644319
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Book reviews
Judah Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral
Expansion, New York University Press: New York, 2015; 320 pp. (including index):
9781479808779, $89 (cloth), $27 (pbk)
Working at the intersection of criminology, geography, and sociology, Judah
Schept’s Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic
of Carceral Expansion is a timely, readable, and highly insightful contribution to
our understanding of the liberal expression of penal expansion. Centered on a
recently proposed 85-acre ‘‘justice campus’’ that would encompass a new expanded
jail, a juvenile facility, and a work release center in Bloomington, Indiana,
Progressive Punishment provides a fine-grained and textured ethnographic exam-
ination of carceral state-making at the county level. Schept interrogates how multi-
scalar political economic disinvestment and reinvestment converged with carceral
logics to produce what he terms a ‘‘carceral habitus’’ that structured discourses
around the justice campus. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and
numerous interviews with local politicians, county officials, service providers, and
anti-jail activists, Schept illuminates how rather than promoting the jail project
through the punitive ideologies of law-and-order and tough on crime politics, the
justice campus was promoted through liberal notions of therapeutic justice, ben-
evolence, and rehabilitation that collude with the broader frame of neoliberal car-
ceral statecraft. However, Schept does not see the carceral habitus as totally
defining or confining the terms of the debate but ‘‘is subject to being dislodged
by social movement organizing. Concrete and radical alternatives through the state
are possible if they follow work that illuminates carceral habitus’’ (p. 237). As such,
Schept illustrates the ways that the local anti-jail organization Decarcerate Monroe
County (DMC) sought to disrupt carceral habitus in their campaign against the
justice campus and asks the vital questions of ‘‘what does it take, and what would it
look like, for the disruption of carceral habitus to be followed by the inscription of
an abolitionist habitus?’’ (p. 17).
In the first part of Progressive Punishment, Schept focuses on the historical and
material geography of the site selected for the justice campus. He begins by out-
lining that in the 1940s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) built a produc-
tion facility on the site in question that by the 1950s was employing thousands of
workers, making RCA the county’s largest employer. Following national pat-
terns of neoliberal globalization, RCA began laying off workers in the 1970s
after opening up new production facilities in Ciudad Juarez to take advantage of
lower non-union wages. After the production site was first sold off to General
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