In February, I’ll participate in an APSA-organized research group led by Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien and Christopher Towler. The purpose of this group is to assist researchers in preparing their material for publication in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (JREP) potentially as part of a special issue.
Archives for category: Research
Last month the IRB at Mason approved my follow-up study. Over the month of November I’ll be in the field interviewing current staff and former students of a boarding school, collecting records at the institution, and photographing documents in nearby archives. I’m absolutely thrilled to be diving headfirst into this project!
My article “The Submerged Prison State: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability” has been accepted for publication at Punishment and Society. [Online first copy available here.]
Here’s the abstract:
Much of the US penal state is ‘submerged,’ in the sense that Suzanne Mettler uses the term. There are networks of rules and regulations that link public funds, services, and institutions to various private interests with far reaching consequences. These networks are largely a stealth presence in the lives of citizens and their subterranean status, I argue, warps the wider politics of punishment. Resources are circulated along this network in such a way revenue is generated for some, costs cut for others, all in the shadow of public law. To the extent that this kind of redistribution lacks citizens’ consent and approval, it also represents a potentially undemocratic development. Here, I show how the obscured visibility of these public-private connections distorts public attitudes about, and public support for, the penal state. The final pages draw out the normative implications of that distortion.
Keywords:
access to justice, civil law, tax expenditures, carceral state, privatization, regulation, politics of punishment, democratic theory
Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, patients, and the limits of self-government is now available for pre-order (link here) and is scheduled to be released this August.
A drop of good news in an ocean of bad: my article titled “Must penal law be insulated from public influence?” has been accepted at Law and Philosophy. [Accessible here.]
Later this term I’ll be presenting in-progress work on populism and penal law at GMU’s internal speaker series, WRiPS. A draft of the paper is available on request. Nov. 6, 12-1:30 in the Johnson Center.
I’ve managed to complete a draft of my book manuscript, Democracy in Captivity. The Department of Politics and the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy & Law will be hosting a manuscript workshop next month featuring Bernard Harcourt (Columbia), Heather Ann Thompson (Michigan), and Vesla Weaver (Johns Hopkins), along with a number of UVa faculty. I’m thrilled to hear from such an accomplished group of scholars, and I know my book will be better for their input.
If you’d like to attend, send me a note and I’ll send along a copy of the manuscript. May 3, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the University of Virginia.
I’ll be presenting an article titled “Populism, punishment, and the taste for revenge” at the 2019 Annual Meeting on Law and Society. Come join. May 30 – June 2 in Washington, DC.
Wonderful news! My article “Children, development, and the troubled foundations of Miller v. Alabama” has been accepted for publication in Law & Social Inquiry, the journal of the American Bar Foundation.
I’ll be presenting a draft chapter titled “Prisons and Community Control” from my book manuscript at the Political Philosophy, Policy & Law Colloquium this Friday. I’m fortunate to have Dan Henry, an ABD in Department of Politics, as a discussant. Come if you can. April 27, 2-3:45 p.m. in Gibson 296 at the University of Virginia.
Christopher D. Berk 