Friday, March 21, 2025 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM and Saturday, March 22, 2025 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Wolff Conference Room D1103
Presented by The Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research and The Law and Political Economy Project.
What is the political economy of “late” mass incarceration? How has the globally unparalleled US system of mass imprisonment remained impervious to two decades of critique and a decade of anti-carceral mass-mobilization? The harms of mass incarceration are well documented, and its failure to foster safety in our communities is, in the academy at least, uncontroversial. However, the current levels of government spending are themselves politically uncontroversial, whilst political elites are again timorous about reform as the MAGA movement reinvigorates the debased ‘tough vs. soft on crime’ discourse.
This conference seeks to turn the lens of political economy on this apparent impasse, in the hope that attention to the distribution and contestation of power and resources can help us to understand the resilience of these institutions, and to move past modest declines in aggregate incarceration rates and into an actual post-mass-incarceration future.
This conference is open to anyone invested in understanding or achieving a decarceral transition (academics, organizers, everyone).
Call For Papers from Graduate Students:
We will include exciting graduate student work from across disciplines that addresses the conference’s core questions. The work can be complete or in progress. Submit a brief abstract to Dion Nania (nanid359@newschool.edu) and Eric Seligman (selig056@umn.edu) by January 31, 2025. Unfortunately, we do not have funds available to assist with travel, but we will provide a couple meals and some beverages at the event.
Non-exhaustive list of potential topics:
-What is the relationship between the carceral state, broadly defined, and labor markets?
-What is the role of prison work in the carceral political economy?
-What can we learn from the application of a racial capitalism lens?
-What defines the contemporary post-COVID period within neoliberal capitalism, and what is the nature of the associations between these economic trends and penal trends?
-How can a comparative lens help bring into view what is truly unique about the disposition and staying power of carceral solutions in the U.S.?
-What is the political economy of the proliferation of ‘cop cities’?
-How does analysis of carceral political economy inform the praxis of contemporary anti-carceral social movements?
Please reach out to the organizers with any questions: Dion Nania (nanid359@newschool.edu) and Eric Seligman (selig056@umn.edu).
Funded in part by the NSSR Dean’s Conference Fund.