Mass incarceration and neoliberal penality : a response to Lloyd and Whitehead’s Kicked to the Curb

This paper is written in response to Lloyd and Whitehead’s (2018) Kicked to the Curb: The triangular trade of neoliberal polity, social insecurity, and penal expul-sion. Using the “triangular trade” that underpinned chattel slavery as an analytical metaphor, Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) argue that the growth of mass incarcera-tion is an endogenous feature of neoliberalism. They conclude a distinctive form of penality - neoliberal penality has developed over the past forty years. Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) propose that a tripartite model - neoliberalism, precarity and mass incarceration - as the basis for a model of neoliberal penality. This paper uses an exploration of the arguments raised by Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) to examine the links between neoliberalism and the expansion of the penal state. Whilst rec-ognising the centrality of race to these issues, the paper argues that the model that Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) present offers a partial explanation for mass incarcer-ation. This paper acknowledges that the triangular trade metaphor is a powerful one but will conclude that it has limitations. In particular, the comparison be-tween mass incarceration and chattel slavery is overstated. The economic impact of slavery and its centrality to the modern capitalism (Williams, 2014) cannot be compared to the exploitation that occurs in the current prison system. The paper argues that neoliberalism, precarity and mass incarceration are clearly linked but do not constitute a triangular trade as Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) conclude

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

Race and Colorblindness after Hernandez and Brown

[No abstract

Race and Colorblindness after Hernandez and Brown

[No abstract