The late 1960s and early 1970s, of course, was also time of political ferment and economic crisis. Social movements—civil rights, Black Power, second-wave feminism, the New Left and the broader counterculture—challenged the distribution of power in the United States and questioned its place in the world. Simultaneously, the post–World War II economic boom had begun to bust. The grand compromise between labor and capital at the base of the New Deal and Great Society unraveled under the pressure of declining profits, rising unemployment, and runaway inflation. By the 1980s, a new arrangement was taking shape. The reforms that can now be seen as the origins of fusion centers were part of larger changes in the criminal legal system that gave rise to mass incarceration, the excessive use of imprisonment as a strategy “for addressing problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment, racial conflict, citizenship, sexuality, and gender as well as crime.”3 Many of these problems were exacerbated by the new economic order, which empowered capital by removing many of the measures that previously had protected much of the population from the market’s worst ravages. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the United States became a workfare-carceral state.
While most other advanced capitalist states to varying degrees have become workfare states, no other state has built a carceral complex that compares to the United States.4 With just one-twentieth of the global population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners.5 The incarceration rate in the United States is seven to ten times higher than the rates of other advanced industrial countries in Europe and East Asia and two to five times higher than high-crime countries like Brazil and South Africa. Even with the declining US prison population since 2008, the 2016 incarceration rate of 660 persons for every 100,000 is still by far the highest in the world.6 The rates are even higher for racial minorities: 831 per 100,000 Hispanics and 2,306 per 100,000 blacks.7 The fusion centers and the larger post-9/11 security surge, then, are embedded within the larger problem of mass incarceration and police violence in the United States. To fully reckon with fusion centers, they need to be holistically approached within their historical context and understood as components of a vast security apparatus that took generations to build.
In their efforts to understand this new order, however, most scholars focused on only one part of the workfare-carceral state couplet. The literature on welfare states is a distinct thread of conversation that exists within larger academic and public policy debates about the global economic restructuring that began in the 1970s. While not the first to use the term, President Nixon first introduced “workfare” into discussions of social assistance programs. As workfare went “from a programme of reform within the welfare system to a codification of an alternative to this system,” scholars and activists worked to identify the contours—and contradictions—of a new economic order, explaining how it arose from the decaying welfare state and resolved, at least for a few decades, the economic crisis that afflicted advanced capitalist states in the 1970s.8 This scholarly conversation on workfare often bleeds into the larger discussion about changes effected by “neoliberalism”: the reorganization of production into flexible global networks, the rise of East Asia as a dynamic center of capital accumulation, the increasing power of finance capital, and widening global inequality.9
The scholarship on mass incarceration developed as the story of US prisons clearly diverged from the European experience. By the early 1990s, the United States had over a million people caged. At the time, the incarceration rate (426 per 100,000) could only compare with apartheid South Africa (333 per 100,000) and the Soviet Union (236 per 100,000).10 By the late 1990s, activists and scholars began to use the term carceral state to understand how the United States’ unprecedented prison boom created a new politics where incarceration and policing managed social problems exacerbated by economic change. This massive expansion of the criminal legal system compounded the problem and destroyed entire communities. Since criminal records “marked” people as unemployable “criminals,” already impoverished communities reached new lows. The black middle class left the “communal” ghettos of the Jim Crow era for segregated suburbs, leaving behind “hyperghettos” doubly segregated on the basis of race and class. As the starkest racial disparity (eight to one), incarceration became the central core of a renewed and reorganized edifice of racial inequality around which disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) revolved.11
At the same time, neither the workfare state scholarship nor the literature on mass incarceration can fully explain the precise nature of the United States’ unprecedented incarceration rates and levels of police violence. The workfare state literature does not consider the question. For example, Bob Jessop’s landmark analysis overlooks the security apparatus altogether: “since [his research agenda] focuses on economic and social policy, there are important aspects of the capitalist state that it ignores. Most notable of these are the military and police apparatuses, their changing forms and functions, the nature of modern warfare, and their overall connections to the broader state system.” The omission of prisons and policing is a particularly arbitrary disconnect, as if they have no bearing on “social policy” and no impact on labor markets.12 The reformation of the United States into a workfare state may help contextualize mass incarceration and police violence as, in part, expressions of a new, harsher relationship between labor and capital, but it cannot explain these phenomena, especially in comparison to other states, which implemented workfare policies without resorting to mass incarceration.
For their part, scholars of mass incarceration have emphasized the enduring power of racism as their explanation of mass incarceration. Hence, Loïc Wacquant traces the evolution of the United States’ “peculiar institutions” from slavery to mass incarceration and Michelle Alexander documents the legal architecture of the new Jim Crow.13 Other scholars, like Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton, have traced the deeper historical roots of mass incarceration to paternal ideas about racial oppression embedded into the War on Poverty and the larger project of “racial liberalism.”14 Some, like Bruce Western and Marc Mauer, simply document the stark racial inequities of the system.15 All these studies have made important contributions. They all provide needed perspective on the specificities of oppression in the United States. They help answer why black and brown people are incarcerated and killed by police at rates that far exceed their proportional share of the population. They also largely fail to explain why the US criminal justice system incarcerates and kills so many of all races. The current white incarceration rate, 380 per 100,000, still compares unfavorably with other countries. A similar dynamic is evident with “police-involved killings,” although the data is incomplete. To the best we know, police in the United States kill between nine hundred and eleven hundred people per year, 40 to 50 percent of whom are white.16
Here, a one-dimensional conception of subjectivity simplifies the relevant social relations and processes at work. The new Jim Crow thesis, for example, positions mass incarceration as a continuation of racial caste, a system of domination disconnected from political economy. This framing obscures the important differences between Jim Crow, a system that marshaled and mobilized racially devalued labor, and mass incarceration, an arrangement to warehouse superfluous labor. In denying class differences within racial groups, it also simplifies the politics of mass incarceration,