Anti-criminal Discrimination and Stratification
Mass incarceration is only the tip of the iceberg. More than 35,000 laws across the United States apply almost 50,000 punishments to criminalized people beyond imprisonment and probation—by denying political access, employment opportunities, civil rights, and government benefits. These “hidden sentences” directly apply to more than 1 in 3 American adults, but public attention and political discourse remain centered around the 1 in 135 who are incarcerated. These punishments have long operated beneath the surface to segregate based on criminal records, while systemically (re)creating and legitimating race, class, sexual identity, and other social hierarchies.
The Hidden Penal State
Mass incarceration is only the tip of the iceberg. More than 35,000 laws across the United States apply almost 50,000 punishments to criminalized people beyond imprisonment and probation—by denying political access, employment opportunities, civil rights, and government benefits. These “hidden sentences” directly apply to more than 1 in 3 American adults, but public attention and political discourse remain centered around the 1 in 135 who are incarcerated. These punishments have formed gradually throughout American history and have long operated beneath the surface to (re)create and legitimate race, class, sexual identity, and other social hierarchies.
Genocide as Social Destruction
Genocide is not just mass murder. Dead battle-aged men are not a genocide’s only victims. Genocidal violence targets and affects entire social groups through a systematic process of imperial power and intersectional victimization: racial epithets, killings, rape, destruction of infrastructure and cultural resources, and mass displacement that are experienced differentially by gender, by age, and by other characteristics. Understanding genocides like those in Darfur, Jeju, Iraq, or Nazi Germany therefore requires treating killing and other kinds of violence as complex, interacting, global processes that destroy groups and cultures together, through the intersectional experiences of their members.
Legal Cynicism & Ethno-racial Segregation
State-led violence, insurgency, and terrorism are the results of complex cultural framings than change and develop over time—not simple results of long-standing ethnic cleavages or path-dependent resource investments. Persistent levels of anti-state violence throughout (and long after) the U.S.-led Iraq War were the foreseeable results of aggressive, cynical U.S./Coalition strategies that divided the Iraqi state and communities along ethno-racial lines. As a result of those tactics, Arab Shi’a and especially Arab Sunni communities developed feelings of “legal cynicism,” a cultural frame that predictably causes long-term impacts on community resources, isolation, and future violence.