Mass incarceration and consumer financial harm: Critique of rent‐seeking by the carceral state

Casey Carder Rockwell, David Crockett and Lenita Davis

Journal of Consumer Affairs, 2020, vol. 54, issue 3, 1062-1081

Abstract: Mass incarceration is an approach to managing public safety that emphasizes detention over other means. It is also neoliberalism's quintessential political and economic project because it mobilizes a prison industrial complex to generate revenue. We highlight rent‐seeking, the pursuit of extra‐budgetary revenues by carceral agencies, because it inflicts financial harm on incarcerated consumers and their supporters. Carceral agencies leverage government's authority to set the conditions of detention. However, when they also leverage government's market‐making authority to seek rents from incarcerated persons we characterize that as a government failure. To understand it, we depart from a focus on corruption by specific actors to highlight features of institutions that enable unethical behavior. We join activists and elected officials who call for an end to mass incarceration, but we also highlight more immediate reforms that can help restrain rent‐seeking and enable greater public scrutiny of the carceral state.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12316

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jconsa:v:54:y:2020:i:3:p:1062-1081

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0022-0078

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Affairs is currently edited by Sharon Tennyson

More articles in Journal of Consumer Affairs from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().