Joe Soss (University of Minnesota): "Legal Plunder: the Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice"

"Legal Plunder: the Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice"

Joe Soss (Departments of Sociology and Political Science, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, University of Minnesota)
October 16, 2023, 3:00-5:00 PM
Arts 160

Abstract: Over the past 40 years, public and private actors have turned U.S. 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 race-class subjugated communities to governments and corporations. Based on collaborative research with Joshua Page, Joe Soss will discuss the origins, operations, and consequences of this development. Criminal legal governance in the U.S. today operates as a regime of legal plunder, organized by the intersections of race, class, and gender. To understand it, one must locate it in the longer histories of racial capitalism, predatory uses of the state, and political resistance.