Review: Wendy A. Bach, Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care

Authors

Anna Arons, St. John's University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Title

Journal of Law and Political Economy

Publication Date

2022

Volume

3

First Page

419

Abstract

(Excerpt)

“Lock ’em up, clean ’em up, and start over” (145). This is how a drug treatment coordinator in a court in East Tennessee sums up her approach to provisioning substance use services to poor Tennesseans. If someone needs treatment, the most expeditious route—often, the only route—is through the criminal legal system. First, the court administrator casts about for a criminal charge, hopefully a “little charge,” that the person can be arrested on. Then, once they are arrested, they can be brought to jail where they can detox, with no medical supervision and no medication to ease the detox. And finally, hopefully, the person can plead guilty and the coordinator can secure a bed in a treatment facility. If this process does not take the first time, they “start over.”

This treatment coordinator pithily captures the criminalization of care for poor people in the United States that lies at the center of Wendy Bach’s remarkable book, Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. In her book, Bach describes the effects of a short-lived Tennessee law that made it a crime for a woman to take illegal narcotics while pregnant if her child was harmed as a result. Bach examines court records, interviews system actors (including the care coordinator and remarkably open judges and lawyers), and explores the history of the opiate epidemic and of the courts designed to address it (among many other social problems). In the process, she demonstrates that criminalized care is reserved for poor people, while wealthy people can access care outside systems of punishment; that the idea of care is often illusory and closely linked to systems of punishment, if available at all; and that the linking of care and punishment corrupts the quality of care itself.

Comments

Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p5207tn

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