I also write about the politics of mass incarceration in the United States. One article, “Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars,” co-authored with Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and published in Perspectives on Politics (2021), examines the emergence of partnerships between public carceral institutions and private equity, bringing to light the ways in which these partnerships are reshaping both the carceral economy and the gender relations that sustain it. Another, “Alabama is US: Concealed Fees in Jails and Prisons,” co-authored with Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Nolan Bennett, was published in the UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review (2020).

Building on these related research interests, I have also begun developing a second book-length project, provisionally entitled Democracy’s Debts, which offers a historical exploration of the democratic politics of debt in North America since the eighteenth century. I examine how the discourse of debt has been conceptualized and mobilized both to entrench hierarchy as well as to imagine struggles for equality. I do this by evaluating the economic and legal history of the development of debt in the U.S. within four key arenas where political arguments about debt have been articulated and deployed: political struggles over public debt, the role of credit in slavery but also contemporary demands for reparations for racial injustice, demands for progressive redistribution and practices of regressive distribution, and finally the politics of personal and metaphorical debt. Currently in preparation for journal submission, the first paper in this project, “Hamilton’s Debt: On the Ideological Origins of Public Debt and Private Credit Markets,” examines Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 “First Report on Public Credit” and argues that it operated as a deeply influential site for the development of the idea of a “public debt” that all citizens must organize their economic activity to manage.