[I've moved blogs - check out the Next New Deal Rortybomb blog, here is the new rss feed, and here is this post over at the new site.]

The Spring 2012 issue of Jacobin is now online.  It has a lot of great content in it; make sure to check out Megan Erickson’s addition to the “unschooling” debate that goes back and forth in parts of the internet.

I have a piece - Against Law, For Order - on ideology, governmentality and “policy” in an era of mass incarceration.  It’s about how criminal laws informs our markets and government policy.  Bits and pieces of it have appeared in this blog, but here it is in one place.  The piece ends up reviewing a lot of recent books on policing, with special attention to Bernard Harcourt’s work on neoliberalism and policing, as well as Jonathan Simon’s work on “governing through crime” - how policy is reworked to use the language and techniques of policing.  I hope you check it out!

I wrote it a while ago so I didn’t get to reference two of the big events in policing and incarceration that happened recently, but I think they fit into the framework I try to build.  The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman appears to be, in large part, about Zimmerman believing Martin didn’t belong in the neighborhood he lived in.  Maintaining order, seperating insiders from outsiders, and who gets to make those calls and what consequences they have is a central part of the neoconservative vision of policing I outline.

Meanwhile the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington held that “Jail strip searches do not require reasonable suspicion, at least so long as the arrestee is being admitted into the general jail population.”  Reading Justice Kennedy’s logic, it looks like that since people put into a prison population could be dangers to themselves, guards and other prisoners, the guards have the ability to institute whatever techniques they believe are necessary.  Kennedy looks uninterested or unwilling to second guess the prison system.  Which means that people within the criminal justice system exist in a sphere of total government control and competency, a way of thinking I link back to the neoliberal vision of governance.

Sadly I couldn’t find a way to link in one of the more interesting pieces I’ve read recently, one I’m still grappling with, Kate Redburn’s Hate on Me at New Inquiry.  It’s about the GLBTQ groups – including The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, the Peter Cicchino Youth Project, and the Audre Lorde Project – who oppose New York State’s “Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act,” which “would make violence against gender-nonconforming people a hate crime.”

This is governing through crime – the best way to react to the social problems of violence and hate aimed at the GLBTQ community is to increase the policing and incarceration of those who do the violence.  Mandatory minimums, which translates into higher guilty pleas, which translates to more bodies in jail.  These groups oppose this because the police themselves are part of the problems they face, not part of the solution.  As Redburn argues, “Hate crimes legislation not only doesn’t change institutional bias; it further empowers this broken system by increasing law enforcement’s ability to arrest and imprison.”  I find the challenges posed here important to understand as we all try to find a way to have a governance project built outside the logic of mass incareceration.