Table of Contents
Essays
We, the Watchers
Bennett Capers
A man’s home is his castle, the expression goes. It is a place where he can retreat from intrusion or prying eyes, including from the state, at least without a warrant or extenuating circumstances. At least this is what we tell ourselves.
This Essay shows the falsity of this belief. A man’s home may still be his castle, but his castle may as well be made of glass. The state has entered the home. And we, too, have become watchers.
Family Policing as Welfare Theatre
Tarek Z. Ismail
Every year, Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies across the United States conduct more than 2,000,000 investigations into allegations of maltreatment—investigations that are invasive, traumatic, and disproportionately concentrated in poor Black and Brown communities. And yet 84 percent of these investigations fail to substantiate the allegations that prompted them. Of those that do, the overwhelming majority identify poverty-correlated neglect rather than intentional abuse. Why, then, does American society spend billions of dollars a year on this investigative apparatus, which can cause families significant harm, with so little to show for it?
This Essay introduces a novel framework for answering that question: welfare theatre. Drawing on the concept of security theatre—policies designed to produce a feeling of safety regardless of their actual effectiveness—this Essay argues that CPS investigations function as a welfare theatre: a system of agencies, practices, norms, and popular narratives that perform a collective concern for child welfare irrespective of its actual impact on the children it claims to protect or the families it targets. This Essay traces the origins of the welfare theatre to a particular political moment in which the organized abandonment of Black and Brown communities was reconstituted as a child protection imperative, and in which the tools of investigation and surveillance were substituted for structural investments that might have materially addressed the conditions now labeled as neglect.
This Essay identifies three central functions of family policing’s welfare theatre: communicating to the non-policed public that the government is committing its resources to doing right by its children, individualizing collective harm by scrambling structural shortcomings into parental failure, and securitizing race-class marginalized families—compelling their compliance as the theatre’s objects. This Essay concludes by surveying how impacted families have already begun to break the fourth wall and by proposing legal and policy reforms to shrink the stage.
Civil Death by a Thousand Cuts
Eisha Jain
Commentators have leveled trenchant critiques of collateral consequences of criminal conviction, analogizing them to a form of “civil death.” This Essay develops the related concept of “civil death by a thousand cuts” in two senses. First, penalties such as voting bans or deportation after a conviction are often just the tip of the iceberg. Second, a system of far-flung, intertwined civil and criminal penalties portends the death of a civil society capable of recognizing and mediating excessive penalties. Recognizing how these penalties operate—and how difficult they can be to address—is a critical step toward creating a more proportionate criminal legal system.
Surveillance Architectures
Arti Walker-Peddakotla
From a municipal perspective, architecture and urban planning decisions dictate the presence and use of physical structures in our world. But architecture and urban planning decisions are also used to constrain and regulate the behavior of people and communities. While urban planning principles have been explored in the literature, there remains a gap between connecting urban design principles with a municipality’s decision to enact urban surveillance. As this symposium contends, there is a “shadow carceral state” where carceral power exists in systems of administration and social control. This Essay argues that urban planning and architecture principles are part of the shadow carceral state and are indeed linked to the decisions to enact urban surveillance.
By viewing physical and virtual geographies from a critical perspective, this Essay locates the invisible link between the design and behavioral regulation of physical space with the decision to enact virtual surveillance. This Essay situates urban surveillance enactment within the urban planning, criminology, and critical geographies scholarship. The intertwined decisions of how to structure the physical design of a community and whether to enact urban surveillance are best described by a paradigm this Essay calls “surveillance by environmental design.”
Instead of separating urban planning decisions from a city’s decision to enact urban surveillance, this Essay argues that surveillance by environmental design is one of the primary mechanisms that has created the ever-present, all-seeing surveillance state that we live in today. The surveillance by environmental design paradigm informs us that surveillance is an essential element, and indeed inextricable from a municipality’s urban design decisions, allowing us to locate the normative impacts of an urban surveillance by environmental design practice. Thus, if we are to resist the installation of surveillance technologies in our communities, we must first make visible the ways in which our architecture and urban planning principles contribute to our decisions to enact virtual carceral surveillance.