State acknowledgment of carceral violence normalizes it rather than undoing it

Evidence

Sovereignty thus is not only about the authority of the state but also about the excess of violent policing that purportedly delineates the rule of law and the reinscription of state power. That this violence is acknowledged by state agencies does not undo the violence; instead, such force works to make these acts commonplace and, perhaps, acceptable. It is in this sense that carceral violence is the state of exception that defines the U.S. nation-state, making the prison camp of detention the iconic regime of disciplinary power for migrants as figures of racialized illegality. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 817

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that acknowledged violence becomes commonplace and acceptable — that state admission functions as normalization rather than correction — is a reframe of how institutional violence sustains itself, worth sitting with.
• XREF: Echoes Agamben’s state of exception and Foucault’s disciplinary power, but applied concretely to the US detention apparatus; connects to the reader’s Milgrom work on how institutions legitimize themselves. — connects to: State-sponsored violence channels a resentful hatred of living bodies