Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care

This book details how, in poor communities, access to healthcare and social support is linked to punishment systems.

Wendy A. Bach (Author)

9781108465533, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2022

300 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.36 kg

'Wendy Bach has written a book that helps us understand the inhumanity that results when we try to solve every problem we face with police, prosecutors, prisons, and probation officers. Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care is required reading for a society that wants to imagine solutions to our troubles that do not involve carceral systems.' Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law

At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crime would help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law's actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting 'fetal assault', and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and far more often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move towards robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities.

1. Creating a crime to create care
2. Framing and reframing
3. Laying the Ground
4. Punishing poverty
5. Deepening poverty and degrading justice
6. The Path In: From healthcare to child welfare to criminal systems
7. Criminalization as a road to care and the price you pay
8. Corrupting care
9. A path forward.

Subject Areas: Medical & healthcare law [LNTM], Family law [LNM], Criminology: legal aspects [LAR], Law & society [LAQ]