Carceral Citizenship as Strength: Formerly Incarcerated Activists, Civic Engagement and Criminal Justice Transformation
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Carceral Citizenship as Strength: Formerly Incarcerated Activists, Civic Engagement and Criminal Justice Transformation Justin M. Smith1 · Aaron Kinzel2 Accepted: 19 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract During the era of mass incarceration, a history of felony convictions and imprisonment imposes legal and extra-legal sanctions that strip individuals of rights—what Miller and Alexander (2016) call “carceral citizenship.” Despite the wide-reaching structural constraints that accompany the identity of being formerly incarcerated, many individuals enact their agency with civic engagement to reshape boundaries around individual and collective identity. Building from past convict criminology research (e.g., Ross and Richards 2003), we address the gap of including formerly incarcerated people into policymaking and community organizing around penal system reform. We offer expanded conceptualization of “carceral citizenship” and provide a framework for the transformation of practices that constitute carceral systems. As Goodman and colleagues (2017) demonstrate, the reformation of penal systems is not simply a result of the mechanical swing of a pendulum. Instead, the ongoing contestation between different stakeholders shapes criminal justice. Borrowing foundational theoretical concepts from multiple critical criminology perspectives, we frame the role of “carceral citizenship” within the transformation of the penal system reform.
Introduction: The Carceral State and Its Transformation In an extensive analysis of politics in the United States (US) and the carceral state, Gottschalk (2016: 275) argues that “major national organizations committed to social and economic justice are vexed with subtle biases that keep them from mobilizing on behalf of the most marginalized groups in the USA, including offenders and ex-offenders.” Within interest group politics, generally, the lack of “affirmative advocacy” in
* Justin M. Smith [email protected] Aaron Kinzel [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA
2
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, USA
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organizational mobilization and policy decision-making often fails to centralize the needs of the most disadvantaged (Strolovitch 2008). Specific to the focus here, representation of those directly impacted remains a key missing element for a more encompassing, broader movement to resist the carceral state. The history of art, biographical narratives, and social scientific evidence illustrate the myriad “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes 1958). The harms inflicted by prisons are numerous and we are unable to document them fully here. Nevertheless, comprehensive and clear analyses abound (e.g., Irwin 2005; Reiman and Leighton 2016; Ross 2009; Wacquant 2009). And we can note the unprecedented psychological and collective harms instituted by the carceral state over the last several decades in the US: (
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