From the Free World to the Carceral Empire: American Prisons in International Context since 1941

Post-9/11 debates over Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, and Abu Ghraib have repeatedly suggested that these American strategies of imperial assertion abroad have been tightly linked to the law-and-order regimes and vast prison systems at home. But is this connection between punishment and warfare only of recent origin? Based on corrections records, United Nations proceedings, and published sources, I trace the international dimensions of America's politics of punishment and rehabilitation from World War II to the War on Terror. Troubled by the horrors of German concentration camps, U.S. military prisons as well as state prisons of the new “corrections” movement tried to refashion themselves as “schools of democracy” and racial tolerance. At the same time, however, racial concepts of citizenship persisted on Southern penal farms, in the big houses of the Northeast, and in California. In their efforts to draw sharp distinctions between Soviet gulags and American prisons therapeutic corrections, advocates of modern corrections also stumbled repeatedly over contradictions the promise of rehabilitation and the reality of punishment. At the same time that the United States witnessed the failure of its efforts to save “hearts and minds” in Vietnam, correctional rehabilitation also lost credibility as a policy of the postwar welfare state. As states and the federal government increasingly expanded funding for the war on crime and drugs, advocates of a punitive state won the domestic security debate in the 1980s and 1990s at the same time that neoliberal policymakers designed a new foreign policy for American supremacy after the Cold War. This history emphasizes the relationship between a national discourse in the United States over corrections since World War II and the larger international debate about slavery and freedom. It thus invites us to discuss prisons not only in the context of race and citizenship, but nation and empire.