Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-406
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Judicial Intervention ◽  
Hostage Crisis ◽  
Prison Systems ◽  
State's Rights ◽  
And Control ◽  
Critical Moments

The epilogue reflects on what happened to the prisoners who brought civil suits to Texas and frames the legal and political legacy of Ruiz within the current political moment of national prison strikes and the ongoing struggle over mass incarceration. The chapter considers Ruiz’s legacy through the lens of the Tennessee prison hostage crisis of 1985 as well as ongoing contemporary prisoner politicization over mass incarceration. It considers the development of the Prison Litigation Reform Act as part of carceral federalism’s effort to overturn judicial intervention in favor a return to state’s rights and control of its prison systems. It concludes with an analysis the country’s first national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 as critical moments tied to Ruiz and the case’s political legacy.

Critiquing Critical Pedagogies Inside the Prison Classroom: A Dialogue Between Student and Teacher

2017 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin L. Castro ◽  
Michael Brawn
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Critical Pedagogies ◽  
Prison Systems

In this article, Michael Brawn, an incarcerated student, and Erin L. Castro, a nonincarcerated instructor, engage in a dialogue about the politics of using critical pedagogies in prisons, where teaching and learning processes are severely restricted by the constraints of mass incarceration. Situated within the broader politics of postsecondary educational opportunity for incarcerated people, their dialogue highlights the ways that the prison context significantly limits the promises and praxis of critical pedagogies. The authors close by turning to an emplaced praxis for nonincarcerated educators working within prison systems that acknowledges the complicated and contradictory nature of authority in critical pedagogies.

scholarly journals Teaching Undergraduate Courses on Robotics and Control in Prison

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (09) ◽  
pp. S11-S16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Bretl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Males ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Incarceration Rate ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Federal Prisons ◽  
White Males ◽  
The World ◽  
And Control

There is growing public consensus that the system of mass incarceration in the United States needs reform. More than 2.2 million residents (0.73%) of the United States were held in state or federal prisons or in local jails at the end of year 2010 [1]. This incarceration rate is the highest in the world, and disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities: 4.35% of black males were held in custody compared to 0.68% of white males in 2010.

Carceral protectionism and the perpetually (in)vulnerable

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 537-550
Author(s):  
SM Rodriguez ◽  
Liat Ben-Moshe ◽  
H Rakes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Transformative Justice ◽  
State Agents ◽  
And Control

The United States relies on carceralism—mass incarceration and institutionalization, surveillance and control—for its continued operation. The criminalization of difference, particularly in relation to race, disability and queerness, renders certain people as perpetually subject to state violence due to their perceived unruliness. This article relies on two case studies, in Toledo, Ohio and Brooklyn, New York to question the construction and co-optation of vulnerability by state agents and focus on interrelated instances of state violence done under the guise of protectionism of and from unruly subjects. We then discuss the response to these instances of violence- from the state in the form of carceral ableism and sanism, and from local activists trying to navigate the shifting contours of protectionist violence by enacting queer transformative justice.

Prison Litigation Reform Acts

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-267
Author(s):  
Susan N. Herman
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Physical Injury ◽  
Prison Staff ◽  
Prison Systems ◽  
Challenging Question

Whether the Prison Litigation Reform Act was well aimed or effective is a challenging question. Advertised as stemming a flood of trivial prisoners' lawsuits in the federal courts, the PLRA erected obstacles to serious as well as frivolous complaints – like claims of racial discrimination or sexual abuse by prison staff that leaves no physical injury. And much of the time saved by dismissing cases is spent interpreting the PLRA's perplexing procedural rules. More and more often, courts are leaving prisoners (and pretrial detainees) to the vagaries of cash-starved prison systems. The author brings her years as a prisoners' rights litigator and Pro Se Law Clerk to bear on the issue of whether, in these days of economic recession and mass incarceration, it is prison rather than prison litigation that is truly in need of reform.

Theories of Mass Incarceration

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha A. Frost ◽  
Todd R. Clear
Keyword(s):  
Crime Prevention ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Prevention And Control ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Prison Populations ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Way

This essay focuses in greater detail on sources of the massive increase in US prison admissions in the late 20th century. It argues that subtle, and not so subtle, shifts in policy and practice lead to changes in the way people approach crime prevention and control, and those shifts ultimately explain changing rates of incarceration. Elsewhere, these dynamics have been referred to as the “iron law” of prison populations. Explaining increases (or decreases) in prison populations is fairly straightforward-it is invariably a question of policies that drive prison populations up or down. Explaining what led to those policies, how they came to exist, and why they were deemed necessary is much more complicated. The recent downturn in incarceration rates is also considered within this framework.

The Rise, the Fall, and the Reinvention of the Prison Ethnography

2021 ◽  
pp. 529-552
Author(s):  
Jill A. McCorkel
Keyword(s):  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Treatment Programs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Impact

This chapter traces the emergence, maturation, and subsequent decline of ethnographic studies of prisons and jails in the United States. It provides a summary and overview of classic and contemporary prison ethnographies and identifies key issues and themes that animate qualitative research on prisons and carceral facilities. These include questions about the forms that punishment, surveillance, and control take, the ways that incarcerated men and women experience, resist, and make sense of the conditions of confinement, and the impact incarceration has for their relationships with families, communities, and one another. The chapter considers the dramatic reduction in the number of ethnographic studies of prisons and jails at century’s end and identifies how punitive policies associated with mass incarceration made it all but impossible for ethnographers to gain entry to carceral institutions. Contemporary ethnographers have reinvented the form by documenting practices and ideologies of control in alternate carceral spaces including visiting rooms, drug treatment programs, and group homes. A summary of recent work is included, along with a review of the ways that contemporary ethnographers foreground issues related to race and gender inequality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of prison ethnography in Europe where ethnographers enjoy greater access to carceral facilities and have considerable influence over public policy. For comparative purposes, I include a summary of ethnographic research from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France.

Dignity and its discontents: Towards an abolitionist rethinking of dignity

2020 ◽  
pp. 147737082097657
Author(s):  
Jonathan Simon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Court System ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
Prison Systems

As we approach the decade anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata (2011), it is perhaps a good time to take stock of some of the optimism expressed by this author (Simon, 2014) that the landmark prisoners’ rights decision, with its stark condemnation of the toxic combination of chronic illness, medical neglect, and overcrowding so typical of American prison systems in the era of mass incarceration, and its rhetorical invigoration of ‘dignity’ as a constitutional value, could play a role in taming mass incarceration in the United States. In doing so, part of the inquiry is juridical and jurisprudential. Did the opinion move the court system towards more protection of human rights for prisoners? The second aspect of the question is cultural and political. At a time of unprecedented public interest in reforming the criminal legal system in the United States, has the language or rhetoric of ‘human dignity,’ along with the problems of illness and overcrowding that the Plata case called national attention to, played a role in the foment? The Black Lives Matter movement, a major force in the street protests against policing in the summer of 2020, emerged just two years after Plata and, completely independently, has revitalized abolition discourse in the United States, leading to popular calls to ‘defund’ the police. To what extent should abolition and other goals of the movement for racial justice, supplant human dignity, with its liberal legal genealogy, as a meaningful lodestar for legal and political efforts to end mass incarceration? As an essay in normative sociological jurisprudence, my answers will be both descriptive and prescriptive.

The Diplomatic Presentation of the State in International Crises: Diplomatic Collaboration during the US-Iran Hostage Crisis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E Banks
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Hostage Crisis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mutual Interest ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Better Than

Abstract Theories of crisis (de-)escalation often focus on conflict, stress, and information problems. However, crisis (de-)escalation may sometimes hinge on how de-escalation is interpreted by domestic audiences. In this article, I combine Putnam's two-level games model of diplomacy with Erving Goffman's concepts of interaction order and face to create a mechanism I call “diplomatic presentation.” I show how diplomatic presentation can be instrumental for the crafting of diplomatic outcomes that states believe are in their mutual interest but that run the risk of being rejected by their domestic publics. Successful diplomatic presentation requires that states collude together to manage their performance, engage in teamwork, and control the impact of unsympathetic audiences. In evaluating this mechanism, I analyze the diplomacy surrounding the Iran Hostage Crisis. During this crisis, regime officials from the United States and Iran colluded in a theatrical “scenario,” in which both sides adopted specific roles in order to satisfy the sentiments of US and Iranian publics. I show that complications regarding the presentation of this scenario explain escalation of the crisis better than prominent alternatives. This argument contributes to the growing literature on symbolic diplomacy in international relations, while also challenging common assumptions about the adversarial nature of crises.

View from Vanishing Point

Mnemosyne ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 725-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.M. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epistemic Access ◽  
Strategic Model ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
And Control ◽  
Critical Moments

This paper explores the aspects of mortal temporal awareness which Eteocles reveals as he struggles with the paradox that we have epistemic access to the past but not to the future. His rejection of divine assistance and his attempt to shape strategy and control future events have particular resonance for contemporary Athens where control of muthos and kairos was increasingly viewed as key to determining the future of the polis. The Pindaric model of the myth in Pythian 8 bolsters oligarchic tradition, while Aeschylus suggests a new strategic model for the evolving democratic meta-city. Through analysis of critical moments, imagery and Aeschylus’ stylistic use of tense and mood, we see how Eteocles follows a linguistic trajectory which articulates his psychological journey and highlights the spatio-temporal dynamics of the play.

Triggering Federal Court Intervention in State Prison Reform

1993 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRADLEY STEWART CHILTON ◽  
DAVID C. NICE
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Causal Model ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Judicial Intervention ◽  
Court Intervention ◽  
Prison Systems ◽  
Reform Litigation ◽  
And Behavior

What “triggers” federal court intervention in prison reform litigation? The authors present a causal model of federal judicial intervention in the prison reform litigation of 48 states (all except Alaska and Hawaii). From analysis of variables posited by numerous qualitative case studies to be critical, the causal model indicates that federal court intervention in state prison systems can be correlated to various factors, including political ideology, socioeconomic factors, and the “problem environment” of state prison conditions. The authors offer the analysis in the hope that it will stimulate additional discussion of the jurisprudence and behavior of federal judicial intervention in prison reform litigation.

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