Caught in the Countryside

Race, Class, and Punishment in Rural America

Bibliographic Data

ID23214068
AuthorsMarie Gottschalk (corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages25-52
Publication date2020-09-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRethinking Class and Social Difference (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEmerald Publishing Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1108/s0198-871920200000037003
OpenAlexW3088209809
ISBN9781839820212
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited28

Discussion of the 2016 electorate has centered on two poles: results of public opinion and voter surveys that attempt to tease out whether racial, cultural, or economic grievances were the prime drivers behind the Trump vote and analyses that tie major shifts in the political economy to consequential shifts in the voting behavior of certain demographic and geographic groups. Both approaches render invisible a major development since the 1970s that has been transforming the political, social, and economic landscape of wide swaths of people who do not reside in major urban areas or their prosperous suburban rings: the emergence and consolidation of the carceral state. This chapter sketches out some key contours of the carceral state that have been transforming the polity and economy for poor and working-class people, with a particular focus on rural areas and the declining Rust Belt. It is meant as a correction to the stilted portrait of these groups that congealed in the aftermath of the 2016 election, thanks to their pivotal contribution to Trump's victory. This chapter is not an alternative causal explanation that identifies the carceral state as the key factor in the 2016 election. Rather, it is a call to aggressively widen the analytical lens of studies of the carceral state, which have tended to focus on communities of color in urban areas.

Class (philosophy) · Criminology · Geography · Political science · Punishment (psychology) · Race (biology) · Rural area · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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