Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice (Chicago Studies in American Politics)

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