Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor

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Univ of California Press, Feb 21, 2023 - Law - 256 pages
An unflinching exposé of how the family, juvenile, and criminal justice systems monetize the communities they purport to serve and trap them in crushing poverty
 
Injustice, Inc. exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations.
 
Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long.
 

Contents

Crumbling Foundations of Justice
11
Juvenile Courts Monetizing Child Removals
31
Judicial Child Support Factory
49
Prosecuting the Poor for Profit
69
The Probation Business
84
Policing and Profiting from the Poor
98
The Business of Jailing Children
115
Racialized Harm of the Injustice Enterprise
138
Conclusion
164
Selected Bibliography
231
Index
237
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About the author (2023)

Daniel L. Hatcher is Professor of Law in the University of Baltimore's Civil Advocacy Clinic and author of The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America's Most Vulnerable Citizens. A former Maryland Legal Aid and Children's Defense Fund attorney, he has long been a scholar, advocate, and teacher on poverty and justice.

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