Abstract
For decades, radical intellectuals of social movements have articulated powerful critiques of the prison industrial complex. By now these critiques are well known. Yet, when liberals deploy such narratives, often their intention is not to dismantle the largest carceral state on the planet, but rather to expand it. In his timely book, Progressive Punishment, Judah Schept explores how progressive rhetoric has been used to justify carceral expansion. He interrogates the politics of municipal carceral growth in Bloomington and Monroe County, Indiana, home to Indiana University. He examines how liberal Democrats in the region promoted the very punitive responses to social and economic crisis that they claimed to contest. In this exploration, Schept depicts how liberal consent to carceral expansion can take hold without customary appeals to law and order, especially in a devastated deindustrialized county.
In an introduction, eight substantive chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue, Progressive Punishment tells the story of a county reeling from deindustrialization. With the closure of an RCA/Thomson plant, almost 10,000 industrial workers had recently been laid off. Schept explores how liberals in Bloomington and Monroe County responded to this economic crisis by promoting the construction of a so-called “justice campus” on the surplus land. Aware of the critiques of the prison industrial complex, local liberals incorporated denunciations of racism and mass incarceration—and sometimes even the excesses of capitalism—and combined them with a passionate call for the construction of the justice campus. In the name of “justice,” this planned campus would feature a new jail, juvenile detention facility, and a work release center. State officials, journalists, and academics depicted this carceral space as a site that would enable so-called “therapeutic justice” for poor and unemployed people in the county. Schept explores how liberals sought to construct “a lockdown facility … with the feel of a small, private college.” (p. 96) He considers how narratives of liberal benevolence influenced the county’s “carceral habitus,” (p. 10) by which he means a set of taken-for-granted ideologies and political activities. In the case of the justice campus, this habitus included demands for “green thinking” in the design of the campus and other apparently “sustainable” forms of carceral development. As such, Schept concludes that liberal rhetoric reproduced a carceral habitus without recourse to the customarily conservative discourse of law and order.
Drawing on impressive ethnographic fieldwork, government documents, and a range of media sources, Schept also offers an important analysis of the liberal common sense in this ultimately failed prison venture. He powerfully examines how liberal elites constructed narratives about the so-called “red neck,” “unsocialized,” and “white trash” poor and working-class population to legitimate criminalization in a city that was 87 percent and county that was 88 percent white. In doing so, he demonstrates how liberals worked to distance themselves from the racist politics of law and order articulated by conservatives in other parts of the state and country, thereby shoring up consent to neoliberal carceral policies that would otherwise have been untenable. This political rhetoric reflected the hegemony of what Naomi Murakawa calls “carceral racial liberalism” (Murakawa, 2014: 12) that permeates the political culture of the county. Schept illustrates how racial liberals individuated poverty and constructed a “jail(able) population” that was made up of the deindustrialized poor and working class. By locating the problems of poor and working people in individualized terms, local liberal politicians were able to sidestep structural accounts of the political economy of prisons.
To challenge such conceits, Schept traces their origins to a historically specific geography transformed by capitalist restructuring. Specifically, he draws upon the historical-geographical materialist analysis modeled in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (Gilmore 2007) to show how local organizers struggled to forge a political project capable of halting the transformation of the surplus land of the former RCA/Thompson plant into a new carceral space. The final section of the book explores how the prison abolition organization Decarcerate Monroe County (DMC), of which Schept was a key member, organized to resist such prison expansion at the county scale. It highlights how DMC organizers and intellectuals sought to alter dominant definitions of the situation promoted by state officials and the local press in order to transform the reigning common sense. DMC’s analysis of the political culture and economy was enriched through an engagement with the critical theories of Stuart Hall and his Birmingham colleagues as well as Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to prison abolition founded in California in the late 1990s. Schept explores how DMC produced political education about the prison industrial complex, and fought to resist the local expansion of the carceral regime. DMC fought to redefine issues of safety and security through the “counterhegemonic constructions of key concepts on which carceral expansion was predicated.” (p. 218)
In a refreshingly self-reflective analysis, however, Schept also considers some of the organization’s shortcomings. He delineates some reasons why they may have been unable to increase membership and leadership from the criminalized poor, working class, and communities of color, those “most affected locally by the policies that DMC fought.” (p. 232) Specifically, he questions whether the DMC’s emphasis on a “non-hierarchical” group process may have been “too decentralized for the task of building a broader movement.” (p. 232) In this way, Schept’s book offers a useful case study for a new generation of abolitionists across the US and the world encountering similar dynamics.
Schept’s study stands out in the field of critical prison studies for its ethnographic and geographical analysis of the carceral state. Using a generative theoretical framework, the book traces the ways that the carceral habitus takes shape at the county scale. Readers might be puzzled way the book is marketed as a critique of “political leaders on the Left,” since the book actually critiques mainstream liberals. This distinction is critical in a moment when it has become ever more fashionable for liberals to denounce the excesses of police violence and mass incarceration without ever addressing the ways these institutions contain the contradictions of capital in particular geographical spaces.
Progressive Punishment’s perspective on the liberal legitimation of carceral expansion is essential. It proves that liberal racial discourse can provide ideological cover for punitive politics and austerity economics. It also demonstrates that scholars and activists neglect these dynamics to their peril. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that efforts to contest the common sense of the carceral state should engage with the generative work in critical prison studies. This growing body of scholarship, as Schept notes, “might hold the key to the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and the structural conditions that make it possible.” (p. 232) As liberal discourses have helped to authorize carceral solutions to political-economic crises at local and national levels, Progressive Punishment offers an indispensable primer for navigating this shifting terrain of struggle.