Racism, fines and fees and the US carceral state

In: Race & class: a journal for black and third world liberation, Band 59, Heft 3, S. 38-50

Abstract

The size, scope, and implications of the carceral state, particularly for urban communities of colour, are currently grossly underestimated. This article suggests the need to move beyond the traditional debate about mass incarceration in the US to show how the ubiquitous imposition of fines and fees for low-level offences has wide-reaching poverty-enhancing and racially disparate effects. The author argues that local government institutions such as the police and courts, which comprise the carceral state at neighbourhood level, engage in daily practices that reflect the colourblind racism of neoliberalism, including revenue-generation, which necessarily produce and reinforce race and class inequalities. The American state has always managed and controlled black labour; the author compares the imposition of fines and fees in the wake of black Emancipation and Jim Crowism to the current practice of fines and fees functioning within the paradigm of neoliberal colourblind racism.