What Is the Carceral State?

This definition provided by Ruby Tapia, the chair of the opening panel of the Carceral State Project's 2018-2019 symposium, briefly and powerfully introduces the expansiveness of the carceral state. Her description clearly illuminates the ways in which the carceral state involves more than just prisons, jails, and other formal institutions associated with the concept of "mass incarceration."

As Ruby Tapia argues, the reach of carcerality extends far beyond formal incarceration itself, which includes but is not limited to state and federal prisons, local jails, immigrant and juvenile detention centers, military prisons, and carceral programs of probation and parole. The concept of carcerality captures the many ways in which the carceral state shapes and organizes society and culture through policies and logic of control, surveillance, criminalization, and un-freedom. Tapia calls these "punitive orientations" that revolve around the "promise and threat of criminalization" and the "possibility/solution of incarceration." The carceral state, operating through these punitive orientations, functions as an obstacle and a substitute for "humane solutions to social problems" such as poverty, racism, citizenship status, and other forms of inequality and discrimination.

The carceral state, and its punitive processes of criminalization and control, operate in highly discriminatory ways and have both produced and reinforced massive inequalities along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories. But carcerality is also everywhere, a central organizing principle of our society and culture, and therefore affects and diminishes us all. Theorists such as  Michel Foucault  argue that everything is carceral, that the techniques of power and control associated with prisons operate throughout society and culture as well. The carceral state extends far beyond the prison population captured in the infamous charts of mass incarceration in the modern United States.

When we think of the carceral state, images of prisons and jails generally come to mind. However, if you think further, the carceral state includes all aspects of life in which people are subject to surveillance and the threat of punitive policies under the premise of safety. Take, for example, the neighborhood crime watch signs that dot our streets, or  government monitoring of email and cell phone data  under the guise of national security, or the drug tests and criminal background checks required by so many employers, or even something as widely accepted as airport security. Undergoing screening to catch a flight or watch a sports event is a form of carcerality that is so common that we barely even think twice, yet we are all subject to arbitrary searches of our persons and belongings. Similarly, if you take a trip to the shopping mall, security cameras line every wall with the goal of catching would-be thieves, and the promise of protecting "law-abiding" people by maintaining social order, with little regard for civil liberties and the right to privacy.

Carcerality is more than government programs and corporate surveillance. In a tangible and everyday sense, there are ways that we all participate in, witness, and either support or resist systems of carcerality in our everyday lives.

PG Watkins, an activist with  No New Jails Detroit , eloquently illustrates the ways in which carcerality is ingrained in our way of living. In doing so, PG proposes a thought-provoking question: What do we use the police for?

The police and other law enforcement agencies, of course, are the front line forces of criminalization and surveillance, and they target particular groups of people and particular types of places in highly discriminatory and selective ways, especially along lines of race and economics. But by living in the American carceral state, all of us are unwittingly surveilled and potentially criminalized, which is a punitive form of carceral control, and then we can either resist or become complicit and active in perpetuating these same forces. Let's hear what the symposium panelists say about criminalization.

As Ruby Tapia explains, the carceral state is not just formal institutions of confinement such as prisons and jails or other commonly thought of punishments like probation and parole. The carceral state also refers to "logics, ideologies, practices, and structures" that result in "punitive orientations to difference." Criminalization refers to processes that treat somebody, or a group of people, as though they are criminals even if their actions are not illegal. Criminalization also operates through laws and policies that render particular conditions stigmatized and illegal--such as mental health, drug use, and undocumented status--making law enforcement, rather than community-based public health organizations, the front-line responders. Criminalization is a huge part of the more informal and sprawling carceral state. Additionally, discriminatory criminalization has a major impact on the racial and economic disparities in the formal institutions of the criminal justice system.

Derrick Jackson, the director of community engagement at the  Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office , talks about the racial makeup of the county jail (which includes Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, and surrounding communities). Jackson, a police officer with a degree in Social Work, explains how the criminalization of black and brown people creates a severe racial divide in the Washtenaw County Jail and in the broader criminal justice system. Black and brown people are less likely to be able to afford bail, and more likely to receive sentences for minor as well as major offenses, than their white counterparts who are arrested in Washtenaw County. The majority non-white jail population in a majority white county reflects racial criminalization, not crime itself. 

Below, Mark Fancher ( ACLU of Michigan ) describes the heightened deployment of police in poor, mostly black and brown communities while wealthier white communities are left alone. Fancher explains that in his discussions with law enforcement officers, they justify concentrated policing in poor and nonwhite areas based on "where the crime statistics say the crime is," in particular when it comes to drug enforcement. But then he asks the police officers to admit that illegal drug use is very common in upscale white neighborhoods, although these areas are never the focus of targeted policing. Instead, the police place black and brown neighborhoods under surveillance and preemptive criminalization, which degrades the overall quality of life and basic human rights of people who live in those areas, and then floods the jails and prisons with poor and nonwhite people.

Overwhelming evidence reinforces Fancher's point that  racism shapes every stage of drug war enforcement , from targeted policing to prosecutorial discretion to sentencing inequalities, even though white Americans are more likely to use and sell illegal drugs than African Americans. Questioning the carceral state also means asking why the police, and the criminal law code, should have anything at all to do with either the social practice of recreational drug use or the social problem of drug addiction. Some countries, such as  Portugal , decriminalize all drug use and focus on public health and  harm reduction  solutions, rather than involvement of law enforcement. Opponents of the carceral state argue that criminal law enforcement should play no role in regulating and punishing  sex work , drug use, and other issues of public health.

Why does the United States so often address social conditions through carceral policies of punitive policing and racial criminalization? Two of the most important historical foundations are the system of chattel slavery in the South and the law enforcement response to the migration of African Americans to the urban North.

Below, ACLU attorney Mark Fancher traces the roots of modern policing and law enforcement to the criminalization, surveillance, and control of black people under slavery.

The institutions of slavery and then Jim Crow segregation in the American South represent a key historical pillar of the carceral state, but not the only one. As  Khalil Muhammad  and other scholars have shown, "racial criminalization" through the "condemnation of blackness" also flourished in the urban North and shaped the emergence of the modern criminal justice system in the early decades of the 20th century. During this era, cities in the urban North and across the nation implemented Jim Crow policies in  housing  (with explicit support from the federal government),  public schools , and other areas of public policy including  municipal policing and law enforcement . During the first half of the twentieth century, long before the advent of "mass incarceration," African Americans and other marginalized groups such as immigrants and the poor experienced a carceral state in which the police represented the front-line forces of criminalization, surveillance, and social control.

In the following video, ACLU attorney Mark Fancher talks about the roles that white racism, selective enforcement, and false hype about a black "crime wave" in the urban North has played in the history of criminalization. He traces this phenomenon from the era of slavery to the present, a continuous carceral history of racial criminalization and punitive solutions.

Urban governments and federal authorities have long justified the hyper-policing of African American and immigrant neighborhoods based on punitive rhetoric about dangerous populations and allegedly objective statistical evidence of high crime rates. But as Khalil Muhammad has shown, the " statistical language of black criminality " that emerged in the urban North in the early 1900s reflected racist policies and ideas rather than actual social conditions, starting with the consequences of criminalization through selective and discriminatory policing itself.

Many of us assume that crime rates simply measure the amount of crime in a given area. In fact, crime rates are deeply problematic because they are based on arrests, not convictions, and because they better reflect the discriminatory impact of punitive policing, rather than law-breaking itself. (In addition, many "crimes" that result in arrests are based on police maintenance of social order through vague and selectively enforced laws that criminalize loitering, "disorderly conduct," or youth status offenses). A higher police presence in a particular neighborhood will artificially inflate that area’s crime rate, leading to a self-reinforcing process that calls on more and more police to “solve” the “crime problem.”

The easiest way to illustrate this is through mapping. These maps were created by sociologists at the University of Chicago show Chicago between 1927 and 1933 in order to visualize the links between crime, juvenile delinquency, and race.

Racial profiling through stop-and-frisk policing has a long history in the United States. This discretionary law enforcement policy intensified after 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled in the  Terry v. Ohio decision  that police officers could detain and search people based on "reasonable suspicion" instead of a "probable cause" standard. That same year, President Lyndon Johnson signed the  Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act , which provided massive federal funding for local law enforcement and accelerated the process of  flooding nonwhite urban neighborhoods with police on the streets . Additional federal laws, including the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, included billions more for law enforcement and intensified the punitive crackdown that clearly targeted nonwhite communities in urban centers. Many state laws and related urban policy initiatives also accelerated street-level stop-and-frisk policing, based on the " broken windows " theory that law enforcement should preemptively target gang members and unruly youth for minor violations and even non-crimes in order to stop them from committing violence offenses.

The history of stop-and-frisk policing in New York City illustrates the unconstitutional racial profiling and targeted racial criminalization at the heart of this policing approach across urban America. Under mayors Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) and Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013), the New York Police Department dramatically escalated stop-and-frisk policing. Bloomberg made the racial profiling intention of the policy clear in  remarks after he left office : "People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana, they’re all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is." As the  ACLU documented , the NYPD justified its policies targeting nonwhite neighborhoods even though white residents were more likely to sell and use illegal drugs.

The NYPD conducted stop-and-frisks on more than 5 million people during the Bloomberg era. 86 percent of those detained by police were African American or Latinx. Of those searched for weapons and contraband, at least  4.4 million were innocent . In 2011, the peak of the stop-and-frisk era under Bloomberg, the NYPD searched  685,724  people.

Civil rights groups filed a  class-action lawsuit against the NYPD  and, in 2013, won a landmark ruling that the stop-and-frisk policy represented unconstitutional racial profiling. The graph below illustrates the dramatic decrease in stop-and-frisk policing after this legal decision. Although this policing program is far less extensive now, the basic patterns remain intact. Each year,  80-90 percent  of those stopped and frisked are innocent. Every year, black people represent the majority of those stopped, followed by Latinx individuals. A small percentage of those stopped are white, ranging from  8-12 percent .

Though the decrease is a win on many fronts, it is not enough. In March 2019, the  New York Civil Liberties Union released a report  on the racial practices of stop-and-frisk policing, highlighting how discriminatory and damaging these punitive polices remain. The first graph shows how racial bias in policing stops from 2014-2017 disproportionately impact African Americans in New York City, followed by Latinos.

The criminalization of black bodies is also evident when looking at the data on wrongful convictions. According to data compiled by the  Michigan Innocence Clinic , black people  make up 47%  of those who are found to be wrongfully convicted despite making up only 13% of the U.S. population. 

The carceral state includes punitive orientations to social and economic conditions, as Ruby Tapia noted in her opening remarks, instead of humane solutions to inequality and sensitive appreciation of difference. Thus, conditions of carcerality also involve the criminalization of those who live in poverty. Reverend Joe Summers of the  Episcopal Church of the Incarnation , an Ann Arbor congregation active in many social justice causes, talks about how problems that arise from poverty have been criminalized to the point that much of society thinks it is okay to neglect people living in precarious financial situations.

Another population often criminalized are those who suffer from mental illness. Erin Keith, staff attorney for youth legal services and empowerment at the  Detroit Justice Center , tells the story of one of her clients (whom she calls Ayesha, a pseudonym) sent to jail for throwing a temper tantrum. Ayesha had a bipolar diagnosis, and her grandmother called the police for some assistance with this family situation. The police arrested Ayesha, against her grandmother's wishes, and charged her with a felony crime despite her mental disability.

Michigan jails and prisons reflect this criminalization of mental health and the inability to properly respond and find productive treatment for those who have mental health issues. Only  5%  of the general population in Michigan have serious mental disorders, but in local jails that numbers climbs to 17%. As for state prisons, a 2010  UM study  found that 20.1% of male inmates and 24.8% of female inmates had symptoms of severe mental disability. These patterns are  similar across the United States , and county jails serve as the largest mental health providers  in many large urban areas . In a more humane society, people with mental health challenges would not be arrested and detained in jails and prisons, or even arrested and "diverted" to community treatment programs, the  preferred solution  of many reformers. Instead, we can ask why public health programs have become intertwined with the carceral state and what it would mean to remove law enforcement as front-line responders to mental health situations, in favor of community-based and non-criminal solutions.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) classifies children in particular at increased risk for a wide spectrum of physical and mental health disorders due to  Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs . It has linked ACEs to higher risk of dying from, among others causes, heart disease, cancer, and suicide. This study found that the more ACEs a child experiences, the greater the impact on future health. 

This happens because there is a direct neurological link between trauma and health, including impairment of different parts of the brain. The brain’s fight or flight system is activated in response to threats, and if threats become more frequent then the system is activated far more frequently, becoming more harmful than helpful. This leads to effects such as a poor immune system, with many public health consequences.

However, most people who have experienced ACEs, which  includes 64% of surveyed adults , received only individuated healthcare or are criminalized for “acting out in class.”  In a 2014 TedTalk , Dr. Nadine Burke, who also has a master’s from the  T.H. Chan School of Public Health , says, “if you’re a doctor, and you see 100 kids that all drink from the same well, and 98 of them develop diarrhea, you can go ahead and write that prescription for dose after dose after dose of antibiotics, or you can walk over and say, ‘what the hell is in this well.’”

As it stands, there is not a unified public health response to pervasive trauma, nor are teachers, administrators, officers, family members, or doctors trained to look for tell-tale signs of ACEs specifically, meaning that all-too-common diseases, like asthma or ADHD, are treated and sometimes punished as individual issues rather than symptoms of an ongoing public health crisis.

There are common misconceptions about when “the carceral state” began. Many people, for example, believe mass incarceration and the carceral state began in the 1970s with Richard Nixon’s war on drugs. Others, including scholars such as  Elizabeth Hinton  and  Michelle Alexander , show that mass incarceration has deep historical roots in the American systems of slavery, Jim Crow, urban racism, and racial and economic inequality in a capitalist society.

In fact, the United States has always been a carceral society, organized around institutions and methods of punitive social control. These methods have evolved over time, and if what we now call "mass incarceration" is only one part of the contemporary carceral state, then historically there also have been other forms of confinement beyond prisons and jails.

Consider involuntary commitment to psychiatric asylums. From the 1930s-1950s, the rate of psychiatric confinement in the United States was three times that of the prison rate. The carceral state forcibly institutionalized many illegal drug users, "sex offenders" (the category during this period included homosexuals), and others suffering from mental illness or otherwise criminalized for their difference. Psychiatric facilities confined the same percentage of Americans by the mid-1900s that prisons and jails held by the end of the 20th century, in what we call the "era of mass incarceration."

It's important to understand the relationship between the state and the asylum during the early-to-mid 1900s.  “Specialists in the emerging professions of psychiatry and psychology were leaders in early twentieth-century criminology. For psychiatrists, socialized courts, like the new psychopathic hospitals invented in the same period, provided an opportunity to extend their cultural authority beyond the walls of the asylum and the jurisdictional confines of insanity.” 

Officers of the state often criminalized and incarcerated people in this alternate form of prison for what we would now call transgressive   behavior.  This included women who sought abortions, people who were “hysterical,” those who identified as gay, women that engaged in premarital or extra-marital sex, and people who were termed “feeble-minded.”   In an era when racist ideologies flourished hand in hand with pseudoscience, the discretionary category of “feeble-minded,” primarily imposed on poor and nonwhite people, implies genetically inherited criminality based on perceived lack of mental or social acuity.

By taking this broad view of carcerality, we can see that the carceral state infects nearly every aspect of society, from criminal background checks for job applications, to the coercive model of involuntary medicalization, to incarceration in jails and prisons. 

Chicago and New York are not alone in the way their governments have used statistics to pathologize and criminalize particular neighborhoods and defend police militarization. In cities across the country, police departments and local governments use artificial and misleading statistics to bolster “get tough” policies, increase police forces, and increasingly arm officers with weapons of war,  which they use in everyday police action .

Similar practices of criminalization based on space, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status continue today. Many different categories of people beyond the official agencies of the criminal justice system participate in this process, including  school administrators, social service workers, families, store clerks, and policy makers , particularly when they call the police to investigate “suspicious” behavior or even in everyday use of particular kinds of language.

 In our everyday use of language , we can legitimize and reinforce patently false narratives about crime, not only in our uncritical reiteration of statistics but also in loaded phrases that reinforce criminalization.  Ronald Simpson-Bey , a formerly incarcerated person and decarceration activist for JustLeadershipUSA, makes this point about language in the "What Is the Carceral State?" panel.

Words such as “thug,” “delinquent,” “criminal,” "felon," “convict,” and "illegal immigrant" reduce people to a single trait that may be entirely inaccurate and also reflects draconian attitudes about personhood within the carceral society. The  racialized language of the "super-predator"  that emerged in the mid-1990s involved the circulation of extremely exaggerated statistics and justified punitive and oppressive law enforcement crackdowns on nonwhite urban youth in particular.

This language also creates expectations that categorizes everyday behavior, like skipping school or “walking suspiciously,” as risky or deserving surveillance. Kids, especially, may be labeled criminal based on perceived transgression or disrespect in schools, funneling particularly youth of color into the system [see "Education and the Carceral State"].

The carceral society uses the criminal justice system as a template for addressing a broad ranger of social conditions, from poverty and drug addition to more typical forms of adolescence. When kids in hyper-policed neighborhoods do criminalized things - like talking back in school, or trespassing - that all kids regardless of location or socioeconomic status do, they are much more likely to be caught, arrested, and treated punitively because the space in which they reside has been so thoroughly criminalized.

When we then label these kids “delinquent” or “criminal,” we participate in language that criminalizes children and the spaces they inhabit, rather than interrogating how increased criminalization and police presence leads to the manufacturing of youth 'crime.' 

This is why person-first language is important. Labels such as “convict” and "felon" and "illegals" reduce a person's complex identity and humanity to a criminalized status. Alternatively, person-first language such as “impacted person” emphasizes the fundamental humanity of everyone, including those who have come into contact with carceral systems of policing, surveillance, and incarceration.

Criminalization and other policies, practices, and ideologies that exist outside of the formal criminal justice system are an important piece of the carceral state puzzle. The following section focuses more so on explaining and analyzing these formal punitive institutions and practices.

As Nora Krinitsky observes, the term 'carceral state' also refers to formal institutions of confinement in addition to the punitive languages and processes of criminalization. The following chart, from the Prison Policy Initiative, illustrates just how invasive the formal carceral institutions are in the lives of Americans. This chart includes 2019 data on federal and state prisons, local jails, youth detention, immigration detention centers, and more.

African Americans made up 40% of the incarcerated population in the United States and are imprisoned at 3 times their share of the population. Latinos are also over-incarcerated compared to the population rate, although not to the same extent, at 1.5 times.

The incarcerated population is overwhelmingly male and predominantly made up of poor and working-class Americans, although poor and nonwhite women are disproportionately confined as well.

Here in Michigan, the racial disparities exceed the national average for African Americans, but not for Latinos. African Americans are 3.5 times more likely than white residents to be incarcerated and represent almost half of the population in state prisons and local jails.

More than twice as many people- around 4.5 million- are under formal carceral supervision through probation and parole than are currently incarcerated in U.S. prisons, jails, and other detention facilities. This  2019 pie chart  compiled by the Prison Policy Initiative illustrates the broad reach of probation and parole, which encompasses supervision and control by the criminal justice system as an alternative form of punishment (probation) and as conditional release after incarceration (parole). This chart is not exhaustive as it does not show the more informal mechanisms of the carceral state such as criminalization, surveillance, policing, and other interactions that are not as measurable as the population of people under formal control.

This  pie chart  shows the correctional control profile of the state of Michigan. As with the United States as a whole, the majority of those in the criminal justice system are on probation.

Probation and Parole are two large pieces of the carceral state puzzle. 

As explained by Mary King, the executive director for the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency now known as the  Michigan Center for Youth Justice , probation and parole also drive mass incarceration. While not all requirements for people on probation and parole are the same, they are usually subject to a list of ten to twenty conditions that are in themselves not criminal actions. For example, those on probation and parole must refrain from drug and alcohol use, pay fines and fees which can disproportionately punish low income people, abide by curfew and movement restrictions, and find or maintain employment. People on probation, and especially post-incarceration parole, are also still subject to the stigma that formerly incarcerated people face.  Criminologists  have found that when it comes to employment and recidivism, adults on probation often fare as badly as similarly situated adults sent to prison. This demonstrates that probation and parole are just alternative versions of punitive control. It is difficult to avoid the criminal justice system while on probation, and herein lies the probation-to-prison pipeline. 

Probation and parole are most definitely carceral net wideners rather than alternatives to incarceration when it comes to poorer people. Probationers are required to pay fines and fees as a condition of probation, but  studies  show that people who cannot pay these fines and fees are more likely to violate the conditions of supervision, experience housing and food insecurity, and struggle to support their family. When failure to pay is a violation of probation, poor people are far more likely to be incarcerated for non-criminal actions.

As Ronald Simpson-Bey recounts, electronic monitoring is a form of the carceral state that expands beyond the directly impacted person into the supervision of entire communities.

The use of these devices is costly both socially and financially. Impacted people report that electronic monitoring has a  negative impact  on individual relationships, causing a stigma and shame around this proverbial scarlet letter. This negative impact can span from  spousal tensions  to creating distance between parents and their kids. In addition to adding stress to personal relationships, electronic monitoring makes it more difficult to find and keep a job, due to the high visibility of the device. Finally,  every state  (with the exception of Hawaii and Washington D.C.) requires a set-up fee and daily payments to keep the device operational that the wearer must pay. Over the last ten years, use of  electronic monitoring has increased nearly 140 percent . 

Probation and parole are also grossly unfair systems in terms of unequal racial impact. Not all people on probation face the same risk of having their probation revoked and possibly facing prison or jail time. A multi-site  study  from the Urban Institute found that African American people on probation experienced significantly higher rates of probation revocation than their white and Latino counterparts. The study also found that differences in risk assessment scores (primarily based on criminal history) and differences in criminal history were contributors to the black-white disparity. Thus, probation revocation is associated with front-end disparities in the criminal justice system. In other words, “ bias at the front end of the justice system can continue to negatively affect outcomes for minority populations throughout their criminal justice involvement ".

The United States has the  world's largest system  of immigrant detention centers in addition to the largest overall incarcerated population. The majority of people in immigration detention centers are from  Mexico or Central American nations  including Guatemala and El Salvador.

Immigration policy in the United States increasingly revolves around criminalization of undocumented status and the logics of the prison system. Language plays a crucial role as well, with politicians and media inflaming tensions by calling undocumented workers and asylum seekers "illegal immigrants" or even worse, just "illegals."

In the video above, Tania Morris Diaz discusses a client of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center who was an asylum seeker trying to go to Canada. Her client first landed in America on a layover and was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as she was trying to reach her family in Canada. She was held in detention even after finding out she was pregnant. ICE deported her, even though she wanted to leave and they wanted her to leave. Tania argues that this shows how the detention system and the current political climate criminalizes all immigrants for simply being immigrants, which is not a fair or "good reason" for doing so.

Additionally, Tania Morris Diaz points out that coming into the U.S. illegally is only a misdemeanor civil infraction under immigration law.

These are not isolated incidents. Maria Ibarra-Frayre, a Michigan-based immigrant rights advocate, tells a story about how one of her clients was arrested and taken to the ICE office while on his way to court for a separate matter. As Maria discusses, her client had been surveilled by ICE prior to the arrest. He has not been convicted, only charged with a misdemeanor, which he was on his way to court to solve.

As the  American Immigration Council  explains, these stories are typical. Federal policies in response to undocumented immigration have become increasingly punitive in recent decades, and "immigrants themselves are being criminalized." The carceral state encompasses immigrant criminalization, detention, and deportation as well. Making connections and building alliances between the often separate categories of "immigrant rights" and anti-"mass incarceration" activism is essential to a full understanding of and confrontation with the carceral state.

The carceral state operates as successfully as it does partially due to the dehumanization of people of color in America. Similar to the discussion around language and the use of derogatory terms for people who have been impacted by the justice system, dehumanizing a person makes punishing them that much easier.

The dehumanization of people of color begins at the genesis of America and is present still today. Consider the days of colonization. Black people were brought to be slaves, and this sparked the roots of connecting Blackness to captivity, a carceral condition. These are the roots of the racialized prison industrial complex that looms over Americans in present day. By removing the human aspect it is easier to condemn a person for an act that caused harm, rather than to treat them as a person.

Gift talks about her work with end-of-life prisoners and how in her training, they were taught that prisoners are prisoners and nothing more than that. Mental health classes were taught by guards and the information presented was almost always wrong. They were not allowed to touch prisoners who were actively dying unless pre-approved by the guards with distinctive guidelines as to how the contact is to be conducted. As Gift discusses, this can be extremely restricting in her ability to comfort the end-of-life people she works with. This shows an extension of punishment that is overtly dehumanization.

Hazelette Crosby-Robinson, board president for the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency now known as the  Michigan Center for Youth Justice , explains that the carceral state does not stop when you come home. The carceral state also encompasses the post-incarceration struggles that returning citizens face.

The carceral state also encompasses the barriers created by incarceration and continued criminalization upon release. These barriers are not as quantifiable as prison population statistics and arrest records but are rather best explained by those who encounter and deal with them directly.

As Hazelette mentions, one of the hidden parts of the carceral state is how it bars formerly incarcerated people from basic human needs such as housing. Natalie Holbrook is the director of the criminal justice program of the American Friends Service Committee.  AFSC  is a Quaker organization devoted to service, development, and peace programs. In the video below, Holbrook describes a formidable barrier for formerly incarcerated people when it comes to housing.

In Washtenaw County, the county where Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are located, many landlords will not rent to people with felony convictions. This phenomena is widespread across the United States. Some landlords won’t even rent to people who have been arrested, regardless of whether they were convicted. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released  guidelines  in 2016 noting that criminal-history restrictions on housing opportunities violate the Fair Housing Act if the refusal to rent impacts certain races or nationalities more than others. Because the carceral state disproportionately impacts black and brown people, it is highly likely, even inevitable, that the issue of finding housing with an arrest record disproportionately affect them. Yet, the practice continues and formerly incarcerated people often live with this consequence of the carceral state that cannot be easily displayed on a pie chart.

Employers and educational institutions also discriminate against people with criminal records, from outright bans on employment and admission to background check policies that promote stigmatization and continued criminalization. Panelist Aaron Suganuma, the executive director of  A Brighter Way  and an executive board member of the Youth Justice Fund, describes his experiences with a barrier he faced as a returning citizen- felony disclosure requirements on applications. From school applications to job applications, the box that asks people to disclose any felony convictions (and sometimes misdemeanor convictions and even arrests) is a hidden and pernicious part of the carceral state. 

Another nontraditional way to think about the carceral state is to recognize that it also encompasses the communities that are built around prisons and that rely on these institutions. Natalie Holbrook talks about the permeation of the carceral state in the city of Marenisco, Michigan. 

Cozine Welch, the editor of the  Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing , sums up the injustices of the carceral state, which he links to the injustices in a racist and capitalist system, in a powerful way. After watching Cozine's concluding remarks, please continue on to the additional thematic reports from the Carceral State Project's 2018-2019 symposium, on the themes of surveillance, racism, violence, trauma, education, capitalism, and alternatives to the carceral state.

 Visit this link  for the other thematic reports in the " Documenting and Confronting the Carceral State " series, drawn from the Carceral State Project's 2018-2019 symposium.

Banner image adapted from the 2018-2019 symposium poster.