Credit, Cops, and Cages

Alexis N. Goad is a PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of Arizona.Tyler Jimenez is assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.Tiana Kathryn Jones works as a Deputy State Public Defender for the Colorado State Public Defender.Harrison J. Schmitt is assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Skidmore College.Lauren P. Sedivy is an existential psychologist and prison reform advocate whose research focuses on supporting rehabilitation and successful reentry for incarcerated individuals.Daniel Sullivan is the director of the Social and Personality Psychology Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

• PrefaceChapter 1: A Theory of Capitalist IndividualismChapter 2: The Legal Scaffold of Self-PositionsChapter 3: Studies on the Psychology of DebtChapter 4: The Ambiguous Case of Student DebtChapter 5: Studies on Public Attitudes towards Policing and IncarcerationChapter 6: Bars and Becoming: The Transformation of Identity in Incarcerated WomenChapter 7: Conclusion: Theoretical ReflectionsAppendix: Methodological Supplement to Chapter 3ReferencesIndexAbout the Authors

Credit, Cops, and Cages: A Theory of Capitalist Individualism offers a powerful and incisive account of how neoliberal capitalism in the contemporary United States produces a paradoxical condition: individuals are promised autonomy while subjected to intensifying legal, economic, and carceral constraints. Through a critical engagement with the neglected criminological writings of the early Frankfurt School—including Rusche, Kirchheimer, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Neumann, and Benjamin—the authors illuminate how capitalist political economy and its institutional apparatuses generate a stratified social order of disciplined, precarious, and incarcerated selves. This timely and important work offers a prescient analysis of past and present conditions while challenging social psychologists to actively build institutions that minimize structural oppression and psychological immiseration.