From the Courtroom to the Boardroom
The era of mass incarceration has been associated with the idea of “law and order,” referring to the carceral regime in which politicians exploited public anxieties over crime and funneled resources into policing and prisons. As important as this system has been and remains to be, there has been a shift in recent years shaped by neoliberalism—the political, economic, and sociocultural program that has supplanted liberal democratic legal frameworks, subordinating them to operations of the market and mandating that private entities intervene in the creation, interpretation, and enforcement of law. While courts and legislatures play a significant role in shaping legal personhood in the neoliberal United States, private, profit-driven institutions are increasingly responsible for determining the post-sentence consequences that people with criminal convictions face. The result has been a move from the courtroom to the boardroom, from a law-and-order society to a policy-and-order society.
From the Courtroom to the Boardroom is an interdisciplinary cultural studies project that examines the role of the criminal justice system in implementing neoliberal restructuring in the United States, including the partial transfer of quasi-judicial authority to employers, landlords, lenders, social media companies, and other businesses. It examines the way the consumer background report industry has privatized the surveillance and punishment of individuals, conflating crime with bad credit and eviction history. It positions Airbnb’s 2018 policy of banning people convicted of crimes as an example of the way corporate entities are increasingly vested with the authority to determine things like the seriousness or severity of crimes. It also tackles the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” arguing that this is best understood not as a feature of the culture wars but rather as a partial return to what Foucault described as the punitive model of infamy, in which the responsibility for punishing has been transferred from the state to individuals.
From the Courtroom to the Boardroom is published concurrently in JSTOR's open access program, Path to Open.
Reviews
“Varner offers an illuminating and timely study of how neoliberalism has given rise to the corporation as the ultimate arbiter of citizenship. Varner deftly traces the roots of our present moment in which companies like Airbnb have the power to condemn formerly incarcerated people to a kind of social death, taking away the basic privileges that comprise modern citizenship in an era of the gig economy and surveillance capitalism. This book makes lucid, highly readable, and important interventions upon ongoing debates in American studies, criminology, critical race studies, and legal studies. It testifies to the emergence of a vital scholarly voice that can help us see and understand the often-hidden methods of institutional and digital control that define today’s United States.”
— Jeffrey Ian Ross, author of Key Issues in Corrections and An Introduction to Political Crime
“The violence of the carceral state is both concentrated and expansive. Jails, prisons, and police shorten lives, sometimes spectacularly. The quotidian power, on the other hand, reaches deeply into the social body and can be more difficult to identify and document. Thankfully, From the Courtroom to the Boardroom offers the kind of capacious and rigorous analysis needed to meet a moment where the carceral capacities of the state have both intensified and diffused into various individuals, institutions, and cultural practices. In rich and theoretically driven writing, Deena Varner argues that creditors, landlords, HR compliance officers, employers, and companies like Airbnb take on extensive powers of investigation, adjudication, policing, and punishment, often enacting collateral consequences of criminalization and imprisonment outside of the criminal legal system. In the process of such a sprawling deployment of carceral logics and practices, these actors and institutions straddle and explode conventional divisions between public and private or civic and criminal, while also reinforcing and renovating cultural norms of individual justice. This book is urgent reading for both understanding the complex relationship between capitalism and the carceral state and anticipating its ongoing development.”
—Judah Schept, author of Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion and Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia
Cover Art
"Factotum" by William J. Livingston III
When I first encountered Livingston’s art in 2019, he had already been incarcerated in Oklahoma for a number of years. Most of the pieces he was creating were silkscreens of album covers and other iconic images of indie bands from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I’d written previously about how, because prisons are sites of total control, inmates are often fashioned as subjects totally controlled, totally inside. We often expect them to talk only about prison, or to write or make art only about prison. Livingston’s art reminds us that prisoners’ interests and ambitions are both inside and outside the prison, and that the boundary between inside and outside is always more porous than it seems.
The artwork on my book cover, “Factotum,” is part of Livingston’s “Throwaway People” series that he began making at the beginning of his confinement. In our personal correspondence, he cited as inspiration for the piece “the noise, the chaos, the unpredictability and the loneliness while still surrounded by so many.” The title, of course, is an allusion to Charles Bukowski’s novel of the same name, which, Livingston writes, “is about a man who has lost everything and lives life with no direction.” Although the throwaway people inside the honeycomb structure seem to be trapped there, this jail is also porous, visually recalling the way honey oozes out of its comb. From the Courtroom to the Boardroom is very much about how the prisoner eventually leaves prison, but it is also about how the prison and its logics ooze into our everyday lives, whether we’ve ever been locked up or not. The rhizomatic quality of the honeycomb, too, evokes the kind of society I imagine when I think about the ways that public and private actors work together to punish. There is no top or bottom, east or west, no clear directional flow. We’re all inside of it, but it’s never quite clear what is the cause and what is the effect.
