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Upends the “broken systems” myth and reveals how the law deliberately criminalizes and punishes Black women, inflicting lasting harm on Black communities in the process.
 
The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with Black Americans representing a disproportionate share of theimprisoned. Many view this statistic as evidence of a broken system. But sociologist Susila Gurusami argues that the carceral system that so disproportionately harms Black families is not broken at all. In fact, it works just as it was intended. Looking closely at the lives of formerly incarcerated Black mothers, Gurusami shows how state institutions—the criminal-legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems—keep Black mothers from their families, harming Black communities in the process. She also shows how Black women work towards conditions that seem impossible—and even utopian—as part of their everyday mothering labor, but find themselves criminalized for these same actions.
 
Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women in South Los Angeles, Gurusami challenges dominant assumptions about mothering and criminal justice reform. Gurusami finds that criminalized Black women endure multigenerational political, social, and embodied assaults–what she calls “reproductive warfare”— and still, they build networks, practices, and theories of radical care that protect Black maternal life, legacies, and futures. With incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted Black mothers at the forefront of the growing movement to abolish prisons and jails, Gurusami demonstrates how their everyday mothering work—what she calls “abolitionist motherwork”—is essential to imagining the end of incarceration and ultimately achieving it.
 
Written with a tender and honest voice, Break the System shares moving vignettes that underscore why we must break the system, rather than reform it, and why we must imagine a future that is radically different than the one we’re told we must accept or salvage.
 
 

In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights.

Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood

Tracing the rise of digital computing in policing and punishment and its harmful impact on criminalized communities of color

 

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that law enforcement agencies have access to more than 100 million names stored in criminal history databases. In some cities, 80 percent of the black male population is registered in these databases. Digitize and Punish explores the long history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years—with devastating impact on poor communities of color.

Providing a comprehensive study of the use of digital technology in American criminal justice, Brian Jefferson shows how the technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment. After examining how the criminal justice system conceptualized the benefits of computers to surveil criminalized populations, Jefferson focuses on New York City and Chicago to provide a grounded account of the deployment of digital computing in urban police departments.

By highlighting the intersection of policing and punishment with big data and web technology—resulting in the development of the criminal justice system’s latest tool, crime data centers—Digitize and Punish makes clear the extent to which digital technologies have transformed and intensified the nature of carceral power.

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.

Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico.

This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.

Global perspectives on policing within LGBTQ+ communities

Relationships between law enforcement and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities have always been varied and complex. On one hand, history is filled with incidents of police harassment: raids that sparked famous uprisings and rebellions; shoddy police investigations into the murders of LGBTQ+ community members; a corrosive organizational culture marked by heteronormativity and misogyny. Yet positive changes are being made, such as the creation of LGBTQ+ police associations, participation by police officers in Pride Parades around the world, and formal apologies for past actions. To some LGBTQ+ community members, police are the physical manifestations of state-sanctioned oppression and abuse. To others, they are guardians who have become partners in public safety.

Q Policing features eighteen contributors from around the world who explore the nature of the relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and the police. Part 1 of the book offers insights on policing and racial and ethnic constructions, including efforts to build collaborative models of community-building within groups and with law enforcement. Part 2 highlights the experiences of individuals who may be marginalized due to various social constructions such as transgender, unhoused, southern, or kink-involved. Finally, Part 3 shares perspectives of queer folks inside policing.

The contributors—scholars, social workers, police officers, and other community leaders—cover diverse topics, including queer experiences of policing in southern India, clinical implications for mental health professionals working with Latinx LGBTQ+ people, transgender and nonbinary peoples’ presentation management during encounters with law enforcement, discriminatory policies in place in the southern United States, the pathologization of kink, and more. Essays analyze interviews with the “Pride Defenders” in Hamilton, Canada, as well as British and American police officers transitioning while in uniform. They explore the experiences of gay, lesbian, and genderqueer police officers, map principal findings and central concerns that structure extant scholarship on gay police officers in the UK, use queer theory to explore the effectiveness of LGBTQ+ liaisons, and more.

The volume editors adopt an inclusive global perspective to account for contextually located experiences of queer people within and outside of the United States. The book incorporates a variety of voices, data sources, and methodologies, but contributors share an intentional focus on race, age, sex, gender, and other identities that helps explain and contextualize queer people’s experiences around and in policing. The diverse, international group of contributors—whose voices are not often heard in traditional outlets and mainstream media—demonstrates that despite discrimination, harassment, and violence, LGBTQ+ communities continue to thrive.