Define Mass incarceration
Two primary features:
A rate of imprisonment markedly above the historical and comparative norm.
A high demographic concentration that affects whole racial and class groups
Describe the relationship between slavery, convict leasing, and incarceration. How does each system contribute to racial domination?
historical sequence of racial caste models that are “reborn in new form,” to maintain a racial hierarchy through the criminal legal system.
* Slavery established domination through private social control, where slave masters handled punishment
* Convict Leasing exploited the 13th Amendment loophole by using “Black Codes” and “Pig Laws” to manufacture criminality and re-enslave Black people for private and state profit.
* Incarceration functions as the “New Jim Crow,” using the race-neutral “prison label” to legally authorize the same forms of social, political, and economic discrimination used during the Jim Crow era, effectively locking people of color into a permanent undercaste
What is Davis’ critique of Douglass, and what does it tell us about abolition as a concept?
Davis argues that Douglass’s “absolute faith” in Enlightenment principles and legal reform (prioritizing the ballot) blinded him to how the 13th Amendment’s loophole allowed the law itself to become a “weapon of terror” through convict leasing.
Reveals that true abolition cannot merely be a change in legal status; it must be a structural project that dismantles the institutions (like the prison system) and ideologies (the equation of Blackness with criminality) that concretely sustain racial hierarchy
How can we measure and make real knowledge about racial groups?
Present stats data as objective, “color-blind” facts to rationalize and normalize racial hierarchy. This uses disproportionate arrest and mortality rates to racialize crime while “sanitizing” the criminality of white people.
this knowledge is made “real” through formally race-neutral proxies (like “character,” “intelligence,” or the “prison label”) that allow white gatekeepers to distribute benefits and burdens along racial lines while maintaining a false sense of fairness
What is new racism?
A product of racial domination where social exclusion is achieved through formally race-neutral labels (like “criminal”) rather than explicit racial language
What is big data?
Computerized crime prediction that appears objective but increases inequality by rationalizing concentrated police deployment in Black communities based on biased historical data
Explain how the federal criminal court diverged from civil court
In the 1940s, procedural reforms created “separate and unequal courtrooms”
Civil Court: Designed for white litigants; emphasized transparency and discovery powers to ensure adversarial balance.
Criminal Court: Stripped defendants (often people of color) of discovery powers, granting prosecutors unchecked discretion to control the factual record
Explain how racial politics played a role in the changing structure and procedures of the criminal court
Racial politics influenced the court to prioritize “efficiency” and speed to satisfy white “bloodlust” and provide a carceral substitute for lynchings. This structure inserted a white gatekeeper (the prosecutor) with unreviewable discretion to “sort” defendants based on racialized perceptions of “law-abiding instincts”
How does power play out in the modern criminal court?
skewed heavily toward the state; prosecutors unilaterally determine what evidence to share, while defendants are reduced to “passive participants”
Describe the relationship between civil rights and “law and order”
“law and order” = rhetoric used to pit the “civil right” to safety against the Black activism of the 1960s
Describe the relationship between social welfare and social control
Great Society programs merged antipoverty funds with anticrime initiatives, embedding police into schools, clinics, and housing projects
How do the tools, institutions, and funding of this era set the stage for “mass incarceration” in the 1980s and 1990s
The 1960s War on Crime provided the carceral infrastructure: funding for local police, militarized equipment (helicopters, armored vehicles), and surveillance technology.
By tying grant funds to arrest records, the government incentivized the mass incarceration of low-income urban residents
Explain the relationship between color-blind racism and mass incarceration (how does racial discrimination still operate?)
Racial discrimination operates through coded words and dog whistles (e.g., “tough on crime,” “urban drug pushers”) that associate Black communities with criminality without naming race. This allows the state to target “criminals” while claiming to be race-neutral
In what ways can we still see the afterlife of the war on drugs in the courts?
The drug war’s legacy persists through:
The “prison label” that authorizes permanent legal discrimination.
Probable cause laws that allow the “smell of marijuana” to justify warrantless searches, a tactic used disproportionately against Black and Hispanic motorists
Explain the “slow violence” concept
disadvantages that compunt over time rather than one catastrophic event; sum of its parts greater than violence seen in court; victimization is dispersed and hidden
How does Civil Asset Forfeiture illustrate the “slow violence” of policing?
(CAF) allows police to seize cash and property based on mere suspicion without a conviction. This targets Black communities for revenue extraction, creating long-term financial instability that traps individuals in poverty
Alexander: The New Jim Crow
mass incarceration functions as a comprehensive system of racialized social control to maintain racial hierarchy
It uses the criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then subjects them to the same legal discriminations—such as denial of voting rights and housing—that were once used during the Jim Crow era
Covert: The Court Watch Movement
The system is a “house of cards” propped up by the public’s lack of understanding of its daily operations. The movement finds that most cases involve non-violent “crimes of poverty” and that the mere presence of observers in the courtroom can shift power and force institutional actors like judges and prosecutors to be more accountable
Davis: From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison
The 13th Amendment contains a loophole that allows “involuntary servitude” as punishment for a crime,. Southern institutions exploited this by passing “Pig Laws” that elevated petty thefts to felonies, ensuring a constant supply of Black bodies for the convict lease system, which was often more exploitative and deadly than slavery itself
Herring: Complaint-Oriented Policing
third-party complaints (911/311) from wealthier residents and businesses rather than police command,. It results in “burden shuffling,” where police move the unhoused spatially or bureaucratically rather than providing housing, and inflicts “pervasive penality” through the destruction of survival property like tents and medications
Hinton: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State
The “War on Crime” was birthed from The War on Poverty aka welfare programs that utilized militarized surveillance. Federal government directed funds into police departments to embed police into schools and housing projects, institutionalizing the management of Black communities through control and incarceration rather than equality
Joseph and McCarthy: California Civil Asset Forfeiture
Testing “racial threat theory,” the study found a strong association between the number of police seizures and the percentage of Black residents in a jurisdiction, regardless of actual crime levels,. The results debunked the institutional claim that CAF is a tool for targeting high-level “drug kingpins,” finding no significant link between seizures and drug arrest rates
Lassiter: Impossible Criminals
U.S. drug policy is designed to protect middle-class white youth (the “impossible criminals”) from the consequences of drug laws while targeting urban minority populations,.
Created a racialized “pusher-victim” script where white youth were framed as innocent victims of predatory pushers, leading to a bipartisan consensus that selectively decriminalized drugs for suburbanites while maintaining militarized punishment for POC
Meyn: Constructing Separate and Unequal Courtrooms
Procedural reforms created a two-tiered system where white prosecutors were granted unchecked discretion, while criminal defendants (disproportionately POC) were stripped of discovery powers.
Deliberately reduced defendants to “passive participants” who were denied access to information, while civil rules—governing mostly white litigants—were designed for transparency and adversarial balance
