The Trap: Care and Mystification in Carceral Governance

ABSTRACTAs a component of the broader carceral state, criminal legal probation has become a defacto social safety net. In this essay, I argue that criminal probation mystifies time and space to create a surface relation of care in Philadelphia. Through cycles of capture and release, judges capture and detain as care. Though the term “trap” was used by interlocutors to refer to selling drugs and entry-level work, I argue that the mystifying work of the carceral state produces a deeper trap. The robust and coordinated armature of criminal probation far exceeds any welfare state service, rendering the tools of capture and detention the only source of interruption in escalating cycles of violence, drug use, or mental distress. To enter the relation of care this dynamic of capture and release creates, however, one has to accept the symbolic terms of its mystification. Racialized urban inequality appears as a mythical story of heroes and villains.KEYWORDS: Mystificationtemporalityracialisationneoliberalisminequality AcknowledgementsTongo, this essay is dedicated to you with love. I hope you continue to find some echo of your life in its pages. To Deborah Thomas, Sara Rendell, Katherine Culver, Kate Rowland, and Ruth Shefner: thank you for being the robust village that brings an article from inception to submission. To Kevin O’Neill, thank you for your boundless generosity and wisdom: they have shaped this essay in more ways than you know. I am forever grateful to have received such critical mentorship from a familiar space where it was not owed or required. To Hanna Pickard, thank you for taking a chance on an anthropologist and offering such generous opportunity and mentorship to me at Johns Hopkins; this article would not have been possible without it. Net, thank you for the time and care that brought the revision of this article to the finish line – you bring life and truth to the term colleague. Briana Nichols, thank you for being my ride or die this year. I couldn’t do it without you.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Ethics InformationInstitutional Review BoardUniversity of PennsylvaniaFederal wide Assurance Number: 00004028Original Proposal IRB Number: 826720Continuing Review signed by IRB#8Reliance agreement with Johns Hopkins UniversityFederal wide Assurance Number: FWA00005834Signed by University of Pennsylvania: Jessica Yoos; jessyoos@upenn.eduSigned by Johns Hopkins University: Bertrand Garcia-Moreno; bgarcia@jh.eduNotes1 The name of every person in this article is a pseudonym, typically chosen by the individual, or occasionally assigned by the author to protect confidentiality.2 The terms villain and hero are mine yet very much inspired by David Scott (Citation2004) and his engagement with the romantic genre. The terms are meant to capture the fetishised life of criminality and the subject who could expel that criminality which circulated through criminal legal contexts. I sought terms that captured the dehumanisation these fetishisations facilitate and the mythical power they impart.3 I use the term subproletariat following Loïc Wacquant (Citation2007) because the Marxian equivalent, the lumpen, is empirically inaccurate in today’s political economy. The subproletariat indexes the formidable, structural presence of the excluded, racialised surplus class in the United States and the ways in which it has been managed and rendered productive. It sheds the cultural and historical inaccuracies embedded in the earlier term ‘underclass’ deployed by William Julius Wilson (Citation2012) and others.4 Institutional Review Board, University of Pennsylvania; Federal wide Assurance Number: 00004028; Original Proposal IRB; Number: 826720; Continuing Review signed by IRB#8. Reliance agreement with Johns Hopkins University; Federal wide Assurance Number: FWA00005834; Signed by University of Pennsylvania: Jessica Yoos; jessyoos@upenn.edu; Signed by Johns Hopkins University: Bertrand Garcia-Moreno; bgarcia@jh.edu. Author has retained copies of all signed, informed consent documents.5 Though Larry Krasner’s reforms have dramatically reduced these rates of incarceration and supervision, the purpose and structure of this system is relatively unchanged for the most vulnerable segment of Philadelphia’s poor and racialised population on which this essay centers.6 Pennsylvania introduced legislation in 2019 that would cap probation sentences to three years for misdemeanors and five years for felonies [SB 14] yet this was not included in the bill that passed in 2021 [SB 913]. This bill did cap revocation sentences for technical violations, however. Larry’s Krasner’s administration-specific cap on probation sentences is three years for a felony and one year for a misdemeanor case, yet these caps are not protected by state law.7 I use the term racialisation in the stead of anti-Blackness to signal the ethnic studies tradition (Shih Citation2008) that espouses a comparative approach to racialisation that is historically specific and locally contingent. In racialised, US urban poverty, this helps us understand how poor Latinx, Cambodian, and White populations have been dispossessed and criminalised yet only relatively, and in relation to, a foundational anti-Blackness that figured criminalisation (Muhammad Citation2019). This approach clarifies the processes of racialising poor rural whites who are currently being incarcerated at faster rates than any population in large US cities (See Kang-Brown & Subramanian [Citation2017] on this point).8 ‘The Walmart of Heroin’ Citation2018.9 This contradiction of scale emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Without significant federal and state investment, cities gutted their public staff and services, silently endorsing the exposure of millions of US workers to keep the city’s political economy afloat.10 I am not conflating the distinct contexts of historical and contemporary discourse, here, nor reducing Scott's rich argument to Hayden's recognition of the romantic, historical genre. I invoke Scott here to think about the relationship between linear temporality, the discourse that structures that linearity, and the mythical characters that this discourse produces.11 These discursive distinctions also extend beyond the jail and characterise what my interlocutors refer to as the space of ‘the program’: the inpatient drug and alcohol programme, the drug and alcohol recovery house, or any other space off the street yet co-terminus with it.12 My positionality as a White, middle-class woman in the class of ‘helping’ professionals contributed to my ‘cop’ characterisation in this fantasy.13 Danielle Sered's Citation2021 Until We Reckon, persuasively argues that though jail and prison punish in inhuman ways they do not forge accountability or force perpetrators to reckon, integrate, and forgive themselves for the harm that they have done and for the internalised symbolic violence of street-based life. Further, she argues as I do in this essay, that this accountability can only be forged simultaneously with a broader, societal accountability for the violence it has imposed on poor and racialised people.14 An important aspect of county probation that this article cannot fully explore is its escalating risk. Each county probation sentence, though based in the community, legally contains the possibility of the original jail/prison sentence upon violation. In this way, probationers are consistently threatened with the maximum jail or prison penalty for their original charges upon the violation of their probation. The majority of social work judges use this as a threat that they rarely act upon – which is what Judge Dean does here, as Tongo gets yet another social service programme – yet other, more conservative judges wield probation’s capacity for punishment in devastating ways.15 See Mark Halsey (Citation2010) and Rueben Miller (Citation2021) on the experiences of the anemic and inadequate social services offered to people to facilitate their reentry.16 ‘Eastside’ (Benny Blanco et al. Citation2018).17 ‘Eastside’ (Benny Blanco et al. Citation2018).18 Social Security Insurance (SSI) is the form of social security for individuals who have a disability and have never worked; this is the only existing form of welfare payments available to single men (See Hansen et al. Citation2014).19 There are fascinating analyses of carceral temporality (Comfort Citation2008; Moran Citation2012) in the context of state prison in particular where subjects typically serve a sentence of over two years. These temporalities would convey a sense of endlessness and potentially despair – rather than this reset oriented towards a new future – and these subjects often refer to time in carceral institutions a ‘doing time,’ an active engagement with the stretch of a long-term prison sentence. I am particularly interested here in understanding the proximal relation between the county jail and the street and the experience of shorter-term sentences and the churning effect of the capture-release dynamic.20 Beyond the period of incarceration, many judges released probationers to drug treatment, mental health treatment, and other social service institutions, further entangling right and left-hand state functions. Yet even the most intensive and specialised of these services – inpatient drug treatment among them – released probationers back to the neighbourhoods where they were arrested after just a few months, but more typically after a few weeks. These services do not change the core material conditions that structure the lives of the majority of probationers. The investment in these sparse and inadequate services as part of a new future is its own interesting and important line of inquiry, especially as these services sought to link criminality to deeper, individualised, psychological problems like addiction and mental illness which require treatment (Kaye Citation2013).21 In contexts of extreme structural disadvantage, fighting for oppressed people – and in the process, responsiblilising them – is often the only way to relate that inheres optimism and imparts agency to structurally constrained people within the limitations of the institutions and the political economies in which they are embedded. This is the only human mode of engagement in these contexts. I have nothing but respect for the actors deep in the trenches of this fight, and do not believe there is an easy, ethical way out of the trap that I am theorising here. I am simply taking advantage of the removed position of social science to reflect on the mystification and historical contradictions that haunt these practices, ones in which I was and am deeply complicit as an anthropologist.22 This is a paraphrased fictional quote by Valery Legasov, one of the lead scientists testifying in the Chernobyl-disaster criminal trial from the HBO mini-series ‘Chernobyl’ Citation2019: ‘Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.’Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1851033] and the Wenner-Gren Foundation [grant number 9446].