AUTHOR EVENT with Jill McCorkel: The Profit in Loss: Metamorphosis and Adaption of the Private Prison Industry

Jill McCorkel is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at University College Dublin. Jill’s research investigates the social and political consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. She focuses primarily on how law and systems of punishment perpetuate race, class, and gender-based inequities. In 2014, she received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology Division of Women and Crime for her research in these areas. Her book, Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment (New York University Press, 2013), explores the consequences of the War on Drugs and "get tough" policies for women prisoners. Her book was selected by the Society for the Study of Social Problems as one of five finalists for the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award.

The Differential Association is very happy to have Jill joining us for a discussion about her recent work on private prisons in the United States. We will be discussing Jill's recent article in Contemporary Drug Problems, 'The Second Coming.'

Details!

Date: Thursday 9th November

Time: 5pm to 6.30pm

Venue: The Green Room, Sutherland School of Law, UCD (L021)

To attend the book club and for a copy of the reading material, please RSVP to Lynsey Black (lynsey.black@ucd.ie).

For an overview of Jill's work on the private prison industry:

In August 2016, the Department of Justice announced plans to phase out contracts with private prison companies with the goal of eliminating private prisons in the federal system altogether. For many scholars and prisoner rights advocates, the announcement was an important step in dismantling the prison industrial complex. However, this perspective obscures the extent to which the largest for-profit prison companies have broadly diversified the services they offer to federal, state, and local municipalities and, concomitantly, the source of carceral profits. In a series of articles, Dr McCorkel traces the rise and growing popularity of one of the largest of these for-profit services -- drug treatment. Although rehabilitation was once considered an antidote to mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, it now fuels the growth of private prison companies and serves as a bedrock of profitability, even in a time of declining prison populations.