Session Abstract

The unprecedented expansion of the United States prison population over the last four decades has recently come under increasing scrutiny from scholars in a variety of disciplines, as journalists, sociologists, and legal scholars have sought to better explain the origins and consequences of this phenomenon.  Their studies have contributed significantly to our understandings of mass incarceration itself, and of the severe racial disparities that are its dubious hallmark. Yet for all this richly deserved attention, historians, as Heather Ann Thompson recently wrote, “have largely ignored the mass incarceration of the late twentieth century and have not yet begun to sort out its impacts on the social, economic, and political evolution of the postwar period.” 

This panel takes up Thompson’s challenge, with its contributors collectively seeking to more deeply explore the genealogies of the modern carceral state and historicize challenges to it.  The carceral state’s origins are generally dated to the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws in New York State, which led to a remarkable expansion of the prison population there and served as a national model.  While conscious of the landmark significance of the Rockefeller laws, the panelists here are concerned with explaining how political and social developments prior to the 1970s anticipated, informed, and shaped mass incarceration’s face and form.  They are also interested in better understanding how citizens and prisoners prior to, and in the germinal period of, mass incarceration responded to the criminal justice apparatuses around them.

Simon Balto argues for better inclusion of local contexts in understanding the development of the carceral state, specifically by exploring antecedents for modern racial disparities through a study of policing strategies in World War II-era Black Chicago.  He examines changes in policing practices and patterns relative to Black migration to the city, as well as the ways Black Chicagoans navigated often-treacherous relationships with the police.

Jessica Neptune examines the shifts between punitive and rehabilitative approaches to narcotics policy and sentencing law over the 1950s and 1960s and explores their relationship to the 1970s punitive turn that has prevailed ever since.  She grapples with the problems of periodization, as well as the features of and forces compelling these paradigmatic shifts in drug law and crime policy.

Megan Stubbendeck examines the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations, with a sustained focus on their responses to gang violence, in order to understand their contributions to the politicization of crime within national discourses and culture.  Complicating narratives that center politicians of the Right in these developments, she argues that scholars need to expand their focus ideologically and temporally to understand the Left’s contributions to the punitive turn.

Robert Chase takes us to the other side of the punitive turn and studies the rebellions of inmates in late-1970s and early-1980s Sunbelt prisons against the conditions of their confinement.  Exploring how prisoners understood and articulated their situation as part of both a particular contemporary moment and longer historical tradition, Chase provides windows onto the experience of—and resistance to—imprisonment in the early years of the incarceration epidemic.