The punishment marketplace: Competing for capitalized power in locally controlled immigration enforcement
| Author | Daniel L Stageman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617733729 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617733729
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(3) 394 –414
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617733729
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The punishment marketplace:
Competing for capitalized
power in locally controlled
immigration enforcement
Daniel L Stageman
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, USA
Abstract
Neoliberal economics play a significant role in US social organization, imposing
market logics on public services and driving the cultural valorization of free
market ideology. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is upheld by an authoritarian
system of punishment built around the social control of the underclass—among
them unauthorized immigrants. This work lays out the theory of the punishment
marketplace: a conceptualization of how US systems of punishment both enable the
neoliberal project of inequality, and are themselves subject to market colonization. The
theory describes the rescaling of federal authority to local centers of political power.
Criminal justice policy activism by local governments is punishment entrepreneurship:
an accumulative approach to securing fiscal gain, political hegemony, security,
and capitalized power. Local immigration enforcement entrepreneurship targets
unauthorized and other deportable immigrants. This punitive immigration control
reinforces racially structured social relations by obscuring the diminishing returns
neoliberal globalization provides working class whites.
Keywords
Deportation, detention, immigration, local governance, neoliberalism, political
economy, punishment
Corresponding author:
Daniel L Stageman, Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 524 West 59th St Rm 601B, New York,
10019–1093, USA.
Email: dstageman@jjay.cuny.edu
733729TCR0010.1177/1362480617733729Theoretical CriminologyStageman
research-article2017
Article
Stageman 395
The well-documented extremes of recent US immigration enforcement give the
impression of a sui generis phenomenon, born as the Trump administration has married
nativist rhetoric and authoritarian politics to what is arguably the most overtly neolib-
eral policy approach in late modern history. Understanding this apparent shift requires
viewing it as a continuity rather than an interruption, the logical next step in the neo-
liberal project defined by David Harvey as ‘in the first instance a [set] of political
economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by lib-
erating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills’, wherein ‘[t]he [sole] role of the
state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices’
(Harvey, 2007: 2). An understanding of punitive practices as the exercise of state
power might suggest that it is the authoritarian impulse that has recently pushed state-
mandated punishments to overstep this more limited role. However, Harvey’s third and
final defining tenet states that ‘if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water,
education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be
created, by state action if necessary’ (Harvey, 2007: 2). Harvey’s parenthetical list
omits what Beckett and Murakawa (2012) have referred to as ‘the shadow carceral
state’, a broad array of punitive structures and practices that includes civil immigration
enforcement. The current administration appears to have recognized overtly the extent
to which the structures of immigration control can be placed in the service of a punish-
ment marketplace. The most dramatic examples of this recognition shaping policy
include the speed with which the Trump administration reversed Obama-era attempts
to end the federal Bureau of Prisons’ contracts with for-profit corrections corpora-
tions—and the even swifter recovery of these corporations’ share prices upon the news
of Trump’s election (Lurie, 2016; Sessions, 2017).
The punishment marketplace is a theory intended to explain the dynamics of contem-
porary systems of punishment that are both integral to the operation of the neoliberal
political economy and internally subject to the market logics that define it. Prior to the
current administration, federal policy inertia—and the resultant weakening of federal
authority—empowered political-economic elites at the state and local levels1 to approach
policy innovation as entrepreneurship: a project of benefit accumulation intended to con-
centrate fiscal profit, sociopolitical hegemony, security, and cultural dominance in pri-
vate hands. The US political economy of punishment appears no longer to serve the
narrow function theorized by Rusche and Kirchheimer (2003 [1939]) as a tool for disci-
plining low-paid workers and deterring behaviors likely to reduce the value of their
labor. This is now only one of many possible functions, in service of a political-economic
elite limited only by their entrepreneurial acumen in the extraction of benefit through
punitive policy innovation. Fiscal profit is one such benefit, and its pursuit provides the
capitalist logic by which the marketplace operates (Clifford and Silver-Greenberg, 2014;
Shelden and Brown, 2000; Trujillo-Pagan, 2014).
I propose the punishment marketplace as a successor to Rusche and Kirchheimer’s
political economy of punishment, refined through the lens of Bernard Harcourt’s neolib-
eral penality: if ‘[e]very system of production tends to discover punishments which cor-
respond to its productive relationships’ (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 2003 [1939]: 5), then
late modern neoliberal systems of production require distinctly neoliberal systems of
punishment. The punishment marketplace is neoliberalism turned back upon itself, with
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