Faith in Violence: Race and the Punitive Paradigm

Abstract

The United States is in the midst of a “racial reckoning”, a confrontation with racial inequality brought to the forefront of politics by recurring acts of police brutality. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, massive uprisings in support of racial justice swept over the United States and then the world. Although George Floyd’s murder was the catalyst of international demonstrations, the protests were not only a response to the worst cases of police brutality. Protesters also sought to confront the day-to-day activities of criminal-legal institutions, that even in the absence of overt brutality and harassment, disproportionately impact stereotyped and socioeconomically isolated communities. Thus, racial disproportion in prisons has come to signify the routine racial injustice of the United States. What remains less known, however, is that the world’s prison are similarly characterized by conspicuous ethnic, racial, and indigenous disproportion, comparable to that of the United States. Indeed, no country can match US incarceration-rates; however, in terms of demographic divergence between the incarcerated and non-incarcerated population, the United States is far from exceptional. Disparate groups such as the Roma of Europe, Indigenous Australians, and Black Americans share a similar carceral experience in that they are far more likely than other groups in their respective countries to be incarcerated. Despite a clear global pattern of disproportionality in prisons, there have been few specific theorizations to clarify this occurrence. This dissertation offers a general theory of ethnoracial and indigenous prison disproportionality and relates this theory to the future of criminal justice in the United States. I first demonstrate the extent of disproportion in world prisons by analyzing 19 countries across 6 continents. The findings show that no country for which data is available has anything close to a proportional prison system, including the low-incarcerating and wealthy democracies of Europe, which otherwise appear progressive in their penal regimes. Addressing existing theories for prison disproportion and finding them insufficient to explain a global pattern stretching across considerable national variation, I develop a novel general theory to clarify why and how legal violence becomes focused on a country’s perceived “outgroups”. Criminal-legal systems, despite their respective variation and the variation of the political regimes in which they are embedded, are shown to be legitimated and motivated by a shared set of ideas and assumptions, what some call the “criminal justice paradigm”. I deconstruct the criminal justice paradigm to reveal an implicitly exclusionary logic I articulate as “nationalistic”. I explain how this exclusionary logic predisposes police and other criminal-legal actors to focus on groups perceived outside the bounds of an idealized national identity, therein constituting a “selection bias” at the institutional level. Thus, while criminal justice reformers remain preoccupied with rooting out bias at the individual level, they overlook the bias inherent to the very idea of criminal justice itself. While “institutional racism” is a long-established concept, this dissertation articulates a specific reason, apart from any single country’s history or culture, for why criminal-legal systems are predisposed to identarian discrimination. I relate this theory back to the racial reckoning of the United States the future of American criminal justice. I conclude with normative recommendations for how the American approach to crime can be made compatible with a commitment to racial justice.