LPE Originals
Community Bail Funds as a Tool for Prison Abolition
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network explore how community bail funds can serve as tools to advance abolitionist movement building.
LPE Originals
Moving from Ending Money Bail to Demanding Pretrial Freedom
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network provide a critique of dominant “bail reform” agendas, arguing for a more ambitious vision of pretrial freedom.
LPE Originals
“Bail Reform” & Carceral Control: A Critique of New York’s New Bail Laws
In this post, Survived & Punished NY presents an abolitionist critique of New York’s bail reform statute, calling for a bolder vision of freedom and a broader scope of change.
LPE Originals
What Comes After Money Bail? An LPE Perspective on Pretrial Detention
This is the first post in our series on Money Bail. Click here to read all posts in the series. It is no longer controversial to say that our current system of money bail is flawed. When more than 400,000 people are incarcerated pretrial at any one time—a majority there because they cannot afford the amount…
LPE Originals
Sex Work and Immigration: When Criminalization Is Disguised as Protection
By
Gilda Merlot
I am an undocumented immigrant from Honduras. I crossed the Guatemalan, Mexican, and U.S. borders when I was 5 years old. I’m currently a sex worker and a 25-year-old DACA recipient. Like most sex workers, I want decriminalization, or the elimination of all criminal penalties for sex work.
LPE Originals
Teaching Penal Abolition
By
Amna Akbar
In April, the New York Times ran a profile on abolitionist visionary and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Harvard Law Review published an entire issue on prison abolition. This fall, the University of Texas Law School Human Rights Center is hosting a conference on abolition. The new journalistic outlet The Appeal runs abolitionist pieces…
LPE Originals
To Reimagine Intervention Strategies: The Political Economy of Domestic Violence
In recent years, mainstream anti-domestic violence programs have moved away from a fixation on the criminal justice system to undertake economic justice initiatives designed to “respond to, address, and prevent financial abuse” related to domestic violence. The shift reflects the growing realization that strategies of remedy through the penal state have tended to fracture the…
LPE Originals
Restorative Justice and Moral Neoliberalism
By
Amy Cohen
Restorative justice is thus intriguing not only for how left organizers use it to advance prison abolition but also for how libertarian and conservative reformers have fashioned it into a tool of American neoliberalism.
LPE Originals
Who are “the People” in Criminal Procedure?
The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…
LPE Originals
Rethinking Criminal Law
Energized and challenged by the rise of powerful grassroots movements in the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, law professors are rethinking how to teach first-year Criminal Law. At the Law and Society Association annual meeting this summer, Alice Ristroph convened a group to ask “Are we teaching what we should be teaching? .…
LPE Originals
Teaching Criminal Law from an LPE Perspective
Angela Harris imagines a criminal law class taught from an LPE perspective.
LPE Originals
Police Surveillance Machines: A Short History
The local structure of American policing has shaped the adoption of surveillance technology, including body cameras, in fundamental ways.
LPE Originals
Law, Political Economy and Municipal Finance in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri
There’s yet one more way I try to get students to see the mutually entangled systems of capitalism and racism presented by Fant v. Ferguson. Why did Ferguson and other northern St Louis suburbs end up depending on their criminal justice systems for the revenues necessary to run a city?
LPE Originals
Law and Neoliberalism in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri
In my first post on Fant v. Ferguson, I introduced the case as a story about our racialized criminal justice system. The criminal justice story, however, represents only one layer of the onion. Like its fast counterpart, the slow violence experienced by Keilee Fant is embedded in a larger system of structural economic inequality that we call “poverty.”
LPE Originals
Criminal Justice and Slow Violence in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri
In a series of four posts, I’ll outline an approach to teaching law and political economy using Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri, a class action filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri in 2015. In this first post, I explain how I use the complaint in Fant to frame a discussion of law, political economy, and the “slow violence” of the criminal justice system.