Carceral Citizenship: Race,Rights and Responsibility in the Age of Mass Supervision

Introduction

The waning decades of the 20th century and the burgeoning years of the 21st were marked by three key developments in the United States. First, law and order crime control policies led to the racially disparate swelling of the US inmate census. Second, a less well-documented but equally historic expansion in the number of formerly incarcerated people living in segregated urban, rural and suburban neighborhoods further concentrated social and material hardship (Eason, 2017; Simes, 2017). Third, the advent of new laws, sanctions and regulatory penalties, numbering in the tens of thousands shaped the social, civic and economic participation of people with criminal records. These developments changed the nature of social life for the raced and criminalized poor inaugurating what we call carceral citizenship, a novel form of citizenship emergent in the carceral age (see Loyd, 2015; see also Miller and Alexander, 2016).

Citizenship is broadly understood as membership of a political community with attendant rights, privileges and responsibilities (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994). Carceral citizenship is a distinct form of political membership experienced by and enacted upon people convicted of a crime. It is not like second-class citizenship, where the state fails to guarantee the rights of a subgroup that under normal circumstances would be considered full and equal members of a free society (i.e. absent practices of racial, gender, class-based and other forms of domination). Nor is it like “custodial citizenship”, a “diminished form of citizenship” where criminal justice involvement teaches the subjects of criminal justice intervention their place in US democracy (Lerman and Weaver, 2014). Rather, carceral citizenship begins at the moment of a criminal conviction and is distinguished from other forms of citizenship by the restrictions, duties and benefits uniquely accorded to carceral citizens, or to people with criminal records.

Citizenship is constituted at the intersection of legal standing, social interaction and experience, and consists of responsibilities, laws and entitlements (Glenn, 2011; Kymlicka and Norman, 1994). Carceral citizens are subject to laws that conventional citizens are not, and they have responsibilities that conventional citizens do not have. These include “collateral consequences” that constrain their geographic and social mobility and the expectation that they pay an ambiguously defined “debt to society”. Like other forms of citizenship, carceral citizenship has benefits. These include access to goods and services reserved for formerly incarcerated people and the symbolic benefits of public regard for those who have “made good” (see Maruna, 2001). The combination of laws, duties and entitlements associated with carceral citizenship provides evidence that people convicted of crimes live in an alternate legal reality. Yet we know little about how their unique social situation shapes their experience of US democracy.

The consequences of carceral citizenship deepen with the progression of a criminal record from accusation through conviction to incarceration and release. There are real material differences at each stage of this process that vary by the kind of crime committed and the kind of person presumed to have committed the crime. For example, white-collar criminals have vastly different experiences than people convicted of “street crimes” (Hagan, 2012), and “sex offenders” experience forms of regulation that exceed most other offense categories, including murder. Furthermore it is well known that there are racial disparities at every level of criminal justice intervention and with the severity of a given criminal sanction. A full treatment of this variation is beyond the scope of this article. It is, however, important to our analysis to note that the criminal record activates carceral citizenship by making the presumed “essence” of the “offender” legible to third parties, and that there are different consequences at each stage of criminal justice intervention and for different “kinds” of carceral citizens. We call this process translation.

Carceral citizenship is not necessarily inferior to conventional citizenship, in a normative sense, or even more-or-less punitive, though one could scale its “pains” (Sykes, 1958). It is instead an alternate legal reality where people convicted of crimes live out a distinct form of political membership. Theorizing citizenship in this way allows us to identify how crime control shapes the social landscape, the role that third parties play in contemporary modes of governance, and how the proliferation of these practices reconfigure the US state.

In the pages that follow we delineate the features of carceral citizenship and present the mechanisms through which it is enacted. We conclude by discussing its implications for how we understand the role of the state in the lives of the criminalized poor.

Crime control and the remaking of the US state

The number of formerly incarcerated people living in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods has increased precipitously since 1973, when roughly 1 million US residents were on probation or parole. Today that figure is 4.7 million. They join the 19.6 million people estimated to have a felony conviction, two-thirds of whom are poor, one-third of whom are black (Shannon et al., forthcoming). This population is over nine times the size of the US inmate census, but it does not account for the 12 million people processed through local county jails each year or the 79 million Americans that have criminal records. These records, which can be accessed through electronic background checks, have grave and long lasting consequences.

The American Bar Association curates a national database on the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. It lists over 48,000 laws, regulations and administrative penalties that constrain the mobility of people with criminal records. But if all politics are local, carceral politics are hyper-local. Over half of the 35,000 inmates annually released from Illinois prisons return to just six neighborhoods in the city of Chicago (Vigne et al. 2003). Each has poverty, crime and unemployment rates triple the national average, with black and Latino residents exceeding 90 percent of their resident populations. This is part of a national trend. It is therefore unsurprising that nearly half of all black men will be arrested by their 23rd birthday or that a third of black men are estimated to have a felony conviction (Brame et al., 2012; Shannon et al., forthcoming). Furthermore, the incarceration of black women has increased 10-fold since 1980 and one in nine black children now has an incarcerated parent (Wakefield and Wildeman, 2013). These figures reveal one way that crime control has transformed black family life and altered urban sociality. But they further reveal how mass incarceration has changed the relationship between the state and the criminalized poor (Lerman and Weaver, 2014).

Beyond second-class citizenship

Some of the most provocative work on crime and punishment in the United States comes from scholars who study racial disparities in criminal justice intervention. They argue that poor black Americans experience citizenship through their interactions with the criminal justice system (Lerman and Weaver, 2014). We know, for example, that black people are twice as likely to be arrested as whites, and comprise a grossly disproportionate share of those stopped and searched by police (Epp et al., 2014). Examining lifetime prevalence rates, Becky Pettit and Bruce Western (2004) find that one in three working age “inner-city” black men will experience incarceration, and theorize mass incarceration as a life course event. Labeling this group the “mass imprisonment generation”, Western (2006: 29–30) later writes:

Because of the nature of imprisonment, as an official sign of criminality, the collective experience of incarceration is as much a relational as a biographical fact […] Through its extent, concentration and designation of deviance, mass imprisonment converts young black men with little schooling from a demographic category into a social group. As such, they share the same life chances and are ascribed the same social status by state officials, employers, and others in power.

Building on TH Marshall’s notion of social citizenship, Western (2006) argues that mass incarceration erodes the social levers that tether African Americans to the labor market and to the social rights of full citizenship in a liberal democracy. Mass incarceration, he suggests, diminishes African American citizenship and situates poor black men who have been incarcerated as a distinct social group. Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver (2014) extend this theory of group making in their work on “custodial citizenship”, which they define as a form of second-class citizenship that socializes “custodial citizens” through their interactions with public institutions, like the police and the courts. Contact with formal criminal justice actors teaches the custodial citizen about their place in US democracy. Since these largely coercive, antidemocratic and harmful interactions are the primary way that custodial citizen experiences the state—“the only government I know” in the words of one interviewee—they come to view themselves and people like them as members of a pariah class and recoil from political life. “Citizenship and democratic political standing”, write Lerman and Weaver (2014: 29), “are most appropriately measured not only by the laws on the books, but also by how citizens conceptualize the state and their position in it”.

Drawing on survey and interview data, this important work goes a long way in explaining how everyday experiences shape civic engagement and the place one takes in the demos. Furthermore, since most custodial citizens have never been convicted of a crime, custodial citizenship reveals one way the effects of mass incarceration extend beyond the prison gate. But political membership is much more than a perception. It has symbolic and material consequences that cannot be captured by examining one’s feelings about the systems they encounter. Furthermore, recent studies in the sociology of punishment raise questions about the extent to which formal criminal justice actors are the chief arbiters of crime control policy to begin with (see Haney, 2010; Miller, 2014). ¹ Rather, people with criminal records also experience the state through their interactions with members of their support networks and the third party actors they encounter in everyday life. This diverse universe of social actors must be accounted for if we are to understand the full nature of citizenship in the carceral age. Finally, while there is a great deal of work on punishment and social control, we know little about what crime control produces in the social world. How then might we make sense of the full, if precarious lives of formerly incarcerated people? ² And relatedly, what does this tell us about citizenship in the carceral age? To capture these developments and the full extent of their effects, we shift attention away from the control and coercion of mass incarceration toward the productive side of what criminologists Fergus McNeill and Krystal Beyens (2013) have called mass supervision.

A matter of carceral citizenship

Working in the context of continental Europe, McNeill and Beyens (2013) theorize mass supervision as the formal regime of sanctions deployed by the state to manage formerly incarcerated people. However, the US welfare state is less well developed than almost any European welfare state, and legal penalties in the United States are more numerous and severe. Since the poor have few protections and criminal records constrain their social mobility, third parties are made the resource of first (and often last) resort, empowering them to care for and regulate the lives of carceral citizens. The same legal exclusions that make their support necessary shape how these third party actors interact with the criminally accused. Understanding this experience and its broader implications requires that we reckon with the politics of informality, as family members, friends, employers and social service providers take up the slack of an anemic welfare state while facing many of the same societal pressures as the people they support. The interactions between these actors and the people they care for in part constitute carceral citizenship and shape how carceral citizens experience US democracy.

Carceral citizenship, then, has three defining features. First, it consists of laws and policies that shape how formerly incarcerated people engage the stabilizing institutions of a free society. Put differently, a criminal conviction changes the nature of one’s interactions with public welfare agencies, the labor and housing market, with their families and in civic life. Second, the carceral citizen is included in practices of supervision, correction and care that are otherwise unavailable to conventional members of the polity who have not been accused of a crime. This includes access to prisoner reentry programs and prisoner-specific social service agencies, healthcare and housing services administered through public and private organizations, counseling provided by state and non-governmental agencies, and services through probation, parole and alternative court systems. Finally, third parties operating within the public and private sphere are empowered to manage, correct, sanction and care for the carceral citizen.

The laws, responsibilities and entitlements unique to members of their class shape the social lives of carceral citizens. They have alternate legal standing and occupy an altogether different political community than people who were not convicted of a crime. Here Jenna Loyd’s (2015) work is particularly important. In her article on carceral citizenship and the global apartheid of US immigration policy, Loyd (2015: 12) writes, “[c]ommon sense understandings of criminality, confinement, and race informed treatment of unwanted asylum seekers, discursively rendering them confineable and punishable. The fact of confinement, in turn, effectively becomes the mark of criminality, regardless of criminal conviction.” Loyd (2011) demonstrates how confinement for the Haitian asylum seeker signals their criminality and justifies their treatment as criminal whether or not they committed a crime. In a similar way, a criminal record, even when charges are dropped, marks the conventional citizen as “criminal” making their presumed criminality legible to the people they encounter in everyday life. We discuss this as a process of translation.

The criminal conviction and the translation of the subject

A criminal record renders the conventional citizen translatable, as criminal, to the networks of responsibilized actors empowered to manage them. To be translatable in this sense refers to the communication of a person’s “essence”, in much the same way that a translator communicates the essence of a text (Benjamin, 1968). Here, a criminal record makes the essence of the criminalized subject legible, or readable, to others. Thus, the record does a work of translation. It marks the carceral citizen as criminal, alerting the people they encounter to their availability for legal exclusion and inclusion into alternate systems of governance.

Translation occurs across a wide range of institutional settings and involves actors across institutional contexts. State bureaucrats, employers, landlords and teachers may all “read” a criminal record as evidence of criminality, but they have latitude to respond in different ways. To these ends, a state regulator may read an arrest record as a breach of “good moral character” and deny a woman accused of shoplifting access to a real estate license (see May, 1995). An employer may read a felony conviction as an insurance liability and threaten to fire a parolee injured on the job if they file for worker’s compensation (Kaufman et al., 2016). An admissions counselor may read a non-violent drug offense as a public safety risk and require a candidate to provide evidence that they have changed their ways prior to granting admission. In each case the record relays the presumed criminality of the subject, empowering bureaucrats working outside the criminal justice system to regulate their lives in specific ways. But to be made available for legal regulation does not mean specific regulations will be enacted. It means, quite simply that a person becomes vulnerable to the decisions of others.

The bureaucrat, employer or school administrator may issue a license or lease to a well-qualified applicant, or admit a straight-A student into a prestigious university. It is, however, in the power of these actors to delay the process, reject the application or require additional steps solely because the applicant has as criminal record. This is despite their qualifications. In almost any other circumstance these actions would be considered a form of illegal discrimination because most other vulnerable groups have the rights and protections of conventional citizenship. Once translated as a criminal, however, the carceral citizen does not have these same rights and the state does not interpret itself as having an obligation to protect them in these same ways.

The act of translation is distinct from other forms of subject making. There is a long and productive literature on these processes—a full engagement is beyond the scope of this essay. ³ Suffice it to say that more agentic forms of subject making, like interpolation, labeling and people processing, are informed by discourses about the subject, typically initiated by formal institutional actors (e.g. during policy encounters, in court houses, etc.) and produced through the subject’s internalization of and participation in the process (Althusser, 2006; Goode, 1975; Hasenfeld, 1972). But just as a text does not need to respond to a translator to be interpreted, and just as a translation can occur across diverse social settings (e.g. classrooms, on menus, at the United Nations), the criminal subject does not need to respond to, or even acknowledge their subject position to be read by others as a criminal. Furthermore, translation need not occur within formal bureaucratic institutions or even be initiated by formal bureaucratic actors. A text in translation is not agentic, acting alongside, with or against its translator. It is instead made legible through the actions of others. Subsequently, the criminal record makes the criminality of the carceral citizen legible to others empowered to manage them within and outside of the formal criminal legal system.

It should be noted that the language used to translate a text limits its translation. Words and sometimes-whole meanings get lost in the translation process. Similarly, the defining features of a carceral citizen often get lost in their process of translation. The criminal record flattens their essence making their presumed criminality omni-relevant while invisibilizing their non-carceral traits. Thus, the UPS driver who was once convicted of methamphetamine production but now volunteers at an animal adoption clinic is barred from public housing along with the serial rapist, the recalcitrant bank robber and the petty thief. Their good works and efforts to move beyond their conviction are lost in translation. The carceral citizen is therefore no more responsible for how they are “read” than a text is for how it is translated.

It is worth noting that this is not a universal experience for all people accused of a crime. The well resourced, the well supported and those with high public regard are often able to operate within the social world without being defined by their criminal record. Chuck Colson, special counsel to president Richard Nixon, founded the nation’s largest prison ministry after serving time on the heels of the Watergate scandal. He remained an important and influential political operator until his death in 2012. Martha Stewart’s business empire benefited from her incarceration at the West Virginia Women’s Prison, and she remains an icon of a particular kind of femininity and wholesome living (i.e. white upper-middle-class homemaker) (Latson, 2014). ⁴ These examples demonstrate the important and intersecting role that race, class and other axes of difference play in the experience of American citizenship, and the distinct legal reality that the raced and criminalized poor are made to navigate.

The social life of legal exclusion

Like other forms of political membership, the politics of informality are central to carceral citizenship (Glenn, 2011). Whether we consider the role of the police in the therapeutic governance of the urban poor (Stuart, 2016), or of social service providers, landlords and employers in the moral reform of the ex-offender (Miller, 2017), recent scholarship reveals that citizenship is experienced through state sanctioned actors responding to conditions of legal exclusion, along with actors who operate in the private sphere and respond to exclusionary state sanctions. This happens in formal and informal ways. Formally, state’s contract social service providers to address former prisoners’ needs, despite lacking the capacity to do so (Taxman et al., 2007). Informally, family and community members do the best they can to fill gaps in the safety net. They support their lovers, siblings, children, parents and friends despite their own instability (Comfort, 2008; deVuono-powell et al., 2016). Megan Comfort’s (2008) work speaks to this social situation, revealing how the conditions of confinement shape family life, and conversely how family life shapes the experience of incarceration for fathers, husbands and intimate partners.

Amputated from the labor market, the ability of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to meet their basic human needs is dependent on the goodwill of others. This makes them subject to their whims. For example, Miller’s (2014) ethnography of a Chicago halfway house revealed that residents were subjected to almost constant observation in exchange for a place to live. One resident, Manny, complained that he was in a zoo. There was an expectation for his life to be an “open book” and that he would recount his story of crime and redemption to the many religious volunteers, researchers, politicians and high school students who frequently visited the facility:

I’m supposed to be like, yeah this place is fucking great. I’m fucked up, now I’m good. This place got fucking bed bugs bro. You want to hear about that shit? But I do need this place… I mean. I ain’t got no place [to go]. But why people always like, “You don’t have to be here?”

(Miller, 2014: 325–326)

The vulnerability brought about through legal exclusion cannot be underestimated, as it changes the nature of social relationships. In this case, Manny reported feeling coerced to tell a redemption story to the many people who visited the halfway house where he lived. If he had somewhere else to live he may not have had to put up with the living conditions of the halfway house, or he may have had a very different relationship to its staff, volunteers and visitors. This is not an uncommon experience and it is brought about through the conditions of carceral citizenship, which shape the actions of the carceral citizen and the people tasked with helping them.

From New York City to Los Angeles, federal housing mandates are interpreted in such a way that a mother who allows her son to sleep on her couch can be evicted if he has a felony. She takes this risk to house him, but the stakes involved in caring for him may change how they relate to one another. Furthermore, employers, landlords and social service providers are subject to lawsuits or reputation loss should an employee commit a crime on their premises. They therefore either exclude formerly incarcerated people from services altogether or cream applicants, accommodating those considered least risky. These cases show how interpretations of liability law raise the risk for well-meaning family, friends and professionals who help people with criminal records (See Thacher 2008). In fact, there is a tacit expectation that they will exclude them from services and care. With the advent of electronic databases and the proliferation of what Sarah Lageson (2016) calls “digital punishment”, even convictions for low level offenses and arrest records where charges are dropped are used as a reason to reject an applicant. Given the risks involved for supporters, public pressure to fleece “criminals” from applicant rolls, and legal cover to discriminate, providing help to formerly incarcerated people is considered beyond reasonable expectations and construed as a kind of favor (Miller and Alexander, 2016). These favors are connected to everyday modes of exchange, like hiring a qualified candidate or providing a family member with a couch to sleep on, raising the consequences of everyday interactions for people with criminal records.

These practices endow caregivers, employers and other third parties with inordinate power. This is because third parties represent one of the few resources that carceral citizens have access to, introducing a new kind of vulnerability where the carceral citizen is subject to the whims of the people they encounter in everyday life—even those whom they are closest to. An argument with a partner or a misunderstanding with a social worker could warrant a trip back to prison, a night on the street or restricted access to food, work, healthcare or their family. This is not the case with other marginalized groups whose access to goods, services and stabilizing institutions are protected under the US constitution. This combination of precarity and derision creates a power imbalance, altering even the most intimate exchanges between the formerly incarcerated and the most important people in their lives.

While there is a long literature on women’s incarceration, Susan Burton’s powerful memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton (Burton and Lynn, 2017), along with the recent and growing literature on the post prison experiences of black American women demonstrate the profound and complex ways that black women uniquely experience this new form of citizenship (Gurisami, 2017; Richie, 2012; Rumpf, 2014; Threadcraft and Miller, this volume). While a full accounting of the criminalization of black women is beyond the scope of this article, black women occupy a particularly precarious position in the social landscape that deserves scholarly attention. They are objects of and subject to gendered forms of carceral citizenship, and remain targets of criminal justice intervention and the main support system for their formerly incarcerated partners, parents, siblings and children. Put simply, black women experience a deep and trenchant form of vulnerability to re-arrest, to housing instability, to disruption and displacement, that has a cumulative effect that exacerbates their precarity. Crime control filters into their family life, civic engagement, friendships and professional networks of carceral citizens in unique and powerful ways that vary by the “kind of person” who experiences them. These practices have changed urban sociality, and with it, the very nature of social interaction for the criminalized poor. As such, the ways in which they experience citizenship is fundamentally different from the experiences of other marginalized groups.

Punishment beyond the law

Following innovations in the study of carceral politics, one might suggest that the consistent engagement of carceral citizens with this loosely tethered network of public and private actors empowered to regulate their lives teaches them lessons about their place in the US democratic project (Lerman and Weaver, 2014). This is certainly true. At the same time, these interactions provide the context through which their citizenship is expressed and experienced. That is, as Lerman and Weaver (2014) aptly point out, people learn how to be citizens and what to expect from the state through their interactions. But beyond perception and socialization, such practices relay to others the political community to which carceral citizens belong, signaling, producing and justifying particular kinds of treatment. Put differently, beyond a legal status, citizenship is a “local practice […] a matter of belonging which requires recognition by other members of the community” (Glen, 2010: 3).

To understand citizenship in an era of mass supervision, we must move beyond official discourses on “who’s who” and “what’s what”, and even beyond the pronouncements of the criminalized poor about their place in the social landscape. While assertions from the marginalized about their presumed second-class citizenship offer a warrant for empirical investigation, the answer to the questions they raise lie at the intersection of experience and legal standing. This includes their experiences with actors administering law and policy, and their day-to-day interactions with the people they encounter who respond to their legal exclusion. These practices together constitute their legal and political realities (Berlant, 2004; Glenn, 2011). Taking this more ethnographic approach to how we theorize citizenship reveals the state’s ambidextrous nature and its deep penetration into the lives of the poor as it at once punishes and cares for them (Wacquant, 2009).

If social actors in public and private life are implicated in the governance of the carceral citizen, then the 48,000 legal sanctions they face are but one part of the legal apparatus that shapes their experiences of citizenship. ⁵ There are also burdens of carceral citizenship that must be accounted for, and obligations to the state that carceral citizens uniquely bear.

The responsibilities of carceral citizenship

The best-known obligations of citizenship include knowing and obeying the law, paying taxes, serving jury duty and voting (US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2016). We see little distance between these conventional obligations and the responsibilities associated with carceral citizenship, though the obligations of carceral citizenship are unique to class members. The carceral citizen is not only expected to obey an additional set of laws, which include the thousands of collateral consequences they face and the conditions of release that are imposed upon them, but that they repay a symbolic debt to become “productive” members of society through their economic and civic engagement. Susila Gurisami (2017) calls related work “rehabilitative labor.”

The formally codified laws on the books vary greatly from state to state, and are unevenly enforced across cities, towns and the organizations that operate within them. More importantly, the exceptions to these rules are highly localized. Returning to our example of public housing, there are restrictions on the books for people convicted of a crime in each state. Yet, public housing schemes have made exceptions, running pilot programs that allow people with felony records to live with their family members (Bae et al., 2017). Furthermore, thousands of laws constrain the labor market participation of formerly incarcerated people. Yet, many cities have “banned the box” and New York City recently passed the “Fair Chance Act” making it illegal for employers to discriminate against people with criminal records (NYC Human Rights Commission, 2015). The number of criminal record restrictions in a given city or state, coupled with the variegated nature of their enforcement make it difficult to fulfill the obligation to obey the laws to which they are subject, to know which laws they are in violation of or to anticipate what their conviction status means from time to time or place to place. Thus, carceral citizenship is as much shaped by official laws and formal practices, as it is by the seemingly arbitrary enforcement of those laws and policies.

In addition to formal laws on the books that the carceral citizen is expected to follow, they are presented with a list of conditions that they must meet upon their release from jail, prison or pretrial detention. These conditions dictate where one may live and with whom they may associate. They include regular check-ins with parole officers, geographic travel restrictions and repeated alcohol and drug tests. In addition, the carceral citizen may be mandated to attend self-help and community treatment programs. Despite the fact that many of these restrictions are formally legal activities, and that most people subject to these restictions have not yet been convicted of a crime, a violation of these conditions may result in incarceration. Such formally legal but institutionally illegal practices include crossing state lines for any reason without permission, using alcohol or cannabis in states where consumption is legal or missing an appointment. The obligation to fulfill these conditions is unique to carceral citizens, but even this maze of legal restrictions does not fully capture their social situation.

Formerly incarcerated people are expected to pay a material and symbolic “debt to society”. This includes the payment of court fines and fees during and after incarceration, and the obligation to participate in self-help groups, counseling services and prisoner reentry programs (Harris, 2016; Miller, 2014). In sum, they are expected to be civically engaged in ways that conventional citizens are not, and to offer some social or material benefit to their home communities (Miller, 2017; Putnam, 2000). No other group is expected to “give back” in this way, raising questions about what we expect from the most marginalized members of the polity. But citizenship is much more than a list of restrictions and obligations. It also includes rights, benefits or entitlements that must be accounted for.

The (perverse) benefits of carceral citizenship

It seems counterintuitive to think of the carceral citizen as a rights bearing subject. This is in part due to dominant understandings that the criminally accused and convicted occupy second-class citizenship status. However, carceral citizens have access to alternate systems of benefits that are unaccounted for in the literature. We are here referring to benefits in their legal sense, meaning the bundle of entitlements accorded to a group as a consequence of their political membership. For example, once arrested and imprisoned the conventional citizen becomes a ward of the state, which makes the state responsible for their care. As such, the state must provide for their basic human needs in ways that meet some standard of adequacy. California’s prison realignment was based on such an obligation, prompted by a lawsuit citing inadequate housing and healthcare in the state’s overcrowded prisons (see Brown v Plata). There is no guarantee of adequate healthcare or housing afforded to any other group under any other condition beyond a criminal conviction. Furthermore, while attorneys are provided at no cost to the accused so long as they qualify as indigent under the constitutional right to counsel (see Gideon v Wainwright), prisoner reentry programs, therapeutic services, case management and housing assistance are made available to former prisoners designated “high risk”. Finally, many organizations have enacted “felon friendly policies” in the face of labor market exclusion. This is especially true of the new and growing field of social enterprises, since many of these organizations specialize in hiring and training formerly incarcerated people.

These benefits are not typically available to people who have not been convicted of a crime, but even pretrial detainees are often mandated to attend drug treatment, violence and domestic violence prevention groups. If we view these mandates as a service to people whom the state deems in need, rather than a punishment or even an additional obligation, we can see access to these services as benefits of carceral citizenship. Similar benefits extend beyond the criminal justice system itself. Scientific and charitable societies have devoted resources to addressing social problems associated with mass incarceration, and a criminal record is sometimes viewed as a mechanism that endows individuals with expertise on criminal justice matters. The ex-offender that “makes good” is considered well suited for employment in the social service sector, while the formerly incarcerated expert is called upon to testify before Congress for a slate of celebrity causes (Maruna, 2001; Speck, 2010; US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2015). This includes the movement to disband solitary confinement, the release of nonviolent drug offenders and national criminal justice reform efforts.

These “benefits” are presented somewhat tongue in cheek. Incarceration is, after all, a state of deprivation. By this we mean that inmates are deprived of freedom of movement, freedom to freely associate with others, freedom to labor and to be creative and the freedom of sexual pleasure and expression. We are in no way suggesting that access to prison food, a jumpsuit or the exercise yard while incarcerated, a waiting list for a social service program or preferential treatment for low-wage work upon release, or even the positive public regard afforded some exceptionally skilled formerly incarcerated activists make up for the formal and informal practices of punishment they have endured. Put differently, the benefits of carceral citizenship are only made possible in the wake of the state’s failure to ensure the social rights of citizenship to begin with, and to provide adequate protections against social and environmental risk (e.g. Miller, 2015; Ward, 2015). But however they accrue their citizenship status, citizenship includes benefits and political membership has privileges that must be accounted for if we are to understand the broad effects of crime control policy in the era of mass supervision.

Acknowledging the benefits of carceral citizenship reveals that carceral citizens are not superfluous in an Arendtian sense (Arendt, 1973). That is, they are not without a state or naked in the face of state violence, unable to fend for themselves. Furthermore, they are not fully subject to the whims of others because carceral citizens have agency. A theory of citizenship in the carceral age must allow for formerly incarcerated activists who push for and successfully advance meaningful change, and the moments of agency that emerge in processes typically considered individualizing, apolitical or repressive. This includes the communal sense of agency activated in former prisoners’ self-help groups (see Kaye, 2013), and thinking carefully about the ways in which prisoners find social life in the social death of their incarceration. Similarly, while there is only limited enforcement of this group’s legal rights and the effects of punishment are cumulative, the carceral citizen does not experience the kind of bare life that exists in Agamben’s (1998) state of exception. Nor do they exist in an emergency state where government powers engage in illegal activity because of a presumed threat from a dangerous class (see Cooper-Knock 2017). On the contrary, the carceral citizen is rendered “super-visible” because of their criminal histories and because of their contact with institutions of punishment, coercion and care (McNeill, 2016; Fitzgibbon et al. 2017). ⁶ Their legibility as subjects to be corrected leads to their over-regulation by actors within and beyond the criminal legal system. That is, they are managed by a heretofore under-analyzed set of social actors, and relate with them in specific and largely unaccounted for ways. Their experience of citizenship is therefore unique and they therefore occupy a novel form of political membership.

Conclusion

Beyond the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction, and the extent to which the formerly incarcerated fully realize the rights of conventional citizenship, mass supervision has brought into being a unique form of political membership and activated an alternate citizenship tract for the raced and criminalized poor in the United States. The existence of an alternate form of citizenship, which rests on the presumption of (black) criminality, provides a unique opportunity to rethink how we approach social problems associated with mass incarceration. Theorizing mass incarceration and its community analogue mass supervision as a matter of citizenship rather than a problem of behavior (of the accused or of the accuser) moves us toward a deeper understanding of the social arrangements that contribute to and shape social action in the carceral age. It turns our attention toward what it means to belong to a political community and how varied forms of belonging are experienced and expressed together. Finally, it highlights the diverse range of actors involved in these processes and the mechanisms that bring these processes about.

What does it mean to have an alternate category of citizenship where the civic, social and economic freedoms of an entire social group are uniquely constrained and expressed? How does the public’s abiding of such a condition shape US democracy and conventional forms of citizenship? In what ways do the lifeworlds created, modified and destroyed by this unique form of citizenship shape social life for those outside the ambit of the carceral state? What are the implications of carceral citizenship for the future of social life within and beyond the USA? For the carceral citizen, the lines between punishment, welfare, state and family are blurred by the activation of third parties in their governance. The combination of legal exclusion, selective inclusion into coercive and caring networks and the power relations wrought by the under-analyzed vulnerabilities of the criminalized poor reveal the deep penetration of the state into their everyday lives. Put simply, mass incarceration and its community analog mass supervision has not just transformed the relationship between formerly incarcerated people and formal agents of the state. It has fundamentally altered the nature of social life for poor black Americans and especially those convicted of a crime. Carceral citizenship reveals one way that crime control has transformed the state while extending its reach, and how legal exclusion maintains separate social worlds even for interdependent populations that live in close proximity.