“The Deck Was Stacked Against Me”: Plea Bargaining and the Imputation of Guilt in the Carceral State

This paper’s primary concern is to uncover the role of religiously-inflected symbols of guilt in the plea bargain ritual’s production of criminal bodies. It argues, first, that Christian guilt symbolism is interwoven with the raced, gendered, and classed social hierarchy in America, which produces criminal typologies that influence prosecutors’ and judges’ perceptions of defendants’ guilt. Second, it claims that plea bargain rituals are a strategic point in the American carceral system in which this guilt is transferred—or to use more theological language, imputed—to the individual who confesses. The confession that lies at the heart of the plea bargain ritual functions on the one hand, as the defendant’s (often coerced) confirmation of the ‘truth’ of their criminal identities and on the other hand, as an absolution of the carceral state’s complicity in the creation and condemnation of criminal bodies.