CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 158Criminal Justice and Corrections AnalysisCriminal Justice and PenologyEducation Discipline and Inequality

Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion

Schept, Judah·2015·New York University Press eBooks
DOI 10.18574/nyu/9781479876532.001.0001
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Winner, 2017 American Society of Criminology's Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice Best Book Award An examination of the neoliberal politics of incarceration The growth of mass incarceration in the United States eludes neat categorization as a product of the political Right. Liberals played important roles in both laying the foundation for and then participating in the conservative tough on crime movement that is largely credited with the rise of the prison state. But what of those politicians and activists on the Left who reject punitive politics in favor of rehabilitation and a stronger welfare state? Can progressive policies such as these, with their benevolent intentions, nevertheless contribute to the expansion of mass incarceration? In Progressive Punishment , Judah Schept offers an ethnographic examination into the politics of incarceration in Bloomington, Indiana in order to consider the ways that liberal discourses about therapeutic justice and rehabilitation can uphold the logics, practices and institutions that comprise the carceral state. Schept examines how political leaders on the Left, despite being critical of mass incarceration, advocated for a “justice campus” that would have dramatically expanded the local criminal justice system. At the root of this proposal, Schept argues, is a confluence of neoliberal-style changes in the community that naturalized prison expansion as political common sense among leaders negotiating crises of deindustrialization, urban decline, and the devolution of social welfare. In spite of the momentum that the proposal gained, Schept uncovers resistance among community organizers, who developed important strategies and discourses to challenge the justice campus, disrupt some of the logics that provided it legitimacy, and offer new possibilities for a non-carceral community. A well-researched and well-narrated study, Progressive Punishment offers a novel perspective on the relationship between liberal politics, neoliberalism, and mass incarceration.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18574/nyu/9781479876532.001.0001

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The ways that political scientists-in particular, settler political scientists-publish and speak to academic and public audiences, teach and mentor new scholars, and advise or inform stakeholders about carceral power can reproduce or counter its logics and legitimacy.

    “The ways that political scientists-in particular, settler political scientists-publish and speak to academic and public audiences, teach and mentor new scholars, and advise or inform stakeholders about carceral power can reproduce or counter its logics and legitimacy (Brown and Schept, 2017;Schept, 2015).”

    From Decolonizing Research on the Carceral in Canadian Political Science (2023) · cites this paper as Schept, 2015

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Schept, J.
Corresponding author
Schept, Judah
Venue
New York University Press eBooks
Publisher
New York University Press
Published
2015-12-31
DOI
10.18574/nyu/9781479876532.001.0001
OpenAlex
W4393264268
Cited by
158
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 26 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 7
FWCI
13.91
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
New York University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
  • Social Sciences › Law › Criminal Justice and Penology
  • Social Sciences › Education › Education Discipline and Inequality
Keywords
mass incarceration, progressive politics, neoliberalism, liberal politics, rehabilitation, therapeutic justice, carceral state, Bloomington, Indiana, community organizing, deindustrialization, urban decline, tough on crime, prison expansion

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review