The Punishing State: Punishment, Social Control, and Social Services in North Carolina

Abstract

The United States is excessively punitive. More people are held in prisons in the U.S. than in any other country on record. Public assistance programs are deeply restrictive. The U.S. has the highest rate of initiated eviction proceedings among all OECD countries. As attention to punitive exposures has grown, researchers have presented theories to explain how, why, and when the U.S. made this turn. Common explanations tend to focus on singular forms of punishment or a specific set of policies at a time. This dissertation tells the story of how North Carolina evolved over a century to punish its residents across multiple domains. Chapters two through four documents the development of punitive policies from the late colonial period to the 1970s in North Carolina. In tracing this history, I argue that there were three distinct phases in creating social services. The first was from the late colonial period to the early 1900s. I argue that faced with the pending liberation of almost four million Black people, the state was faced with mounting pressure to maintain the racial hierarchy. Social services were subsequently developed to help elevate the status of poor Whites above newly freed Blacks. The second period was defined by expanding services while excluding Black people from accessing those services. The third period demonstrates the dropping of racial barriers but simultaneously ramping up the punitive administration of services. In providing a history of the development of punitive policies across institutions, I argue that researchers should be weary of focusing on singular forms of punishment and should instead incorporate frameworks that consider the multiple ways that the state imposes punitive sanctions on its residents. I then switch gears slightly and put numbers to words. In presenting data that measures nine forms of state punishment over the last decade, I show that the tendency to focus on the law enforcement system, or at individual systems at a time, poses the risk of drastically underestimating the rate at which people experience punitive sanctions from the state. In addition, I show that punishments tend to have a cumulative effect and pile on communities with higher percentages of Black and poor populations. I then pose the question: So, what? By considering the multiple ways the state punishes people, I show that we can better understand the political lives of highly punished communities than when we hyperfocus on a select few.