Abstract
Carceral liberalism: Feminist voices against state violence describes the intertwinement of neoliberalism, racialized punishment in and beyond prisons, and patriarchy. The volume's coverage is impressive. Its two parts, each framed by original poetry, include a personal narrative of the way race, class, gender and the law create pipelines to prison; analyses of prison writings and feminist social movements from India; reflections on the complicities of prison yoga and creative writing programs; report-backs on experimental alternative justice projects; and accounts of the way women incarcerated in Peru, day laborers in Texas, and Iraqi and Syrian women refugees in the US experience, navigate, and resist punishment, surveillance, and state violence. Far from watering down the book's thesis—that “carceral liberalism is the hidden script of neoliberalism; […] an ideology that wreaks violence on the most vulnerable while promising freedom and a higher quality of life for all”—the extensive ground covered in geography and subject matter reinforces the depth with which racialized punishment is the hidden structure of liberal capitalism, pervading our institutions, norms, and relations (p. 2). Editor Shreerekha Pillai aptly calls this “the banality of the carceral” (p. 3).
Pitched for an academic audience, Carceral liberalism is an important read for students, professors, and service providers looking to understand how racism, sexism, gender-based violence, capitalism, and imperialism converge in carceral systems—prisons and jails, detention facilities, policing, surveillance, and the narratives that justify their necessity. The book's most important contribution to the feminist literature on prisons and punishment is Pillai's development of the book's titular concept as an analytical framework and descriptor for the violent conditions created by neoliberalism. As Pillai explains in the volume's introduction, carceral liberalism is the “subscript” of liberal notions of freedom, a “ruse” or discursive order with material consequences, that “waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins, that speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remains warehoused in state apparatuses, that speaks of capital while its dispossessed remain mired in debt” (p. 6). This insight, that the carceral state and industry are at the heart of liberalism and not its exception, is crucial for understanding the power dynamics and demographics of institutional life in the US. This premise makes Pillai's introduction enlightening reading for policymakers, teachers, social workers, and anyone else working in an institutional or service-provision context. While the book is more critique than proposal, the book's contributors make a strong descriptive and analytical case for the centrality of liberalism's reliance on imprisonment and other forms of racialized punishment while documenting the agency and resistance of those subject to its depredations.
The book's central argument—that the containment, punishment, and exploitation of racialized and gendered bodies make liberalism possible—unfolds kaleidoscopically, with each chapter casting its own light at its own angle. The first part, “Carceral Narratives and Fictions,” discusses the power of media and writing produced by and/or about people who are incarcerated. A strength of this first part is the way that these chapters expose the liberal myth that prisons are necessary places for reform. Beth Matusoff Merfish's critical analysis of the Texas Prison Museum is particularly striking in this regard, describing the museum's site and objects as glorifying “law and order,” rendering invisible state violence, and dehumanizing inmates. Her description of an exhibit of faceless, black-colored mannequins in white prison scrubs drives home the way that our current system rests on narratives of who is entitled to freedom, substantiating the claim that liberalism is carceral while concealing this violence and mythologizing itself as the defender of safety, freedom, and civilization.
The book's second half, “Carceral Bodies and Systems,” is looser in focus, but rich in important concepts for those practicing social work who are seeking to understand and navigate the contradictions of service provision. The notion of “going carceral,” coined in Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial's chapter on prison yoga programs, describes the colonial, othering, and civilizing tendencies of programming that, while improving the quality of life in prison to an extent, also serves to inculcate docility and reinforce white beneficence without challenging the system. Service providers working in contexts where they don’t share their clients’ racial, class, or migration backgrounds may find this notion helpful. Maria F. Curtis’ description of “drone poetics” and the “carcerality of the mind” will be of particular interest to practitioners working with migrants to the US, since it captures the legal, bureaucratic, and atmospheric barriers faced by migrants as a kind of “exilic condition” where the “panopticon of the prison yard is no longer a fixed geographic space but hovers, drone-like, in the mind of the person building a resettled home” (p. 193).
The volume's silence on settler colonialism is notable, given the intersectional feminist orientation of the book, the disproportionate violence faced by Indigenous women, girls, and LGBT2SQ people, and the importance of settlement to US liberalism. Nonetheless, the book makes a strong case that realities built on borders and nation-states, prisons, resettlement programs, and the exploitation of migrant workers are sustained by violence. Carceral liberalism's argument that this violence at the heart of liberalism is intersectional, and a central issue for feminist theory and practice, makes it a worthwhile read for anyone seeking to intervene in the power dynamics that “wreak violence on the most vulnerable” in the name of freedom (p. 2).
