Probing the meta-prison
Keywords:
Prison. Marginality. Carceral authority. State crafting. Policy transfer. Neoliberalism.Abstract
After the mid-1970s, instead of rehabilitating convicts, the United States rehabilitated the prison and turnedit into a device for the punitive containment of marginality and the reassertion of state sovereignty on theoutside. Then it fashioned the “Supermax”, a new neutralizing “prison within the prison”, to discharge thesame function inside the bloated penal system. Just as the penitentiary is massively overused as a vacuumcleaner for the social detritus of a society ravaged by economic deregulation, welfare retrenchment, andethnoracial anxiety, supermax facilities are grotesquely overused inside to subdue and store the refuseand the refuseniks of carceral rule. The supermax prison thus stands as the hyperbolic product and iconicexpression of the ravenous remaking of the American penal state and of the contradictions of neoliberalpenality. Its study can contributes to our understanding of the internal and external politics of punishmentin contemporary society.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
COPYRIGHT
The submission of originals to Sistema Penal & Violência implies the transfer by the authors of the right for publication. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication. If the authors wish to include the same data into another publication, they must cite Sistema Penal & Violência as the site of original publication.
CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE
As this journal is open access, the articles are allowed free use in scientific and educational applications, with citation of the source.
According to the type of Creative Commons License (CC-BY 4.0) adopted by Sistema Penal & Violência, the user must respect the requirements below.
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
However, only under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests Sistema Penal & Violência endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notices:
You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
For more details on the Creative Commons license, please follow the link in the footer of this website.
