Carceral Liberalism: The Coloniality and Antiblackness of Coercive Benevolence

Due to hyper-imprisonment and its collateral consequences, the United States has become a carceral state where even non-criminal justice institutions have adopted punitive techniques to address social problems. This study examines how state and non-state actors who ostensibly intend to end homelessness perpetuate it through their use of coercive benevolent policing. Drawing on nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork with a homeless service provider in Southern Nevada, this article shows that the coercive benevolent techniques used by those who attempt to assist the unhoused are deeply rooted in antiblack and colonial practices forged in the development of liberalism. I offer carceral liberalism as the conceptual link between contemporary U.S. policing and a transnational and historical past dedicated to racialized economic domination. I argue that carceral liberalism reveals the long and ongoing history of state and non-state actors marking marginalized individuals as non-subjects to the state through coercive benevolence and that these findings make a case for the abolition of larger systems of racialized punishment.