Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
Loading next page...
/lp/university-of-chicago-press/the-administrative-disappearing-of-state-crisis-the-resolution-of-SFapqxJ7rz
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Copyright
- © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
- ISSN
- 0002-9602
- eISSN
- 1537-5390
- DOI
- 10.1086/719423
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
That modern states make use of legibility projects to exert social control is widely acknowledged. Much less understood is how state actors resolve crisis situations that severely undermine and disincentivize the use of legibility. These are situations in which public officials confront rapid declines in budgetary resources at the exact same time that new legal rules or pressure forces them to expand access to services. In order to understand what officials do in such situations, this article explores how the policy crisis of Prison Realignment in Los Angeles County—the shift of thousands of California state prisoners into an already overcrowded county jail system—came to be considered publicly resolved. This article introduces the concept of “administrative disappearing,” or the process by which contradictory information embedded within legibility projects is reconfigured into state assets. These contradictions refer to the faulty aggregations, contextually insensitive standards, and incommensurable policy metrics that, during crisis, come to be highlighted and productively used to resolve material threats to the state.
Journal
American Journal of Sociology – University of Chicago Press
Published: Mar 1, 2022