Predatory Decarceration

This Essay critiques the bipartisan criminal legal system reforms that have emerged over the past several years. These reforms result in predatory decarceration that exacerbates the precarious conditions of returning prisoners and supervisees—as well their communities—and distributes the benefits of reform upward. Taking an abolitionist perspective and drawing an analogy to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s concept of predatory inclusion, this Essay contends that these reforms offer freedom from incarceration only in exchange for productivity and compliance with non-incarceration penal controls such as community supervision sentences, which almost universally include work requirements. Thus, the reforms, while reducing incarceration rates, ultimately reinforce an ultraliberal order focused on austerity and ensuring a supply of cheap, surveilled labor.

These reforms co-opt social movement goals, privatize reentry, and link freedom to economic productivity, thereby perpetuating the punitive social and economic structures they purport to reform.