Progressive Punishment

Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion

Judah Schept

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479876532
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

Winner, 2017 American Society of Criminology's Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice Best Book Award The growth of mass incarceration in the United States eludes neat categorization as a product of the political Right. Liberals played important roles in both laying the foundation for and then participating in the conservative tough on crime movement that is largely credited with the rise of the prison state. But what of those politicians and activists on the Left who reject punitive politics in favor of rehabilitation and a stronger welfare state? Can progressive policies such as these, with their benevolent intentions, nevertheless contribute to the expansion of mass incarceration? In Progressive Punishment, Judah Schept offers an ethnographic examination into the politics of incarceration in Bloomington, Indiana in order to consider the ways that liberal discourses about therapeutic justice and rehabilitation can uphold the logics, practices and institutions that comprise the carceral state. Schept examines how political leaders on the Left, despite being critical of mass incarceration, advocated for a “justice campus” that would have dramatically expanded the local criminal justice system. At the root of this proposal, Schept argues, is a confluence of neoliberal-style changes in the community that naturalized prison expansion as political common sense among leaders negotiating crises of deindustrialization, urban decline, and the devolution of social welfare. In spite of the momentum that the proposal gained, Schept uncovers resistance among community organizers, who developed important strategies and discourses to challenge the justice campus, disrupt some of the logics that provided it legitimacy, and offer new possibilities for a non-carceral community. A well-researched and well-narrated study, Progressive Punishment offers a novel perspective on the relationship between liberal politics, neoliberalism, and mass incarceration.

Part 1

Neoliberal Geographies of Progressive Punishment

As a powerful site of state sovereignty, cages are places in which a variety of territorializations of economic and state power converge. The nation-state (border) and the city hold host to the powerful dialectics of fixity and flow, incapacitation and mobility.

—Jenna Loyd, Andrew Burridge, and Matthew Mitchelson, “Thinking (and Moving) beyond Walls and Cages”

The “unconscious” is never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus. . . . It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know. The habitus is the universalizing mediation which causes an individual agent’s practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less “sensible” and “reasonable.”

—Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Sight and Site Lines

In the fall of 2008, the Monroe County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (MCCJCC) hosted four public hearings about the justice campus to present initial design concepts to the community and receive feedback. The MCCJCC was an advisory body comprised mainly of senior officials from county and city criminal justice agencies that served both to coordinate interagency collaborations and to make formal recommendations to the county government concerning criminal justice policy. During my time in the field, the MCCJCC had played an integral role in identifying corrections consultants for the justice campus and subsequent expansion proposals and ultimately contracting for their services. All four of the justice campus hearings featured representatives from the county’s consultant, Program Administration and Results, Inc. (PARI), and from prominent criminal justice administrators. The first three hearings focused on the three major pieces of the campus: the juvenile facility, a work release and community corrections center, and the new jail. In the fourth and final hearing, the content turned to the actual design concept of and architectural plans for the eighty-five-acre site. Joining Richard Kemp, the cofounder and co-owner of PARI, and Tom Grady, the MCCJCC’s chair, for the official presentation was a local architect, Steve Vance, who was responsible for the design of the campus. The architectural rendering of the site and the descriptions Vance and others used to explain it provide important insights into the work that planning, design, and landscaping perform in the service of carceral expansion.

As had been the case with the three previous meetings, Kemp spoke first, after brief introductory remarks by Grady. Kemp began by saying: “Back in April, the commissioners asked us to look at the criminal justice system and how that fit together and established that they wanted us to look at the RCA site. They stressed three items: [first, it had to be] comprehensive, far-reaching beyond itself. [Second, i]t had to be flexible, meet today’s needs and future needs. Something we could grow in. Something that met the needs of staff. Had to be something the community had input in. [Third, it had to] target juvenile, work release, and jail at that RCA site.”

A man in his mid-fifties, Kemp spoke haltingly and stumbled through his testimony, showing little of the authority, confidence, or polish that one might expect from a private corrections consultant. Nevertheless, perhaps because of his rather unthreatening demeanor, the MCCJCC had him begin each of the four hearings. His remarks above, incomplete as they are, demonstrate the important role of the particular landscape sited for the justice campus. The site was chosen in part to accommodate current and projected future needs. Quite explicitly, the county’s representatives communicated to PARI that they wanted a complex that could house the three constitutive institutions in dramatically expanded form and that the site needed to be able to accommodate further expansion. In official county discourse and imagination, carceral expansion lay in the realm of common-sense community planning.1

The naturalization of expansion is an important indicator of the ways that ideological processes have a material and geographical presence. In the series of excerpts below, Vance followed Kemp’s remarks by displaying and describing to hearing attendees the rendering of the proposed justice campus site, noting the ease with which the new carceral geography would both use the land and be integrated into the surrounding landscape. As Vance brought up a PowerPoint slide showing a satellite map of the land to orient the audience to the RCA site, he first located the justice campus in relation to surrounding subdivisions, municipal infrastructure, and businesses: “You can see we’re adjacent to the subdivision to the south, RCA park is here [also south, next to the subdivision], the Sudbury farm is west of us here, and [the biotechnology company] Cook Pharmica is here, Schulte [a home storage company] is here, and the new road that was built for the Indiana Enterprise Center and right next to Cook comes right down to the edge of the [justice campus] site right there. So there’s a new road right here.”

In locating the campus next to its proposed residential, recreational, business, and agricultural neighbors, the county could further the narrative of a truly community-based project. In pointing especially to Cook Pharmica, Schulte (now known as Organized Living), the Indiana Enterprise Center, and the new road, the architect at once attached the campus to the narrative of new economic development that followed on the heels of the RCA/Thomson departure and, crucially, pointed to the infrastructural development that would make a modern facility possible.

Changing slides to a blueprint of the proposed campus, Vance continued:

This is our early site plan. There are a number of features here I’ll explain. First of all are the roads. This site is at the end of the roads right now; over time, roads are planned to crisscross the site so it will be part of the roadway network. This east-west road that would come from Rogers Street and pass through the site would continue through Sudbury and to Wiemer Road [and] would be a secondary arterial in the city’s system. Just off of our site Adams Road would come from the north and connect up, and on our site the new Indiana Enterprise road would come from the north and connect up. So this would become part of the roadway grid.

In this vision, the justice campus would further develop a blighted deindustrialized zone in the process of revitalization. The campus would stimulate further infrastructural development, connecting north-south and east-west roads and in the process facilitate more connections between newly forming high-tech business, surrounding residential spaces, and rural agricultural land. The justice campus, then, must be understood beyond the discourses of rehabilitative and therapeutic justice that expressed a vision of distinctive incarceration; carceral expansion was not just about crime and justice policy. Rather, Monroe County looked to the justice campus as a central municipal project through which to funnel various infrastructural and economic policies, a local example of a much broader pattern that scholars have called “carceral Keynesianism.”2

Finally, Vance turned his attention away from how the campus would animate investment in and commitment to the immediate vicinity and toward the specific geography of the eighty-five-acre site. The concept map of the campus showed the site divided into eight lots of varying sizes, three of which would house the individual facilities, one of which would house a large warehouse that would serve all three facilities, and the remaining four of which would be available for other municipal uses or sold to private developers. In what follows, Vance describes the variety of topographies contained within the site but carefully notes how the terrain could work in the service of the proposed carceral function:

This particular master plan shows lots ranging from three acres to twenty-three acres. The land out there—I don’t know if anyone has been out there on the land, but it has a wide variety of types of land. Lot 1 and lot 2 there is a larger, flat ridge top. Down here in lot 6, same thing: large, flat, ridge top. But the other properties are a little bit rougher. This space right here [pointing to the lot between lots 1, 2, and 6] is full of big boulders and rocks. [Showing photos of the actual site] We really have a variety of spaces out there. The trees you see on here are pretty much what are there now. Some pretty heavy woods over here. Sloped land here, open flat meadow. These sites over here [pointing to the western edge] are [a] bit more broken up. There is a big utility easement that goes through here, large overhead power lines. But these lots are very usable. Usable space on lot 7, lot 8. The [lots] over here [pointing to the eastern edge] are not as easy to use; they have slope going this way and slope going that way, so they’re a little bit more difficult to use for a big structure. There’s acreage there for smaller buildings that could be stepped down a slope on those sites, whereas these sites [pointing back to lots 1, 2, and 6] are adaptable to some pretty large buildings. These rough areas [pointing to the trees that apparently separate several lots on the western part of the property] actually provide the opportunity for some separation and some barriers that we’ll talk more about later. This is an opportunity to [have] separate land use and a significant buffer between various activities.

Vance noted that the site offered a variety of topographies, including large ridge tops, rougher properties full of boulders, and open spaces. Interestingly, the very bucolic nature of the landscape—no doubt part of what allowed this expansion project to be labeled a campus—also would animate the site’s carceral functions. Vance argued at the meeting that the open spaces were “adaptable to some pretty large buildings,” that the boulder-strewn and other rough areas of the property “actually provide the opportunity for . . . barriers. . . . This is an opportunity to [have] separate land use and a significant buffer between various activities,” and that more heavily wooded areas would operate as “sound barriers.” Thus, Vance and presumably others saw specific carceral features in the natural grade of the land. In their view, the site could not only accommodate expansion but would also perform the work of carcerality. In addition to considering this as part of the ideology of landscape in general, I submit that the carceral landscape in this case performed similar functions to the historic role of prison architecture.3 The landscape would naturalize—that is, normalize and beautify through nature—its carceral functions. The name of and philosophy behind a justice campus could only garner support if it appeared to have some integrity. And what better way to demonstrate that the symbolic would match the substantive than to locate the campus on eighty-five acres and deploy a vocabulary and visual register that saw the landscape as naturally carceral? This illuminates important features of carceral habitus and raises critical questions about how the ways in which the world is visually perceived are subject to the structuring logics of the neoliberal state.4 In Monroe County, local derelict landscapes, structured into that form by capital’s migrations, became naturalized carceral opportunities.

The justice campus was possible in Monroe County only because local critics of mass incarceration believed that they would build and operate something distinct from that and characteristic of the community. The ability to believe in the idea of a community unmoored from any spatial or ideological connection to the carceral state (or even to neighboring counties) is clearly a geographical and ideological feat.

But justice campus advocates also had to extract the site from its temporal context. During my three years of engagement in the issues this book examines, I heard virtually no mention of the political and economic history of the county that, once known, would seem to be of essential importance to discussions of incarceration expansion. This particular history implicates the relations of production and representation on which the justice campus was contingent. Perhaps just as important, this history indexes the very spatial connections between capital departures and incarceration growth under neoliberal capitalism. At the core of the dominant vision of expansion, then, was a carceral complex and a set of corresponding logics that proponents would have themselves and others believe operated outside of time and space, separated from the histories and corresponding geographies on which it was dependent.

Chapters 1 and 2 subject the justice campus and carceral expansion to historical and spatial analyses. Understanding carceral expansion as a geographical phenomenon opens the justice campus and various proposals for alternatives up to important material and symbolic scrutiny. Monroe County officials’ creation of the justice campus on the site where industry once stood; their plan to centralize social services alongside the constitutive institutions of the campus, imbuing the complex with both welfare and security functions; and their belief in the encroachment of alternative sanctions into family and community life by locating them on the local continuum of care all point to a need to analyze the spatial articulations of carceral habitus.

1

Capital Departures and the Arrival of Punishment

Focusing analytically on the eighty-five-acre site for the justice campus reveals the land to be a spatial index of the community’s broader historical and economic lineage. That site, a mile south of downtown Bloomington, locates the justice campus in a larger story of globalization and migrations of industry, capital, and jobs into and eventually out of the community. The site was known colloquially in the county as “the old RCA site,” referring to the Radio Corporation of America—the well-known multinational corporation that makes household electronic products—that had bought the property in 1940 from the local Showers Brothers furniture company.1

RCA’s arrival at that historical moment was met with great excitement locally. Unemployment was high—above 40 percent—and the community also had high rates of foreclosures and dependency on federal assistance.2 As one work of local history notes, “for many in Bloomington, the Great Depression ended on February 22, 1940 when they learned that the Radio Corporation of America had purchased one of the Showers plants for a new factory.”3 The company had identified the community as a source of cheap and semiskilled labor. Employing three hundred local residents, its plant started producing domestic radio receivers as early as June 1940. Production continued until 1942, when the plant began to convert to war production. According to the “RCA Handbook of Information in Bloomington,” from 1960, “the first product in this program was a tank receiver for the US Army. Later, civilian production was further curtailed and work was started in the production of the proximity fuse for the Navy. In 1944 civilian production was completely curtailed and the plant was devoted to the production of war materials. Several other items were placed in production along with the proximity fuse.”4 After the end of the war, RCA shifted production rapidly to household consumer products, for which the company would become world-renowned. In 1949, the company produced its first television set; five years later, it would produce the first color television set in the United States. By the mid-1950s, Bloomington was known as the “color television capital of the world.”5 The company’s presence in the community had expanded tremendously. The workforce had grown to 3,000 and would expand to 8,000 just years later. RCA was the largest employer in the county.

But in 1968, the company opened production facilities in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In 1977, as the company and the local media celebrated the production of the twenty-nine-millionth television at the Bloomington plant, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) was filing for trade-adjustment assistance for 1,100 local workers at the plant because of actual and threatened layoffs due to increased imports. The US Labor Department investigated and found for the IBEW, observing that “the average number of production workers at the Bloomington facility declined 18.1 percent in the second half of 1976 . . . and 22 percent in the first quarter of 1977” and that “production of eight television components was transferred from Bloomington to RCA’s foreign facilities during 1976 and production of monochrome televisions was transferred from Bloomington to RCA’s foreign facilities during the second quarter of 1977.”6 The last three decades of the twentieth century found the company—sometimes slowly but sometimes quite rapidly7—shedding jobs in Monroe County.

Critically, the shift in what Jefferson Cowie calls the “international division of labor” was attributable to the growing globalization and mobility of capital (1999, 127). More specifically, RCA’s relocation of production to Ciudad Juarez came on the heels of the expanding labor power of Bloomington’s workforce and the attraction of accumulating more capital by hiring nonunion Mexican workers in maquilado...