CJ Lecture: Joshua Page (University of Minnesota)

Fri. Nov. 9 12:30 PM - Fri. Nov. 9 01:30 PM
Location: 2M73

The Department of Criminal Justice is pleased to welcome Joshua Page from the University of Minnesota on Friday, November 9, 2018 to give a talk entitled: "Preying on the Poor: Tough on Crime as a Revenue Racket".

Abstract: In March 2015, Americans learned from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that the city of Ferguson, Missouri had been operating a “predatory system of government.” Police officers were acting as street-level enforcers for a program –promoted by city officials – in which fines and fees were used to extract resources from poor communities of color and deliver them to municipal coffers. What the DOJ discovered in Ferguson should not be seen as an anomaly, either in relation to U.S. history or American governance. Dr. Page offers a political analysis of the origins, operations, and consequences of revenue-centered criminal justice practices that have grown in the U.S. since the 1990s. Under this policy regime, local governments and market firms draw revenue streams from fine-centered policing, court fees, bail systems, prison charges, civil asset forfeiture, and much more. These practices have a long pre-history in earlier uses of predatory governance to advance American state and nation building, and manage race, class, and gender inequalities. 

Biography: Joshua Page is an associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers’ Union in California (Oxford, 2011) and, with Phil Goodman and Michelle Phelps, Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford, 2017).

e-mail: Joshua Page page@umn.edu