While welfare state literature often leans toward a theoretical formalism that emphasizes systemic tendencies in capital accumulation and ignores the concrete histories and conflicts that shape a social formation, the mass incarceration scholarship has the opposite problem. Most of this work simply describes the historical formation of mass incarceration or provides an empirical assessment of its social impacts. The broader sociological processes informing the rise of mass incarceration and animating its current composition are largely undertheorized. As a result, the scholarship on the subject has largely failed to explain—let alone foresee—contemporary developments. At the end of the twentieth century, most activists and scholars viewed mass incarceration as “an entrenched feature of the social landscape of the country and a central pillar of the post-welfare, neoliberal state. Mass imprisonment, it was widely agreed, had no limits to its future.”19 Indeed, Bruce Western concluded that mass incarceration was “self-sustaining,” and “the penal system will remain as it has become, a significant feature on the new landscape of American poverty and race relations.”20 Yet, as Western wrote those words halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, an important change was becoming clear: decarceration. By the end of that decade, the total US prison population began its ongoing—however modest—decline. More dramatic drops on the state level account for much of the reduction. In nearly half the country, twenty-four states, prison populations are shrinking, including sharp reductions of over a fifth in New York and New Jersey.21 While many scholars of mass incarceration welcomed this change, no one anticipated it.
The incommensurable harshness of the US criminal legal system—a complex of issues that includes the institutionalization of intelligence fusion—cannot be fully explained by a focus on one variable, whether race or class, politics or economics. To approach the complexity of the problem of mass incarceration and police violence in the United States, this chapter examines historically unique state-forms: the enduring institutions created from the social struggles among different social forces to shift the power differentials between them and institutionalize a favorable balance of forces. Recalling the discussion of Poulantzas in the previous chapter, these state-forms are neither the privileged site of power nor autonomous actors in their own right. Neither a subject nor an object, the state-form is the institutional condensation of social relations. It develops in interaction with ongoing conflicts both within the institutional apparatus of the state and apart from it. The United States’ excessive use of incarceration, its terrifying levels of police violence, and its expansive security apparatus are best explained in these terms. The most relevant factor is not a single variable but culminating historical processes: the systemic transformation of the United States, as a social formation and state-form, from a herrenvolk-welfare state into a workfare-carceral state.
To understand this historical transformation, this chapter considers the systemic interconnections among processes of labor-formation, racial-formation, pacification, and state-formation. Drawing on the humanist and historical currents within Marxism, it explains basic theoretical assumptions about the accumulation of capital, the formation of labor, and the regulation of the social surplus.22 In these terms, it returns to the critique of security to demonstrate how the threat of revolt from below and the resultant administrative incorporation of the working class has been one of the historical drivers of state-formation. Given the concrete characteristics of the working class in the United States, however, the pacification of labor also entailed its racial differentiation. These intertwined processes of labor-formation, racial-formation, pacification, and state-formation condition the particular ways that the United States has formed and been reformed. The interaction of these processes produced historically specific state-forms: the herrenvolk-welfare state and the workfare-carceral state. Fusion centers are an important part of the workfare-carceral state. Their increasing prominence—and the larger “post-9/11” security surge associated—is reformulation of state strategy. The ambiguous turn toward a punitive, police-intensive form of decarceration and the further expansion of intelligence fusion, I contend, is an outgrowth of and response to contemporary crisis.
In other words, this chapter considers workfare and mass incarceration as complementary state strategies, parts that constitute the larger processes of social regulation that remade the United States during the four decades between 1970 and 2010. Understanding this transformation, in turn, requires historical perspective on the previous struggles that produced contemporary strategies, hence the attention to the earlier herrenvolk-welfare state. This attempted synthesis is not a purely synthetic project. Indeed, Poulantzas’s work informs the discussions on workfare and mass incarceration. In his final works in the late 1970s, Poulantzas presciently concluded that the internationalization of production, the increased power of finance capital, and the resultant global social “insecurities” forced states into a position of permanent crisis management. The resultant “authoritarian statism” necessitated “growing involvement on the part of the State, so that . . . class hegemony [may be] reproduced.” This “growing involvement” required “intensified state control over every sphere of socio-economic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties.” The workfare-carceral state, then, is the form that authoritarian statism takes in the United States.
In this way, I synthesize the subsequent scholarship influenced by Poulantzas, namely the critique of security, Jessop’s analysis of the workfare state, and the efforts of Stuart Hall and his collaborators to map the coercive “law-and-order” politics of the 1970s. While Hall focused on the United Kingdom, his work informed important analyses of mass incarceration, including Ruth Gilmore’s examination of California’s prison boom as a way of managing the social surplus, and Jordan Camp’s investigation into the relationship between political repression and the formation of the carceral state.23 This chapter builds on these contributions and draws on their organic connections to the humanist and historical currents within Marxism. This theoretical synthesis avoids any entanglement with the prose of pacification, while providing a perspective that can appreciate the systemic implications of the institutionalization of intelligence fusion.
THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND THE REGULATION
OF THE SOCIAL SURPLUS
At its core, Marxism asks a deceptively simple question: How is a given social formation reproduced through time? This is not the economic determinism of “orthodox Marxism.” The accumulation of capital concerns the production, valorization, and accretion of surplus value, the excess social product after the capitalist has paid wages and covered other costs.24 The regulation of capitalist societies, however, entails the broader management of the social surplus, which connotes three interrelated social products: (1) the surplus value produced as capital; (2) the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within the circuit of capital; and (3) the needs and desires of the population that cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations.25 The politics of capitalist societies center on the management of this expanded notion of social surplus. How much capital will be returned to workers as wages? How much will appropriated by the state to fabricate social order? How will excess labor be managed? How will subjectivities—the emotive, aesthetic, and sensuous desires of actually existing populations—be variously articulated, mobilized, fulfilled, and/or repressed? Considering the broader regulation of the social surplus refocuses attention on the expanded notion of social reproduction, which extends beyond the production and circulation of goods in the formal economy.26 The reproduction and regulation of social formation includes diverse processes