Race and lethal forms of social control: A preliminary investigation into execution and self-help in the United States, 1930–1964

2006 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164
Author(s):  
A. Austin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Preliminary Investigation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Help

scholarly journals Foucault, prison, and human rights: A dialectic of theory and criminal justice reform

2021 ◽  
pp. 136248062110159
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Penal Reform ◽  
Foucauldian Theory ◽  
Prison Abolition ◽  
Abolition Movement

Michel Foucault’s advocacy toward penal reform in France differed from his theories. Although Foucault is associated with the prison abolition movement, he also proposed more humane prisons. The article reframes Foucauldian theory through a dialectic with the theories of Marc Ancel, a prominent figure in the emergence of liberal sentencing norms in France. Ancel and Foucault were contemporaries whose legacies are intertwined. Ancel defended more benevolent prisons where experts would rehabilitate offenders. This evokes exactly what Discipline and Punish cast as an insidious strategy of social control. In reality, Foucault and Ancel converged in intriguing ways. The dialectic offers another perspective on Foucault, whose theories have fostered skepticism about the possibility of progress. While mass incarceration’s rise in the United States may evoke a Foucauldian dystopia, the relative development of human rights and dignity in European punishment reflects aspirations that Foucault embraced as an activist concerned about fatalistic interpretations of his theories.

Credit as a Tool of Statecraft

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Sarah L. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central Government ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
Public Private Partnerships ◽  
Credit Allocation ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Farm Credit ◽  
Policy Arenas

This chapter shows how Progressives returned to the issue of farm credit distribution in the early 1900s and drew on European precedents to reframe credit allocation as a way for the central government to help people help themselves. American Progressives thus replaced their earlier, more radical farm credit politics with a more moderate vision of government-supported credit as an inexpensive way of supporting self-help. The chapter then considers the Federal Farm Loan Act (FFLA). Compared with other hallmarks of Progressive Era state building, the FFLA seems relatively unimportant. Nevertheless, it was a turning point in the use of selective credit as a tool of federal statecraft in the United States. The FFLA provided federal credit on a national level that was administered through public–private partnerships and bolstered by tax expenditures. By tracing the lead-up to this policy, one can see how Progressives forged a new array of cultural and organizational approaches to federal credit that would later proliferate across policy arenas.

Benjamin Franklin

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Worship Services ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
The Way

Benjamin Franklin grew up in a devout Protestant family with limited prospects for wealth and fame. By hard work, limitless curiosity, native intelligence, and luck (what he called “providence”), Franklin became one of Philadelphia’s most prominent leaders, a world-recognized scientist, and the United States’ leading diplomat during the War for Independence. Along the way, Franklin embodied the Protestant ethics and cultural habits he learned and observed as a youth in Puritan Boston. This book follows Franklin’s remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. The Philadelphian’s work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventor, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesman was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured. Through the alternatives to medieval church and society, Protestants built societies and instilled habits of character and mind that allowed figures such as Franklin to build the life that he did. Through it all, Franklin could not assent to all of Protestantism’s doctrines or observe its worship. But for most of his life, he acknowledged his debt to his creator, reveled in the natural world guided by providence, and conducted himself in a way (imperfectly) to merit divine approval. This biography recognizes Franklin as a cultural or non-observant Protestant, someone who thought of himself as a Presbyterian, ordered his life as other Protestants did, sometimes went to worship services, read his Bible, and prayed, but could not go all the way and join a church.

The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States.

Social Forces ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 1154
Author(s):  
Richard V. Ericson ◽  
William G. Staples
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Control ◽  
The United States

Disaster Citizenship

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob A. C. Remes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Family Members ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Emergency Powers ◽  
Social Landscape

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands—the Salem fire of 1914 and the Halifax explosion of 1917—saw working-class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. This book draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions—both formal and informal—that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. It explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as the book shows, these methods—though often quick and effective—remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive “solutions” on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

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