Black women, victimization, and the limitations of the liberal state

Abstract

This article challenges contemporary understandings of the US carceral state by confronting the realities of exceptionally high rates of homicide victimization among Black women and considering the implications for equality and understandings of the carceral state. We propose that neither the US state nor the US penal order can be fully understood without taking account of the exceptionally high rates of violence to which Black women are exposed. Conceptions of the carceral state that do not situate criminal justice within the larger context of raced and gendered subject formation depict criminal "justice" as an arena composed almost entirely of adult males. This obscures the realities of how state form contributes not only to criminal justice practices but also to risk of violence. Black women are uniquely situated at the intersection of risk of violence, and risk of experiencing the collateral damage of the carceral state. Without significant attention to issues of connectivity and care, which are directly affected by the carceral state and by inter-personal violence, we cannot fully understand the concepts of "carceral" or "state".

Is self‐worth crucial for the reproduction of inequality? A response to Michele Lamont’s Lecture

“…Women in particular are probably the most likely to claim that caring for others is more meaningful than ‘running in the rat race’, yet they are most likely to be poor and more likely to be victimized (Ferraro ). The same holds true for the African American population which, despite its revaluation of blackness continues to suffer from the highest rate of incarceration rate and violence (Threadcraft and Miller ). The problem of strategies of revaluation is that they cannot be distinguished from the psycho‐social process which Bourdieu had identified as ‘making virtue out necessity’, a process whereby one incorporates the objective constraints attached to one’s social position and accepts them through a process of valuation of the very deprivations one suffers from (for example, working class disdain for education; their valuation of manual work or of the ‘real world’).…”

The Myth of Mob Rule: Violent Crime and Democratic Politics. Lisa L. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press (2016). 272pp. £26.49hb ISBN 9780190228705

“…Koch may be right, and I am grateful to her for expanding the lens such that liberalism, not simply various institutional differences across liberal democracies, becomes an important factor in understanding the politics of crime and punishment. This has been pointed out to me elsewhere (see Threadcraft and Miller (2017); also Peter Ramsey's comments at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in Philadelphia, 2017), and I confess that some of this is beyond my expertise. But it is also true that, whatever the limitations of the liberal state may be, the intensive use of the veto points of American politics, by whites, to block social benefits of any kind to blacks, is a crucial part of the crime and punishment story in US politics and one that cannot be reduced to liberalism alone (comments which were echoed by Naomi Murakawa and Megan Ming Francis at LSA).…”

“…She goes on to show how high rates of violence are unevenly distributed across the US population. High rates of victimisation, specifically homicide rates, disparately impact African American men and women at six to eight times the rates of whites (Table 4.3, p.107; see also Threadcraft and Miller 2017). Black men and women have substantially higher rates of exposure to violence than all other Americans across their lifetimes.…”

Diminished citizenship in the era of mass incarceration

“…Women’s rights as citizens continue to be undermined by the failure of states to adequately address gendered violence (cf. Franzway, 2016: 18 on the sexual politics of citizenship; Threadcraft and Miller, 2017 on high rates of violence against Black women and ways in which gender and race are hardwired into state formation ). These issues are of paramount importance to the women of our study, the vast majority of whom have been sexually assaulted, exploited or abused.…”