Popular histories of United States mass incarceration often focus on federal wars on crime, law and order policing, and the passage of harsh sentencing laws to explain how the United States transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration. My dissertation on the crisis of state prison overcrowding and prisoner resistance in late-20th-century Pennsylvania, however, uncovers a more contested history of mass incarceration’s development. I show how punitive politics created a massive crisis of prison overcrowding for the state and local governments chiefly responsible for imprisonment under American federalism. Even as law and order politics reached its political zenith, state and local officials’ desire to punish far outpaced their capacity to do so, creating administrative and legitimacy crises that carceral policymakers had to solve.In Pennsylvania and in states across the nation, prison overcrowding posed governance challenges for policymakers, strained local finances, and created opportunities for prisoners to challenge an emergent – but not yet settled – carceral state. Indeed, this era of state prison overcrowding sparked a little-acknowledged period of Black-led prisoner resistance. Through an array of tactics ranging from lawsuits to work stoppages to full-scale prison rebellions, imprisoned people and their allies launched considerable challenges to state policymakers who scrambled to expand and toughen their criminal punishment systems. In doing so, they made legible the racialized state violence inherent to their detention in overcrowded, dilapidated, and repressive institutions. In examining this more contested history of the prison nation’s development, my dissertation shows that the United States’ path to becoming the world’s leader in incarceration was not set in stone. To be sure, mass imprisonment would ultimately become a horrific reality in the United States, resulting in the premature death of disproportionately Black, brown, and poor people rendered surplus and deemed inherently criminal under late racial capitalism. But this little-known history of prison overcrowding makes clear the contingency of the prison nation. It recovers a time when the future of incarceration was profoundly unsettled, where prisoners, activists, and policymakers struggled over the future of imprisonment. Mass incarceration, in other words, is neither required for public safety nor an immutable feature of the United States’ political economy – a lesson that can serve as an inspiration and offer guidance for local decarceration movements today.

Creator

• Rosen, Charlotte E.

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-cd3m-4m03

Subject

• History

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_981154
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16491

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright