The Carceral State and the Welfare State: Traditional Racism and New Racism in the Context of Mass Incarceration
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of Sociology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
In my thesis I attempted to synthesize two distinct ways of looking at racism in American society. Michelle Alexander calls our criminal justice system explicitly discriminatory and racist, specifically indicting mass incarceration and the war on drugs, making the system seem guilty of traditional oldâfashioned racism. However, other scholars have argued out that the racism of today's U.S. is a 'new racism', which arises due to egalitarian assumptions about equal opportunity when certain groups perform less well than other groups. This is different from the explicit racism that characterized slavery and Jim Crow, where certain groups were denied equal opportunity on face. My thesis attempts to make clear how new racist assumptions and labeling were able to be institutionalized in our criminal justice system in such a way that the system acts in ways that are explicitly discriminatory. I first looked at survey data from the General Social Survey and the 1991 National Race and Politics Survey that dealt with respondents' attitudes towards criminality and welfare, arguing that the racial stigma surrounding criminals is the same sort of stigma that Martin Gilens tracked when analyzing opposition to welfare and its reform in the 1990s. I then looked at the effects of contact with the criminal justice system on individuals, using Vesla Weaver's argument that close contact with law enforcement and the criminal justice system makes individuals less likely to engage with civic and political institutions. I last look at the current calls towards decarceration, and argued that, due to the already institutionalized assumptions that certain groups are less sympathetic as criminals/offenders, specialized courts (like drug courts) would have an unintended effect of increasing racial disparity in the U.S. prison population.