Legal Plunder Socialist Night School

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. In their new book, Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice, Joshua Page and Joe Soss analyze this development’s origins, operations, consequences, and the political struggles that it has created.

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, including original ethnographic research, Page and 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.

In our next Socialist Night School, Page and Soss join us for a discussion of Legal Plunder.

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 Cowles Professor for the Study of Public Service in the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

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