Vesla Weaver Writes on the “Carceral State”
In an article in the Boston Review, Vesla Weaver explains how our current criminal justice system degrades the whole notion of democratic citizenship in this country. From constant police surveillance in black urban poor neighborhoods to the explosion of plea bargaining for misdemeanors to the voicelessness of the incarcerated, Weaver lays out how the “carceral state” has robbed a large proportion of people of their basic rights, and “in heavily policed communities, criminal justice is the only government people know.”
Vesla Weaver is assistant professor in the department of African-American Studies and Political Science at Yale. She is also a faculty resident fellow at ISPS, where she is heading up a brand new initiative, the ISPS Center for the Study of Inequality (ICSI).
Her new book, “Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control,” co-written with Amy Lerman (UC Berkeley), has just been published by University of Chicago Press.