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Reentry Within the Carceral: Foucault, Race and Prisoner Reentry

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Abstract

Early research on prisoner reentry was largely practical and applied, oriented to policymakers responding to the myriad challenges presented by having millions of people leaving prisons and jails each year. More recently, scholars have drawn on critical theoretical frameworks to reformulate the problem as bound up with large-scale shifts in the nature of social control (Wacquant in Dialect Anthropol 34(4):605–620, 2010a), deep racial divisions (Nixon et al. in Race/Ethnicity: Multidiscip Glob Contexts 2(1):21–43, 2008), and transformations of the United States political economy (Hallett in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-011-9138-8, 2011). This paper continues the work of theoretical elaboration through two avenues: (1) examining the contribution that Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish can make to the conceptual development of reentry scholarship, and (2) reworking Foucauldian concepts and themes important to the study of reentry to account for their racialized characteristics.

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Notes

  1. One of the key challenges to working with Foucault is the sheer volume of scholarship. His writing on incarceration alone includes around 60 texts written over 15 years (Wacquant 2010b, p. 204). I discuss only his most widely read: Discipline and Punish. In reworking key concepts and themes to account for race, I have also excluded discussion of Society Must be Defended (Foucault 2003), a series of lectures Foucault gave in 1975–1976 addressing directly race and racism (see Mendieta 2004, pp. 47–49). Again, this is a pragmatic decision to limit the scope to a manageable goal: mining and revising a classic theoretical text for insights to reentry. Engaging Discipline and Punish specifically with a discussion of race is especially important because for many criminologists it remains the single point of entry to Foucault’s work.

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    Liam Martin

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Martin, L. Reentry Within the Carceral: Foucault, Race and Prisoner Reentry. Crit Crim 21, 493–508 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9196-1

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