Full Description
A searing, historically rich account of how US policing and punishment have been retrofitted over the last four decades to extract public and private revenues from America's poorest and most vulnerable communities.
Alongside the rise of mass incarceration, a second profound and equally disturbing development has transpired. Since the 1980s, US policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation's most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues. Legal Plunder analyzes this development's origins, operations, consequences, and the political struggles that it has created.
Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, including original ethnographic research, Joshua Page and Joe Soss examine the predatory dimensions of criminal legal governance to show how practices that criminalize, police, and punish have been retrofitted to siphon resources from subordinated groups, subsidize governments, and generate corporate profits. As tax burdens have declined for the affluent, this financial extraction—now a core function of the country's sprawling criminal legal apparatus—further compounds race, class, and gender inequalities and injustices. Legal Plunder shows that we can no longer afford to overlook legal plunder or the efforts to dismantle it.
Contents
Introduction: Legal Plunder
1 Predation in Theory, History, and Practice
Part One: Operations
2 Predatory Uses of Police and Courts
3 Predatory Uses of Custody and Supervision
Part Two: Development
4 Reconstructing Criminal Justice Predation
5 Justifying Criminal Justice Predation
Part Three: Making Bail
6 The Predatory Dimensions of Pretrial Release
7 Regulated Improvisation at the Front Lines
8 The Intersectional Logic of Bail Predation
Part Four: Significance and Struggle
9 What Do Predatory Criminal Legal Practices Do?
10 Political Struggle and the Fight to End Predation
Conclusion: Predation, Inquiry, and Politics
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Methodology and Ethics
Notes
Index
