Description
Book SynopsisA critical examination of how contemporary criminal justice reforms expand rather than shrink structurally violent systems of policing, surveillance, and carceral control in the United States. Public opposition to the structural racist, gendered, and economic violence that fuels the criminal legal system is reaching a critical mass. Ignited by popular uprisings, protests, and campaigns against state violence, demands for transformational change have escalated. In response, a now deeply entrenched so-called bipartisan industry has staked its claim to the reform terrain. Representing itself as a sensible bridge across bitterly polarized political divides and party lines, the bipartisan reform industry has sought to control the nature and scope of local, state, and federal reforms. Along the way, it creates an expanding web of neoliberal public-private partnerships, with the promotion and implementation of efforts managed by billionaires, public officials, policy factories, foundation
Trade Review"While scholars will find much in Carceral Con enlightening, the book is no standard academic text. Rather, it is a movement-building tool intended to assist readers in ‘critically interrogat[ing] new [reform] proposals as they arise’ and in choosing the ‘radically different way forward’ of abolition."
* The Nation *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: World Making and "Criminal Justice Reform"
1. Correctional Control and the Challenge of Reform
2. Follow the Money
3. Criminalization, Policing, and Profiling
4. The Slippery Slope of Pretrial Reform
5. Courts, Sentencing, and "Diversion"
6. Imprisonment and Release
7. Threshold
Notes
Index
