Featured in Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis: Putting Wacquant to Work (Palgrave Macmillian, 2019)
In “Deadly symbiosis” Wacquant presents “hyperincarceration” as the “fourth peculiar institution” in the lineage of U.S. racial domination. His thesis allows us to capture the formal mechanisms that “define, confine and control” unskilled black labor. This essay takes up hyperincarceration’s informal side. Extending, while challenging Wacquant’s political sociology, I offer the “supervised society” to capture the scope and consequence of hyperincarceration in the everyday lives of poor black Americans. In doing so, the essay reveals how a principle mechanism of legal exclusion—the criminal record—draws in actors outside of the criminal legal system and works to encourage, shape and produce new social forms, including new forms of urban sociality and a refashioned and rearticulated state.