From Science:
Abstract
Over the past 35 years, public and private actors have turned US criminal justice institutions into a vast network of revenue-generating operations. Today, practices such as fines, fees, forfeitures, prison charges, and bail premiums transfer billions of dollars from oppressed communities to governments and corporations. Guided by scholarship on racial capitalism, we argue that to understand how and why criminal justice operates as it does today, one must attend to its predatory dimensions. Analytically and politically, the concept of predation connects diverse forms of criminal legal takings to one another, to the extractive regimes of earlier eras, and to contemporary businesses that financially exploit subjugated communities. Analyses that focus on predatory relations encourage a reconsideration of some dominant understandings in the study of criminal justice today.
In 2016, Minnesota police killed Philando Castile in his car. Over the previous 14 years, officers had stopped Castile 49 times, issuing 82 citations for minor infractions that cost more than $7000 (1). At a rally for her deceased son, Valerie Castile spoke plainly:
I told my son once before he had got murdered, “These people ain’t even looking at you like a man, they looking at you as revenue…Because every time they stop you, they are going to give you a ticket, they are going to tow your car, so that ain’t nothing but money.” (2)
Castile’s experiences of roadside injustice are consistent with a long history of racially authoritarian policing in the United States (3). Yet they also reflect pronounced change. Over the past 35 years, public and private actors have turned criminal justice institutions into a vast network of revenue-generating operations. Today, practices such as fines, fees, forfeiture procedures, prison charges, and bail premiums extract billions of dollars, disproportionately from race-class subjugated (RCS) communities (4), and deliver them to governments and corporations.
Guided by scholarship on racial capitalism, we argue that to understand how and why criminal justice operates as it does today, one must attend to its predatory dimensions. Indeed, analyses that foreground predation encourage a reconsideration of some dominant understandings in the study of policing and punishment. Continue reading >>>
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