Toward a Critical Theory of Punishment

My dissertation is a careful treatment of penal ideology that reveals the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the development of the contemporary penal system by mapping the complex interaction of institutional, intellectual, and cultural attitudes towards punishment. I argue that instead rather than the traditional justifications of retribution, deterrence, or utility, American punishment is best understood through Albert Memmi's model of the relationship between “the colonizer and the colonized. ” My examination contends that that criminality itself has become divorced from the abstract offending body and has been re-mapped onto already defined bodies, centrally those of poor black men. In addition to contributing to the emergence of mass incarceration, this research maintains that the displacement of criminality from act to body creates a scenario in which harm itself is ever more difficult to recognize or remediate. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of possibilities for resisting hegemonic ideologies of punishment through an immanent critique of their reifying effects. ii Acknowledgments and Dedication While I continue to love the image of the wise and wizened scholar, workin