From the Courtroom to the Boardroom

"The era of mass incarceration has been associated with the idea of "law and order," referring to the carceral regime in which politicians exploited public anxieties over crime and funneled resources into policing and prisons. As important as this system was and remains, there has been a shift in recent years shaped by neoliberalism-the political, economic, and sociocultural program that has supplanted liberal democratic legal frameworks, subordinating them to operations of the market and mandating that private entities intervene in the creation, interpretation, and enforcement of law. While courts and legislatures play a significant role in shaping legal personhood in the United States, private, profit-driven institutions are increasingly responsible for determining the post-sentence consequences that people with criminal convictions face. The result has been a move from the courtroom to the boardroom, from a law-and-order society to a policy-and-order society. From the Courtroom to the Boardroom is an interdisciplinary cultural studies project that examines the role of the criminal justice system in implementing neoliberal restructuring in the United States, including the partial transfer of quasi-judicial authority to employers, landlords, lenders, social media companies, and other businesses. Deena Varner examines the way the consumer background report industry has privatized the surveillance and punishment of individuals, conflating crime with bad credit and eviction history. She looks at how Airbnb's 2018 policy of banning people convicted of crimes is an example of the way corporate entities are increasingly vested with the authority to determine things like the seriousness or severity of crimes. Varner also examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture," arguing that this is best understood not as an example of the culture wars but rather of the way judicial power has been transferred from the state to the individual judgments of citizens-a partial return to what Foucault described as the punitive model of infamy"--