Criminalization Of Everyday Life
These non-legal methods once helped resolve conflicts without courts.
What are mediation, community negotiation, and family intervention?
This term describes how family members of incarcerated people experience punishment and control despite not being imprisoned themselves.
Secondary Prisonization
This author argues that mass incarceration is rooted in long-standing systems of punishment rather than being a recent response to crime.
Who is Elizabeth Hinton?
This is how many people were incarcerated in the United States in 1980, before it more than tripled by 1998.
What is 500,000?
TV shows like Law and Order and Cops usually present this group as the heroes of the story.
Who are the police?
These groups use law to define what is “right” and “wrong” to maintain control.
Who are elites or ruling classes?
At San Quentin, this highly regulated area serves as the primary site where visitors interact with incarcerated loved ones.
The Tube
This term describes how laws and policing were used to regulate Black communities during periods of social and political change.
What is racialized social control?
Beckett and Sasson argue that punishment dramatically increased during the 1980s-90s even though this was actually happening to crime rates.
What is declining (or going down/decreasing)?
This concept describes how law shapes people’s identities and relationships, even when they have not committed a crime.
What is the criminalization of everyday life?
These were criminalized because colonizers saw them as threatening or immoral.
What are Indigenous ceremonies and celebrations like potlatch and hula?
This criminological theory explains why visitors comply with prison rules out of fear of losing access to their loved ones.
Control Theory
According to the reading, modern mass incarceration is historically connected to these earlier systems
What are slavery and Jim Crow?
This Italian theorist's concept describes how ruling classes maintain power not just through force, but by shaping "common sense" to win popular consent.
Who is (Antonio) Gramsci? (or What is hegemony?)
By showing crime as constant and dangerous, crime TV and news media increase public support for this response.
What is aggressive policing?
This example shows how something once illegal became socially accepted.
What is marijuana use?
This group is most often responsible for maintaining relationships with incarcerated individuals and performing emotional labor during visits.
Partners and loved ones
These policies were introduced as a response to rising crime rates and framed as necessary for public safety.
What are "tough-on-crime" policies?
This politician championed the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, allocating $30 billion for prisons and policing.
Who is Joe Biden?
This term describes the way people come to see laws and punishment as normal or common sense.
What is hegemony?
This family model reinforced male authority and limited women’s autonomy.
What is the nuclear family?
This concept explains how prison policies extend punishment beyond incarcerated individuals to regulate families.
Social Control
In current events, immigration enforcement mirrors mass incarceration by using detention, surveillance, and raids, with immigration status acting as this.
What is a proxy for race?
According to Beckett and Sasson's hegemonic analysis, elites responded to the crisis of the 1960s-70s by shifting state resources from this "care" model to this "control" model.
What is (from) the welfare state to the security state?
According to the unit, pop culture helps the law maintain power by shaping public ideas about this.
What is who is dangerous and who deserves punishment?