From the Courtroom to the Boardroom

Deena Varner is an assistant professor of practice in the Department of English at Texas Tech University.

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. An American Neoliberal Revolution 2. Adjudicating Guilt, Innocence, and Citizenship in the Neoliberal Prison 3. Consumer Background Reports and the making of Neoliberal Cops and Robbers 4. Readjudicating Crimes and Imposing Sanctions in Airbnb's Neoliberal "Community" 5. Neoliberal Vigilantism, Cancel Culture, and the Post-Juridical Turn Postscript Notes Selected Bibliography Index

"Varner offers an illuminating and timely study of how neoliberalism has given rise to the corporation as the ultimate arbiter of citizenship. Varner deftly traces the roots of our present moment in which companies like Airbnb have the power to condemn formerly incarcerated people to a kind of social death, taking away the basic privileges that comprise modern citizenship in an era of the gig economy and surveillance capitalism. This book makes lucid, highly readable, and important interventions upon ongoing debates in American studies, criminology, critical race studies, and legal studies.It testifies to the emergence of a vital scholarly voice that can help us see and understand the often-hidden methods of institutional and digital control that define today's United States." - Jeffrey Ian Ross, author of Key Issues in Corrections and An Introduction to Political Crime"The violence of the carceral state is both concentrated and expansive. Jails, prisons, and police shorten lives, sometimes spectacularly. The quotidian power, on the other hand, reaches deeply into the social body and can be more difficult to identify and document. Thankfully, From the Courtroom to the Boardroom offers the kind of capacious and rigorous analysis needed to meet a moment where the carceral capacities of the state have both intensified and diffused into various individuals, institutions, and cultural practices. In rich and theoretically driven writing, Deena Varner argues that creditors, landlords, HR compliance officers, employers, and companies like Airbnb take on extensive powers of investigation, adjudication, policing, and punishment, often enacting collateral consequences of criminalization and imprisonment outside of the criminal legal system. In the process of such a sprawling deployment of carceral logics and practices, these actors and institutions straddle and explode conventional divisions between public and private or civic and criminal, while also reinforcing and renovating cultural norms of individual justice. This book is urgent reading for both understanding the complex relationship between capitalism and the carceral state and anticipating its ongoing development." - Judah Schept, author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia