Torn Apart & Prosecuting Poverty – LPE Project

The Maternal Control Complex

James Brandt — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post concludes a symposium on Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. ** ** ** Wendy Bach’s book Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care is nominally about prosecutions in the criminal legal system – specifically, prosecutions of women who used drugs...

Source

The Deep Roots Linking Help and Punishment

James Brandt — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a symposium on Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. ** ** ** While conducting research on New York City’s “child welfare” or “family policing” system in 2006 and 2007, I interviewed parents who had been reported to and investigated by...

Source

The Profits of Family Policing and Punishment

James Brandt — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a symposium on Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. ** ** ** Anti-carceral grassroots activists and partnering scholars have embraced the concept and practice of non-reformist reforms to signal a clear rejection of reforms aimed at...

Source

Caring for Children by Punishing Parents

James Brandt — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a symposium on Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. ** ** ** Our government’s control and policing of poor, marginalized communities has long been enacted through systems of what Dorothy Roberts calls “benevolent terror” – punishment...

Source

How Can Academic Research Support Non-Reformist Reforms?

James Brandt — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a symposium on Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. ** ** ** What is the relationship between “non-reformist reforms” and scholarship? We can, of course, write about the legislation and policy that we believe will advance...

Source

Under the Guise of Care

James Brandt — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

The carceral state is in a deep legitimacy crisis, with questions about its proper function up for public debate, and social movements pushing for care, public safety, and accountability. Municipalities, meanwhile, are experimenting with non-police responses to varied social problems. These efforts are important: they signal that abolitionist organizing and social insurgency have built sufficient power that the political elite has had to respond. But as Dorothy Roberts and Wendy Bach teach us, care often provides cover for criminalization, and the deployment of professional services often works hand in glove with systems of punishment.

Building a World Without Criminalized Care

James Brandt — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In 2013, a group of Tennessee legislators made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. The law’s supporters offered many of the traditional justifications for criminal law, but they also leaned heavily on a less familiar argument: that creating this crime would, in effect, create care. Indeed, they argued that criminalizing this behavior was a logical response to Tennessee’s opiate epidemic and healthcare crisis, as it would create incentives for judges to draw more treatment resources into court. However, to the extent that the women prosecuted under this law received any care from our legal and social welfare systems, that care was corrupted by its location within or near punishment systems.

Building a World Without Family Policing

James Brandt — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Far from promoting the well-being of children, the so-called child welfare system weaponizes children as a way to threaten families, to scapegoat parents for societal harms to their children, and to buttress the racist, patriarchal, and capitalist status quo. Torn Apart tears off the benevolent veneer of family policing to reveal its political reality and argues that it must be abolished. To achieve this end, we need a paradigm shift in the state’s relationship to families — a reimagining of the very meaning of child welfare.