Carceral logics : family, race, and responsibility in a San Francisco county jail
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The city of San Francisco is widely recognized as one of the most progressive in the US, if not the world. However, with a Black population of just 5%, its' jail population is 60-70% Black, marking one of the greatest racial disparities of any US city. Drawing from three years of ethnographic field work with men incarcerated in a San Francisco County jail and with their family members in the outside world, this dissertation explores the nature of race in the everyday encounters, rhythms, and operations of the criminal justice system. It asks, how is it that race can be at once so prevalent in the effects and in the causes of mass incarceration and yet disavowed in its daily operations? This dissertation is the first US-based 'prison ethnography' with broad access to a cohort of incarcerated people in nearly 50 years. It is also the first in the US to have every examined incarceration from the perspective of incarcerated people and their families simultaneously. With this perspective it reveals the intersecting dynamics of family, race, and responsibility in which provide the ongoing justification for American mass incarceration. It outlines a number of operative 'carceral' logics within the jail which displaced the discourses of race and racism with the discourses of family failure, individual responsibility, and heritable criminality. I argue that the US criminal justice apparatus maintains a social distinction which is much wider than who is, or has been, incarcerated -- maps race onto criminalization and impoverishment.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Maull, Samuel Peter |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Garcia, Angela, 1971- |
| Thesis advisor | Garcia, Angela, 1971- |
| Thesis advisor | Dave, Naisargi N. (Naisargi Nitin), 1975- |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Rosa, Jonathan |
| Degree committee member | Dave, Naisargi N. (Naisargi Nitin), 1975- |
| Degree committee member | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Rosa, Jonathan |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Samuel Peter Maull. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xt651mc7105 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Samuel Peter Maull
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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