Premium
Policing the Carceral State: Prisons and Panic in an Upstate New York Prison Town
Author(s) -
Morrell Andrea
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
transforming anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.325
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 1548-7466
pISSN - 1051-0559
DOI - 10.1111/traa.12118
Subject(s) - prison , racialization , state (computer science) , criminology , prison reform , sociology , solitary confinement , order (exchange) , political science , law , politics , economics , algorithm , computer science , finance
Following the massive prison expansion in New York State in the 1980s, there has been a growing panic that families of men incarcerated in two state prisons in Elmira, New York are relocating to Elmira and utilizing the city's welfare benefits and causing crime. Like in many other Rust Belt towns, prisons were constructed as economic development projects in this small, multi‐racial city, but failed to fulfill the promise of economic recovery. I highlight prison expansion and maintenance as a site of racialization that obscures the history of Black Elmirans and renders people outsiders in their own places. I show how prison workers extend and limit the practice of carceral state making in order to show how the carceral state takes shape in the post‐Fordist era .