ABSTRACT
I begin this chapter with a reflection on how the university is carceral, reflecting on UC Berkeley’s postwar history as well as my own experience to illustrate its violence. I draw heavily from scholarship associated with the emergent field of critical university studies, which aids in understanding the cultural and economic shifts that have informed changes in higher education. I then explain how public criminology often fails to grapple with or attend to these concerns, thus failing to recognize how it, as a project, becomes a commodity that does not recognize how the university’s conditions are carceral. In doing so, it inevitably works in state interests and threatens to perpetuate carceral logics.
