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How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communitiesAs the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America's hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape—coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators—Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region.Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States

This article, based on two years of ethnographic research, examines such incongruity in a small city the author calls Springfield, a Midwestern 'college town' home to a little over 100,000 people and a large university. Springfield, and the surrounding Lincoln County, boasted political and criminal justice leadership comprised almost exclusively of liberal and progressive elected officials. This article relies on fieldwork with these officials to examine their energetic and passionate pursuit of a 'justice campus.' Comprised of a new adult jail, a juvenile facility, a work release center and new law enforcement offices, the campus would sit on 85 acres that had been abandoned by industry in the late 1990s. The constitutive institutions of the campus would each exponentially expand the number of incarcerated and supervised persons in the county. Local officials justified the project as an articulation of local benevolent justice; the campus, they frequently argued, would reject the logic and practices of the carceral state. Adapted from the source document.

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 can progressive polities, with their benevolent intentions, nevertheless contribute to the expansion of mass incarceration? In Progressive Punishment, Judah Schept offers an ethnographic examination into that liberal discourses about therapeutic justice and rehabilitation can uphold the logic, 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 for a community negotiating deindustrialization, urban decline, and the devolution of social welfare. While the proposal gained momentum, local activists worked to disrupt the logic of expansion and instead offer alternatives to reduce community reliance on incarceration. A well-researched and well-narrated study, Progressive Punishment provides an important and novel perspective on the relationship between liberal politics, neoliberalism, and mass incarceration. -- from back cover.

Criminology has been slow to open up a conversation about decarceration and abolition in comparison with other disciplines, including history, geography, and gender, race, and critical ethnic studies. Scholars from these areas and actors on the ground—close up to confinement—have done most of the organizing against mass incarceration and theorizing of alternative possibilities. Why those experiences—and the theoretical traditions that inform their work—have been less recognized and developed in criminology is of pivotal concern as more criminologists move forward with the political project of decarceration. The extent to which criminology can sustain an alternative or abolitionist politics remains an open question. Amid growing conversations about decarceration and shifting rhetorics on punishment, we address some of the obstacles that limit criminology as a site from which to engage the abolitionist project, asking where criminologists might turn for interventionist models that move away from imprisonment and the violence of the carceral state. In this article, we advocate for and discuss the contours of critical carceral studies, a growing interdisciplinary movement for engaged scholarly and activist production against the carceral state. We discuss the imperatives for criminological engagement with critical carceral studies and sketch some of the terrain on which the discipline can contribute to the project, including important work to counter criminological discourses and knowledge production that reify and reproduce carceral logics and practices.

Given the entrenched social inequalities and punitive justice policies facing young people in the United States, a more theoretically informed and principled scholarship on youth criminalization and punishment is sorely needed. A goal of this special issue of Social Justice is to provide examples of such work from scholars working at the intersections of criminology, justice studies, and the sociology of punishment. Using various theoretical lenses connected by a critique of neoliberal logics, the articles explore the lived realities of punitive social and penal policies aimed at young people in the United States. Individual articles focus on particular aspects of the punitive turn: schools, juvenile justice, and community-based programs. But they also historicize their inquiries to make sense of these local lived realities in and beyond the contexts of neoliberal constraints on funding and constructions of responsibilization, the rise of the carceral state and racialized criminalization and punishment, and the increasing securitization of youth spaces. Adapted from the source document.

Criminology has offered alibis and bodies for the capitalist state to securitize schools and criminatize youth. It is the purpose of this article, to begin to sketch these structural complicities. Specifically, the authors examine the role of the university criminology/criminal justice department in creating, staffing. and legitimating the pipeline. This article offers a preliminary and provisional conceptual scaffold for understanding the complicity of the criminology/criminal justice discipline and its academic departments. In addition, this article argues that when criminology does call critical attention to the pipeline, its gaze remains decidedly reformist. The authors contend that scholars must commit to the abolitionist project of dismantling the pipeline and 'redistributing' the state resources that sustain it. Future articles will flesh out the ideas offered here and they hope the colleagues will take up the project of holding the discipline(s) accountable. They believe they are uniquely positioned to offer this reflexive analysis of the discipline's (or disciplines') complicity in the carceral continuum. Adapted from the source document.