Finance & Mass Incarceration

Three recent or forthcoming coauthored publications extend my research on political economy to the intersection of finance and mass incarceration in the U.S.

In “From the Battlefield to Behind Bars: Rethinking the Relationship between the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes,” forthcoming in Daedalus (2025), Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (Cornell) and I offer an innovative argument about the multiple ways—financial, institutional, and racial—that the carceral and military states have influenced one another and evaluate the implications of this entwinement on Western democracies.

“Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity, and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars”, published in Perspectives on Politics (2021) and also coauthored with Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, explores the rise and normalization of private equity firms in the public carceral system and the central role of gendered and racialized exploitation in this process.

“Alabama is US: Concealed Fees in Jails and Prisons” (2020), coauthored with Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Nolan Bennett (Cal Poly) and published in the UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review, identifies and explains how localized legal changes have accelerated the monetization of services within public prisons and jails, leading to “captive markets” in which incarcerated populations and their (generally low-income and underrepresented) families are subject to the profit-making enterprises of corporate actors.