DescriptionMy dissertation develops an account of American punishment that responds to the complex interaction of institutional, intellectual, and cultural attitudes towards punishment, asserting that a careful treatment of penal ideology reveals that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow play a large role in the development of the contemporary penal system. This dissertation is organized around the justificatory narratives that have long dominated American punishment, and seeks to understand the relationships between normative, cultural, and institutional visions of punishment. I argue that punishment is best understood through a model of the colonial relationship of “the colonizer and the colonized” (as Memmi framed it). Through examining the use of retribution, deterrence, and utility as the guiding principles for punishment in the United States, I argue that criminality itself has become divorced from the abstract offending body and has been re-mapped onto already defined bodies, centrally those of poor black men. In addition to contributing to the emergence of mass incarceration, the displacement of criminality from act to body creates a scenario in which harm itself is ever more difficult to recognize or remediate. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of possibilities for resisting hegemonic ideologies of punishment through an immanent critique of its reifying effects.