Organizing Penal-Welfare Hybridity: Trauma, Vulnerability, and State Recognition of Crime Victims

Abstract

Existing literature argues that the incorporation of “crime victims” into the U.S. state has been a causal force in carceral expansion. I argue that instead of carceral expansion alone, victim politics have contributed to penal-welfare hybridity: the welfare state expands as it gets attached to criminal procedures. Drawing from archival data on the crime victims’ movement, I show how victim policies generated a new welfare infrastructure that operates under the aegis of criminal systems. I also reveal the cultural logics through which penal and welfare programs were hybridized: mobilizing trauma discourses allowed stakeholders to fuse therapeutic and “protective” capacities of the state—while perpetuating racial exclusions through the concept of vulnerability. Organizationally, feminized service work was located inside the masculinist penal system, expanding welfarist jobs under the purview of criminal institutions. This article shows that ideas about trauma and vulnerability help explain the selective expansion of the welfare state inside and/or alongside the punitive state.