Overview

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.

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9780226841168

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Reviews

“Page and Soss have produced a chilling and fact-based portrait of the American criminal justice system. They show us how a predatory system of fees, fines, and brutality has become institutionalized, spreading through cash-strapped state and local governments.” -- Frances Fox Piven | Graduate Center of the City University of New York “For decades, scholars have pondered whether profit-seeking or the politics of punitiveness was the truest explanation for American mass incarceration. Legal Plunder demonstrates with astounding precision the perfect merger of these goals in a system of ruthless resource extraction that can both warehouse people and make them a productive source of wealth. As the authors show, this is a criminal legal system that deserves the alarming metaphor of ‘predation.’” -- Jonathan Simon | University of California-Berkeley “In this thoroughly researched and expertly argued account, Page and Soss describe the vast instruments of race-targeted plunder that convert the needs of vulnerable groups into a means of revenue for corporate and government entities. Shining a light on these relations, Legal Plunder will become one of the most authoritative analyses of the criminal legal system by mapping its predatory dimensions and, thus, revealing why and how predatory governance emerged, trapped whole communities in its operations, and how to build a more just democracy.” -- Vesla Mae Weaver | Johns Hopkins University

Author Information

Joshua Page is the Beverly and Richard Fink Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officer Unions in California and coauthor of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle over Criminal Justice.Joe Soss is the inaugural Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the University of Minnesota. He is coauthor of Disciplining the Poor and a member of the University of Minnesota Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

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