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Abstract
The U.S prison population's 430% expansion since 1982 is a topic of intensive scrutiny; states-- and the federal government--commit enormous resources to hold convicts in cages. This dissertation closely examines the context in and means by which California's 500% increase in prisoners reached the national high of 145,140 by the end of 1996. Dominant explanations for prison growth presume that social control based on confinement in cages is neccessary for people who commit drug, property, or violent offenses. Counter explanations focus on racism, and ground their arguments in the fact that people of color--mostly men--in the prime of life account for two-thirds of prisoners, and that their overrepresentation is rising. A third set of explanations, that also counter the dominant view, focus on the prison industry, and propose that the state has segued from military to carceral Keynesianism in the post cold war world.
While drawing explanatory pieces from a variety of frameworks, this dissertation proposes a different explanation by examining the problem through three analytical cuts. Starting at end of the golden age of U.S. capitalism, it traces a series of political economic crises that beset the California economy since 1973, and discovers that the crises produced surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity that were not absorbed by other means. As the military Keynesian state declined in economic and social legitimacy, new power blocs exploited the surpluses to build the prison system, which also constituted the foundation for a new, post Keynesian militarist state. The second cut looks at how prison fits onto surplus land in a delaborized community of the Great Central Valley, recapitulating, with a difference, older relations between farmworkers and cotton oligopolies. The third and final cut examines surplused labor from the perspective of a Los Angeles based mothers' organization who, in fighting against the expansion of prison, fight also the transformation of the domestic state from a military Keynsian to post Keynesian militarist formation. They propose an alternative social project that emphasizes an ethic of care in lieu of a surplus of punishment.
