carceral

adjective car·cer·al \ ˈkär-sə-rəl \

Definition of carceral

: of, relating to, or suggesting a jail or prison

carceral was our Word of the Day on 02/08/2017. Hear the podcast!

Recent Examples of carceral from the Web

Local police and social workers emphasize that no anti-gang approach can be solely carceral; that education, mental health care and social intervention are just as important to present teenagers with appealing alternatives to gang membership.

— dara lind, Vox, "MS-13, explained," 21 May 2018
Kushner has spoken in interviews about the relationships and visits that contributed to her extensive knowledge of the carceral system and the rising number of women it confines each year.

— idra novey, latimes.com, "Rachel Kushner's new novel, 'The Mars Room,' is devastating," 26 Apr. 2018
This Black History Month, The Root, in partnership with Drug Policy Alliance, takes a deep look at why the war on drugs cannot be divorced from generational poverty, the carceral state and white supremacy.

— kirsten west savali, The Root, "The Hood Incubator: Oakland, Calif., Organization Empowers Black Communities to Take Ownership of Cannabis Industry," 22 Feb. 2018
The victory also continued a slow but growing national trend of prosecutorial candidates running on platforms to rethink and scale back tough-on-crime policies that have contributed to the bloated carceral population.

— john legend, The Root, "The Top Criminal Justice Wins of 2017," 25 Dec. 2017
Although 13 states—including carceral strongholds like Texas and Arkansas—eliminated juvenile life without parole after Miller, the Louisiana Legislature didn’t go that far.

— carimah townes, Slate Magazine, "Justice Scuttled," 25 May 2017
While our carceral institutions are, at least, officially opposed to subjecting prisoners to rape, the same cannot be said for torture.

— eric levitz, Daily Intelligencer, "‘Sheriff Joe’ and Everyday American Authoritarianism," 30 Aug. 2017
From the 1960s to 1980s, the federal government’s failed efforts to reduce crime, which resulted from bad data collection, bad social science and bad police practices, led to an expansion of the carceral apparatus rather than a serious reappraisal.

— imani perry, New York Times, "‘From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,’ by Elizabeth Hinton," 27 May 2016
... a place where social and intellectual community might be restored in a way that reestablishes an individual’s agency. The agency a carceral institution inherently attempts to strip away.

— clint smith, The Atlantic, "Why Prison Education Is About More Than Lowering Recidivism," 27 June 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'carceral.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

Describing a painting of John Howard visiting a prison in 1787, Robert Hughes wrote that Howard was "the pioneer of English carceral reform" (Time Magazine, November 11, 1985). Prison reform might be the more common phrase, but the use of carceral was by no means unprecedented. Vladimir Nabokov, in his inimitable prose, described a prison scene in Invitation to a Beheading thusly: "The door opened, whining, rattling and groaning in keeping with all the rules of carceral counterpoint." An adjective borrowed directly from Late Latin, carceral appeared shortly after incarcerate ("to imprison"), which first showed up in English around the mid-1500s; they're both ultimately from carcer, Latin for "prison."