The Relational Carceral State and the Segregated Origins of Drug Policy: A Du Boisian Perspective

Drawing on key insights from relational sociology, criminologists have often analysed the carceral state by examining its relations with welfarist mechanisms of governing social marginality. This way of setting the relational scope for analysing the carceral state, however, has left important research avenues underexplored. Building from Du Boisian sociology and racial capitalism literature, we develop a relational approach that examines the co-productive institutionalisation of liberal and illiberal forms of governance, which we theorize through the original concept of the governance line. This framework sheds new light on how the carceral state has taken shape through processes of boundary work with regulatory forms of governance operating beyond contexts of social marginality. We apply this approach to explore the role of racially stratified notions of freedom in drawing the boundaries between carceral and regulatory regimes of governing drug markets in the United States during the Progressive Era.