Afleveringen
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In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to justice, in real life and popular culture, as unacknowledged crime-fighters and feminist icons.
On stage and in fiction, women detectives were sensational figures who fascinated the public with cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroines who captured thieves, flushed out cheats, and solved murders.
Few people realize that these characters were based on real women who were active as detectives in private agencies and in the Victorian police force. Far from the mythology of an all-male world, women were a daily presence in police activity, although often underpaid and overlooked. They did important and dangerous work in a variety of roles both openly and as undercover agents.
While the fictional characters were heroic figures who always saved the day, these morally ambiguous real women were sometimes paid to betray, deceive, or entrap in the murky underworld of Victorian society.
Related resources:
The interest in Victorian women detectives continues into the present with dozens of contemporary novels, film, and tv featuring Victorian female detectives.
Miss Scarlet on PBS is an original series by Rachael New. The Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2 films on Netflix are based on the original Enola Holmes books written by Nancy Springer.
More Sherlock Holmes adjacent charaters are Mary Russell by Laurie R. King and Lady Sherlock by Sherry Thomas.
While many actual female detectives were working class, fictional portrayals often feature upper class heroines as private detectives such as Lady Darby by Anna Lee Huber, Lady Emily by Tasha Alexander, and both Veronica Speedwell and Lady Julia Grey by Deanna Raybourn.
Author recommended reading
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
Hosted by Meghan Cochran
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Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows.
Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing.
Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School in Syracuse University. Dr. Kumar holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, where she specialized in Modern South Asian Studies. She has conducted archival research in a range of cities including Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and London, and was supported by the History Department at Princeton University and by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.
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Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made headlines, scandals that engulfed Hollywood legends, and more strange-but-true tales that could only happen in the 90210. Beverly Hills Noir chronicles an assortment of jaw-dropping true crime stories spanning the legendary city’s history, each with oh-so-90210 twists—including a high-profile murder mystery in the city’s most extravagant mansion, the daring exploits of a handsome cat burglar with movie star looks, a toxic Tinseltown love triangle that ended in gunplay, a brazen Rodeo Drive jewelry store holdup with tragically stunning finale, an Oscar nominated actress on shoplifting spree and more—complete with major roles and countless cameos by Hollywood idols and cultural icons. A gripping, century-long tour of the glamorous city’s shadowy underbelly through crimes and misdemeanors as over-the-top as the city itself, Beverly Hills Noir collects the kinds of stories you’d expect to be swapped if James Ellroy and Dominick Dunne had met Jackie Collins and Ryan Murphy for cocktails at the Polo Lounge. It’s Sunset Boulevard and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood turned sordid, face-down-in-the-pool reality.
Scott Huver has covered the inner workings of Beverly Hills, the entertainment industry, and the Los Angeles-area elite for three decades.
Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.
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Victim participation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has routinely been viewed as an empty promise of justice or mere spectacle for audiences in the Global North, providing little benefit for victims. Why, then, do people in Kenya and Uganda engage in justice processes that offer so little, so late? How and why do they become the court’s victims and intermediaries, and what impact do these labels have on them?
Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a response to these poignant questions, demonstrating that the notion of ‘justice for victims’ is not merely symbolic, expressive, or instrumental. On the contrary — as Leila Ullrich argues — the ICC’s methods of victim engagement are productive, reproducing the Court as a relevant institution and transforming victims in the Global South into highly gendered and racialized labouring subjects. Challenging the Court’s interplay with global capitalist relationships, the book makes visible the hidden labour of justice, and how it lures, disciplines, and blames both victims and victims’ advocates. Drawing on critical theory, criminological analysis, and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, Kenya, and Uganda, Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court illuminates how the drive to include victims as participants in international criminal justice proceedings also creates and disciplines them as blameworthy capitalist subjects. Yet, as victim workers learn to ‘stop crying’, ‘be peaceful’, ‘get married’, ‘work hard’, and ‘repay debt’, they also begin to challenge the terms of global justice.
Dr. Leila Ullrich is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law. Her research lies at the intersection of international criminal justice, transitional justice, victimology, and border criminology. Her work focuses on how global justice institutions construct gendered and racialized subjects and how these groups engage with or resist these processes. Outside academia, Leila worked as social stability analyst on the Syrian refugee crisis at the United Nations Development Programme in Lebanon and she has also worked as an intern for the ICC. She has also worked for the German Bundestag and the BBC World Service.
Alex Batesmith is an Associate Professor in Legal Professions in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion.
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Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice urgently asked how legal systems can counter bias and discrimination. In India, a nation with vast socio-cultural diversity, and a complex colonial past, questions about the relationship between law and histories of oppression have become particularly pressing. Recently, India has seen a rise in violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and other minorities. Consequently, an emerging "Dalit Lives Matter" movement has campaigned for the effective implementation of India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA).
Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Sandhya Fuchs unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA. Fuchs shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labor can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Moving beyond statistics and judicial arguments, Fuchs uses the intimate lens of personal narratives to lay bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes.
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In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints.
In Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024), Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.
Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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How does a Black man in Austin get sent to prison on a 70-year sentence for stealing a tuna sandwich, likely costing Texas taxpayers roughly a million dollars? In America, your liberty--or even your life--may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If the same man had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it's unlikely that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars.
The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the world. We have more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world's biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? What are the costs--socially, economically, and politically--of having the world's largest population of ex-prisoners? And what can we do about it?
In The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), Kevin B. Smith explains that the United States became the world's biggest jailer because politicians wanted to do something about a very real problem with violent crime. That effort was accelerated by a variety of partisan and socio-demographic trends that started to significantly reshape the political environment in the 1980s and 1990s. The force of those trends varied from state to state, but ultimately led to not just historically unprecedented levels of incarceration, but equally unprecedented numbers of ex-prisoners. Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience--it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, the jailer's reckoning, to be paid for this. As Smith shows, it is a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. Mass incarceration turns out to be something of a hidden bomb, a social explosion that inflicts enormous civic collateral damage on the entire country, and we must all do something about it.
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In this episode of High Theory, Faye Raquel Gleisser tells us about Risk. A calculable danger in economics, athletics, sociology, or healthcare, risk has become a socially constructed danger that changes who we are and how we move through the world. Faye asks us to think about how risk management and risk literacy shaped the conceptual and performance work of American artists in the late twentieth century. Who is at risk? Who is safe? And how do we know?
Faye’s book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (U Chicago Press, 2023) studies how artists in the US starting in the 1960s came to use guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art, maneuvering policing, racism, and surveillance.
As US news covered anticolonialist resistance abroad and urban rebellions at home, and as politicians mobilized the perceived threat of “guerrilla warfare” to justify increased police presence nationwide, artists across the country began adopting guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art. Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society.
Faye Raquel Gleisser is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University and curator, whose work focuses on three main subject areas: art and tactical intervention; the racial logics of archives; and curatorial ethics and canon formation. By bridging curation, art history, and performance studies, she investigates histories of art that challenge intertwined anti-Black societal structures and patriarchal, white-centering notions of value that have long limited the canon of “American art.” She approaches art as a material manifestation of sociopolitical conditions and artists as theorists of power and social encounter.
In the episode Faye names several artists including Asco, Chris Burden, the Guerrilla Girls, Tehching Hsieh, and Adrian Piper. This image for this episode is a photograph by Harry Gambota Jr. titled First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974 that documents a performance by the Chicano art group Asco in Los Angeles. See the Artsy page about the photograph for more about the art and the artist.
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The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime.
In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.
Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system.
Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality.
Mentioned:
Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement
David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989)
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Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration fundamentally create the conditions for substance use, individuals are increasingly experiencing the paradoxes of care and punishment by being propelled into a new regime of recovery which creates new pharmaceuticalized identities. By shedding light on how addiction and the impetus for healing moves through families and institutions of the state, Khan provides an account of the different competing forces that shape substance use, recovery, and relapse. Through a combination of archival research and ethnography, the book makes a case for disentangling punishment from recovery.
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We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the collection of demographic data on those detained by the police during routine traffic stops, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues analyzed twenty million such stops from 2002-2016. They present the results of this research in Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Join us as we speak with Baumgartner about what they found—and what we can do to reduce the most discriminatory features of the practice.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).
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Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton UP, 2024), Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world's largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state-building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century.From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided communities with a cash windfall that they used to cut taxes, reward local officials, and build bigger jails--which they then had incentive to fill. Trapped in America's patchwork detention networks, migrants turned to courts, embassies, and the media to challenge the cruel paradox of "administrative imprisonment." Drawing on immigration records, affidavits, protest letters, and a variety of local sources, Nofil excavates the web of political negotiations, financial deals, and legal precedents that allows the United States to incarcerate migrants with little accountability and devastating consequences.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The image of the sheriff is deeply embedded in American culture – from pacifist Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again and gun averse Roy Scheider in Jaws to those more comfortable wielding power like Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, and Gary Cooper in High Noon.
In the United States, more than 3,000 sheriffs occupy a unique position in the political and legal systems. Sheriffs oversee more than a third of law enforcement employees and control almost all local jails. They have the power to both set and administer policies, and sheriffs can imprison, harm, and even kill members of their communities. Although sheriffs are elected by voters, these elections are usually noncompetitive and low-visibility. Sheriffs enjoy a degree of autonomy not seen by other political officeholders.
In The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States (U Chicago Press, 2024), Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman draw on two original surveys of sheriffs taken nearly a decade apart, as well as election data, case studies, and administrative data to argue that the autonomy and authority granted to sheriffs in the United States create an environment where sheriffs rarely change; elections seldom create meaningful accountability; employees, budgets, and jails can be used for political gains; marginalized populations can be punished; and reforms fail.
Drs. Farris and Holman track the increasingly close linkages between sheriffs and right-wing radical groups and demonstrate how sheriffs holding negative views of marginalized groups leads to unequal policing and discriminatory policies that fail to protect marginalized groups – particularly in the areas of intimate partner violence, racial profiling in traffic enforcement, and immigration enforcement. If the sheriff does not like your group, he structures hiring, training, and policy in his office to punish you. Farris and Holman also interrogate the ways in which sheriffs extract resources to maintain and profit from the carceral state. The book contributes to scholarship on local politics, American political development, federalism, political behavior, sociology, criminal justice, public administration and policy, and political extremism.
Dr. Emily M. Farris is an associate professor in Political Science and core faculty in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on urban and racial and ethnic politics.
Dr. Mirya R. Holman is an associate professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She is an expert on gender and politics, urban politics, and political behavior and has published widely in these areas.
Both Emily and Mirya have been cited widely in outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other important public facing venues.
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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Kate Steel, Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, UK.
Tazin and Kate discuss discursive management in the context of police first responders and domestic violence victims, focusing on Kate’s research in her 2024 paper ‘“Can I Have a Look?”: The Discursive Management of Victims’ Personal Space During Police First Response Call-Outs to Domestic Abuse Incidents’.
Using body cam footage from police call outs for domestic violence incidents, this paper focuses on how the interaction between police and domestic violence victims is managed. The interaction analysis reveals the impact of the context – in this case, the victims’ personal space – which police must enter in order to perform their role and responsibilities as first responders.
If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
Reference
Steel, K. (2024). “Can I Have a Look?”: The Discursive Management of Victims’ Personal Space During Police First Response Call-Outs to Domestic Abuse Incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 37(2), 547-572. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10050-x
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Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra (Cornell UP, 2024) by Dr. Felia Allum dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organisation as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime.
The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organisation. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra.
It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) compiles an array of recent scholarship that draws on newly available archival evidence. This interview with the book's editor, Dr. Michael David-Fox, summarizes what these new findings add up to, and highlights specific arguments made by the collection's authors. While Russian archives are presently difficult to access, Ukrainian archives have proved to contain a trove of information about the Soviet-era secret police. The authors in this collection have broken much new interpretive ground, and the essays are universally engaging and provocative.
About the book: Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.
Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.
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Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.”
Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs.
In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design.
In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.
Joy Knoblauch is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture's engagement with politics and science.
Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.
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Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American jails admit over ten million people every year, but very little is known about what happens to them while they're locked away.
Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail (Oxford UP, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time and what it does to men. Michael L. Walker spent several extended spells in jail, having been arrested while trying to pay parking tickets in graduate school. This book is an intimate account of his experience and in it he shares the routines, rhythms, and subtle meanings that come with being incarcerated. Walker shows how punishment in jail is much more than the deprivation of liberties. It is, he argues, purposefully degrading. Jail creates a racial politics that organizes daily life, moves men from clock time to event time, normalizes trauma, and imbues residents with substantial measures of vulnerability. Deputies used self-centered management styles to address the problems associated with running a jail, some that magnified individual conflicts to potential group conflicts and others that created divisions between residents for the sake of control. And though not every deputy indulged, many gave themselves over to the pleasures of punishment.
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In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future.
Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.
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The police officer who brutalized Abner Louima. A purveyor of child pornography. These are some of the defendants to have come before U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block to ask for reductions in their prison sentences. All of them have been found guilty and have already served decades in prison, but under the 2018 First Step Act they are entitled to petition for reconsideration and release. In a rare glimpse behind the bench, Judge Block recounts the cases of six incarcerated people who have done heinous things but have nevertheless petitioned him for their release. He then explains the criteria the First Step Act has spelled out for his consideration. And, in a novel twist, he asks the reader, “What would you do?”
In A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It (The New Press, 2024), Judge Block puts us out of our suspense in a third section of the book where he tells us what he did do in each case and why, as he weighs each compassionate release request, evaluating issues ranging from “the trial tax,” to sentencing disparities, to judicial incompetence. Finally, Judge Block makes the case that the First Step Act should be extended to state court judges, since state prisons house about 90 percent of those incarcerated. In a book that could be the basis for a new season of Law & Order, Judge Block challenges our ideas about punishment and justice.
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