Dolovich, Sharon, Incarceration American-Style (October 13, 2009). Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 3, p. 237, 2009 ; UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 09-27. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1488439
Abstract:
"In the United States today, incarceration is more than just a mode of
criminal punishment. It is a distinct cultural practice with its own
aesthetic and technique, a practice that has emerged in recent decades
as a catch-all mechanism for managing social ills. In this essay, I
argue that this emergent carceral system has become self-generating -
that American-style incarceration, through the conditions it inflicts,
produces the very conduct society claims to abhor and thereby
guarantees a steady supply of offenders whose incarceration the public
will continue to demand. I argue, moreover, that this reproductive
process works to create a class of permanently marginalized and
degraded noncitizens - disproportionately poor people of color - who
are marked out by the fact of their incarceration for perpetual social
exclusion and ongoing social control. This essay serves as the Foreword
to a symposium in the Harvard Law & Policy Review addressing the
costs of mass incarceration."
