Abstract
Excerpted From: Bryan L. Sykes and Meghan Maree Ballard, Race, The Criminal Legal System, and Stategraft: The California Racial Justice Act (2020), 2024 Wisconsin Law Review Forward 49 (2024) (34 Footnotes) (Full Document)
After decades of unabated growth in mass incarceration, the number of incarcerated adults began to decline following the Great Recession. Changes in sentencing, policing, pre-trial diversion, and the recategorization of offense levels, among other strategies, helped reduce the number of persons under carceral control. While the lifetime risks of incarceration and imprisonment have declined from all-time highs, the routine imposition of monetary sanctions (fines, fees, court costs, penalty assessments, etc.) have continued to proliferate in the criminal legal system.
The imposition of these monetary sanctions represents an immediately recognizable form of stategraft. In this essay, we argue that mass incarceration, and its attendant racial disparities in sentencing, is a form of stategraft that, in some cases, illegally transfers predominantly Black, Latine, and poor white bodies from control of oneself to control of the state. In doing so, the state appropriates the differential time and labor-power of persons under carceral control to illegally profit from racial inequality in mass incarceration and sentencing disparities.
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Thus, there are several pathways of remedy under the CRJA, Title VII, or Title VI for persons who are incarcerated who have claims of racial bias, employment discrimination, and wage theft. By taking such measures, persons of color ensnared in the criminal legal system who are subjected to these forms of state financial corruption may be able undo forms of stategraft associated with racial and ethnic disparities in mass incarceration and criminal sentencing.
Bryan L. Sykes is an Associate Professor at the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy & Department of Sociology, Cornell University.
Meghan Maree Ballard is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California Irvine.
