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As policymakers reckon with how the United States became a global leader in imprisonment after World War II, scholars have suggested that the roots of this phenomenon are in conservative backlash to postwar crime or in federal intervention in American cities during the urban crisis. However, historians and social scientists have overlooked the role of jails in the origins story of mass incarceration. Through a close historical examination of Cook County Jail in Chicago, my research addresses how policymakers used reform claims to rationalize the growth of large urban jails from the 1950s through the 1990s. As a massive state building project, mass incarceration was contingent upon branding urban jails as providers of social services and rehabilitation, even though there was proof that jails failed to provide such services and as jail policymakers built bigger and more brutal jails. While activists, lawyers, and prisoners challenged dehumanizing conditions and state violence, jailers responded to public scrutiny by assuring the public that Cook County Jail was in the process of becoming a space that was beneficial to people awaiting trial there. This project locates the emergence of the contemporary carceral crisis in the battle to transform America’s jails. / History

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This thesis is built on the knowledge and experience I learned working with CURB and as a member of L.A. No More Jail, particularly in the ongoing fight against the Mira Loma gender responsive “Women’s Village” Jail expansion, which is part of a larger jail building boom on going in California right now. I write this thesis to engage in the reimagining of justice that abolitionist community organizers, formerly and currently incarcerated people and others who work to challenge the prison industrial complex have been envisioning for California.

This research aimed to understand how former prisoners make sense of their participation in carceral employment programs in terms of their reintegration into the labour market upon release. Following a social constructivist approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen men living in Ottawa, Canada, who had participated in employment programs while incarcerated in Canadian federal prisons. Content analysis of the transcribed interviews showed that participation in work programs was perceived as beneficial for reintegration into the labour market if the individual received a provincially-recognized trade certificate, could count hours worked in prison towards an apprenticeship, or if engaged in a field of work that matched their aspirations in terms of future employment plans. Most participants noted additional advantages for engaging in work activities in prison, such as the use of work as a strategy to cope with feelings of idleness and estrangement from society while incarcerated. Participants who did not perceive participation as helpful mentioned that returning to the labour market was not desirable or was made difficult by plans to retire, to receive a government pension due to disabilities, mental health conditions experienced during and after prison, the stigma for being a former prisoner as overriding any potential benefit from the program, and parole conditions limiting or preventing the search for jobs in the community. Future studies investigating reintegration into the labour market upon release and seeking to understand how former prisoners make sense of their participation in carceral employment programs could focus on individuals who have completed their sentences and are not subjected to parole conditions. This would allow an investigation of the perceptions and experiences of those who are not impeded in seeking employment and have been actively searching for or engaging with employment upon release.

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本篇論文試圖以米歇爾•傅柯的權力分析為理論基礎來分析和討論瑪格麗特•愛德伍的小說《使女的故事》。透過書中女主角奧芙弗雷德的論述，我們看到的是一個不熟悉且極權統治的國度。小說中描述的高壓政策是對美國八十年代政治和社會趨勢的反諷，也呈現給讀者基列共和國中權力運作的刻畫和剖析；在此國度的權力運作中，不論男女都深受權力網絡的控制。小說中嵌入的是一個全面性且集中的權力機制。因此，本篇論文將以傅柯的權力觀為理論出發點，對於《使女的故事》中的權力機制做一個全面性的閱讀和探究。本論文中所強調的並不是舊權力觀中以壓迫和禁忌為主的權力。此處的權力是落實在策略和技術層面上，而這些手法顯現了權力的負面特性更強調正面的生產特性。權力足以生產出一個模範讓人們仿效，權力更有能力使人們內化這個模範並成為社會認可的正常人。這樣精細的權力運作是為了便於管理和控制。本論文將就傅柯的權力分析來探究小說中所彰顯的權力負面和正面特質。《使女的故事》的情節就像是揉和了傅柯的一些主要論點。小說和理論的對話呈現在權力與論述、與規訓懲罰、與性機制的關係，這些論點將會在內文中逐章討論。這些權力機制製造出奧芙弗雷德的歸順，也產生反抗。反抗則會巔覆既有的權力關係。本論文的最後結論將會說明權力的不確定性和易變性是如何反映在主角的反抗行為中。權力關係並不是統治者和被統治者之間的二元對立，而是一個變動的關係。這樣的不穩定性使得權力永遠呈現出流動和拉距的現象。 / This thesis attempts to scrutinize Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in terms of Michel Foucault’s analytics of power. Through Offred’s discourse, we perceive a totalitarian regime foreign to us. The description of the extremely high-pressure policy is a satiric response to the political and social developments in the United States in the 1980s. This novel also presents us with an anatomy of power that lays bare the exercise of power in the Republic of Gilead, in which both men and women are caught up in the dense web of power. An overwhelming and compressive mechanism of power is embedded in this novel. Therefore, my argument will be based on Foucault’s elucidation of power to analyze The Handmaid’s Tale in a more panoramic perspective. The concept of power elaborated in this thesis is not the one that always says no through prohibition and interdiction. Instead, power is materialized in all kinds of strategies and techniques. These tactics reveal the repressive and the productive characteristics of power. Power is capable of producing the norm for individuals to follow and also of transforming them into the “normal” ones for the purpose of administration and domination. Following Foucault’s analytics of power, this thesis will explore the productive and repressive manipulation of power reflected in this novel. The Handmaid’s Tale serves as an exemplary literary dramatization of some of Foucault’s major ideas. The correspondence between Atwood’s work and Foucault’s propositions of power will be discussed in three separate chapters, in which the mechanisms of power are revealed in discourse, discipline and punishment, and sexuality. Offred’s submission is produced by those power mechanisms, yet power also produces resistance that subverts established power relations. The final chapter will conclude that Offred’s resistant behavior reflects the contingency and vulnerability of power. Power relations are not the binary opposition between rulers and the ruled but the mobile and negotiable relations, in which power flows quickly from one area to another.

Juvenile justice reforms in America today closely resemble the ones that occurred over a century ago. The reforms of both eras aim to separate juveniles from adults and emphasize rehabilitation over punishment. Why is policy repeating itself? In search of an answer, I look to a monumental series of liberal Supreme Court decisions made in the 1960s that constituted what is now known as the Civil Rights Era’s “due process revolution.” In these cases, the Supreme Court provided juveniles with procedural protections in attempt to prevent the manifestation of racial bias in the juvenile court. It is commonly agreed upon that the due process revolution failed in its mission to protect minority youth. However, scholars are divided on why it failed. Some claim that states simply did not implement the protections properly. Others argue that a conservative backlash obstructed their proper implementation. In this thesis, I put forth that the decisions themselves — specifically, Kent v. United States and In Re Gault — criminalized youth by mistakenly presuming that racism could be regulated out of the court by enhanced procedures of due process. The liberal decisions made in Kent and Gault ultimately paved the way for the conservative carceral agenda of the late twentieth century and subjected minority youth to unprecedented punitive policy. I refer to Naomi Murakawa’s “racial innocence” theory to illuminate this interpretation of events and suggest that communities look inwards for alternatives to institutional reform.

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