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Rather than creating specific legislation on the issue, the legal system in Louisiana began reinterpreting old assault and battery laws already in the criminal statutes. These courts relied on the abused wife’s sworn description of the incident, even though Louisiana antebellum courts denied a wife’s testimony against her husband. Women did not cater to antebellum notions of womanhood. Most cursed, fought back, or blatantly demanded protection from their abusers. New gender definitions required recognition of women’s right to be free from violence, and courts reflected this change, effectively criminalizing intimate partner violence.

This chapter is part of the organizers' larger Criminalization Project, which seeks, among other things, to develop theories for how criminalization decisions should be made. The argument presented here is that there is both instrumentalist and deotological value in having criminalization decisions that generally track the community's judgments about what is sufficiently condemnable to be criminal, but that there also are good reasons to deviate from community views. Interestingly, those in the business of social reform may be the ones who have the greatest stake in normally tracking community views, in avoiding community perceptions of the criminal law as regularly and intentionally doing injustice. It is the social reformer who may have the most to gain by building the criminal law's moral credibility so that those hard earned ‘credibility chips’ can be used to have criminal law lead rather than follow community views when the reformer seeks to use law to help change existing norms.

This chapter outlines how race- and class-based stratification and criminalization shape New York City’s street vending industry. The vast majority of New York’s street vendors are first generation immigrants of color who experience racial profiling for turning urban public space into their workplace. Since the Great Recession, a small but growing class of native-born and highly educated actors have been able to enter this profoundly criminalized industry with comparative ease largely due to class and race privileges, spurring gentrification through the city’s underground food permit rental market. The author argues that any meaningful reform of New York’s broken system of street vending oversight must directly engage these inequities and work to decriminalize poor and working class street vendors of color through a participatory and inclusive process rooted in principles of social justice.

In this reflection on the chapters included in the volume, the editors draw out major threads of discussion and highlight opportunities for future research. Two main threads of conversation about power surfaced throughout the collection: power and cultural identity, and power and criminalization. This final chapter explores and summarizes the ways in which the chapters in the volume illustrate the emerging urban trend of food as a cultural commodity. Additionally, the chapter synthesizes depictions of the bifurcation of the food truck industry and the discriminatory implementation of regulations. Finally, the editors recommend further investigation into the direct connection between identity formation and social justice, as well as the impact of incubator organizations on food trucks and street food vending. Importantly, the editors call for research on the relationships between street food vending, food trucks, and gentrification.

This chapter examines the criminalization of black women, demonstrating that police, prosecutors, and judges reinforced notions of black female deviance through the criminal process and through juridical discourse. Through an analysis of visual representation, municipal court convictions, misdemeanour, and felony convictions, chapter one covers the criminalization of black motherhood, popular discourses of black female deviance, racialized discourses of gender queerness, and the policing of alleged urban disorder, revealing that the targeting of black women fortified racial constructions of gender through the criminal legal process.

This concluding chapter discusses Vallaud-Belkacem's proposal, which criminalizes the purchase of sex. This proposal reopened a debate over the status of prostitutes, and led government officials and various nongovernmental agencies to cite the alarming number of women forced into prostitution through trafficking. Criminalization advocates highlighted the enduring, violent conditions in which many of these women work as evidence that prostitution could not possibly be anything but coerced. In opposition to the proposed law, individual sex workers and sex-work union leaders argued that prostitution is both a choice and a profession. Sex workers asserted that they were liberated and subverting male privilege rather than extending it.

The integral relationship between carceral violence and gender violence has led to the criminalization of thousands of survivors. The criminal prosecution of domestic violence survivors for being unable to prevent their batterers’ abuse of their children, also known as “failure to protect,” reflects this punitive trend. This chapter recommends a paradigm shift from a “mitigating factors” strategy that attempts to provide explanatory context for survivors’ “failure,” to a structural critique that exposes the ideological foundations of “failure to protect.” Considering two case studies, it examines how these prosecutions create a spatial continuity of violence between domestic space and court space, revealing how the violence of punitivity and confinement becomes violence that is co-threatened by batterers and court actors. It proposes Battering Court Syndrome (BCS) as a framework from which to theorize the criminalization of survivors, a political diagnosis of the institutionalization of domestic violence, and a possible legal defense strategy.

Feminists working to prevent and respond to campus sexual assault should encourage universities to adopt an intersectional public health approach that incorporates Restorative Justice. An intersectional framework responds to the ways that the general campus climate for students of color, LGBTQ students, foreign nationals, immigrants, and low-income students shapes experiences of sexual assault and help-seeking. An intersectional framework also addresses the risk that implicit bias will infect school investigations and hearings. Feminists should also encourage schools to reject “Crime Logic” thinking and the related belief that campus assaulters are irredeemable “predators.” The predator narrative is based in misapplied research and is contradicted by the results of more sophisticated longitudinal studies. Finally, feminists should encourage schools to adopt Restorative Justice (RJ) alternatives. An RJ approach supports victim healing and autonomy, encourages the student who caused harm to take responsibility for repairing the harm, and enables larger changes in campus culture.

This chapter provides an overview of the research on and community-based programmatic responses to battered women’s use of force in their intimate heterosexual relationships. The chapter highlights emerging issues in this area with the goal of developing a more fully informed response to the complexity introduced by criminalizing women’s responses to violence and abuse in their intimate relationships.

In the wake of the Constitution of 1992, Ghana criminalized cutting not once, but twice. In chapters 6 and 7, which should be read in conjunction, I investigate the intimate relationship between violence and law by analyzing, respectively the associated efforts to reform and enforce the law against cutting. Chapter 6, The Feminist Fetish: Legal Advocacy illuminates how GAWW’s advocacy for more severe legislation functions as an early instantiation of “zero tolerance to FGM” logic. I attend to Ghanaian advocates’ reckoning with both the power of law and the tensions within feminist liberalism, namely, those between protection and punishment, and freedom and violence.

Chapter two analyzes the coverage of the 1980 Mariel boatlift in the Spanish language El Miami Herald newspaper. Stigmatized as criminals in the mainstream press, the Marielitos were younger, poorer, and “blacker” than were Cubans from previous immigration waves. Examining the dilemmas faced by established Cuban exiles, who during the Cold War desired to both support their new compatriots and escape the Marielito stigma, the chapter argues that white dominant tropes about laziness, dependency, and criminality were utilized by Cuban voices to set themselves apart from black or “unworthy” migrants. Juxtaposing the newspaper discourse and Afro-Cuban testimonials, the chapter illustrates how racist attitudes from Cuba and the United States intersected to impact their acceptance by the local (white) Cuban community. The chapter underscores the crucial role blackness played in the Mariel stigma, and illustrates the continued utility of anti-black racializing discourses in current notions of “worthy citizenship.”

Between the 1960s and 1990s, the police power in Los Angeles intensified. Police power was not incidental or supplemental, but constitutive of postwar city politics and authority. The introduction outlines the central question of the book: how and why this could happen after the Watts uprising of 1965 exposed the racism at the heart of the police power, decades of pressure from an active anti–police abuse movement, and under the twenty-year rule of a liberal administration that sought to control and regulate police behavior. Tracing the racism at the heart of the police power reveals the historical consequences of expanded police authority. Relying on the police to manage social problems of crime, violence, and drugs led to disciplinary practices of surveillance, harassment, and arrest that criminalized and excluded African American and Latino/a residents. In the process, as antipolice activists pointed out and struggled against, the police often deemed residents of color as not only potential threats to the public welfare but also unfit for full benefits of social membership in American society. Police practices thereby produced racialized definitions of criminality and enforced the city’s hierarchical racial order. As a result, the struggle over policing structured and exacerbated deep cleavages in American cities over race, citizenship, politics, and state power.

Reductions to social service and urban aid budgets by the Reagan administration, economic crises, and growing conservatism among middle-class white voters reshaped political possibilities during the 1980s. Reductions in urban aid left only punitive solutions available to local policymakers facing drug crime and gang violence. The Bradley administration, as this chapter demonstrates, hoped to maintain its multiracial coalition and attract international capital by waging a militarized war on drugs as a war on gangs. The combined drug-gang war rationalized social and economic inequality and constructed black and Latino/a youth as criminal, thereby legitimating police militarization, disciplinary exclusion, criminalization, and removal of youth of color from the streets.

Judges are not above the law. Like the other institutions of the State, the judiciary must be accountable. Chief Justice Edward Coke told King James I point blank that was not above the law and quoted jurist Bracton, Non-sub homine sed sub deo et lege. (The King is under no man, save under God and the law.) Ironically, judges themselves don’t appear to be following this dictum giving an impression that they are above the law. The judiciary should be accountable according to its own reasonings employed for holding all other institutions to account. But it abhors the idea of accountability for itself in the name of its independence. It is a misnomer as independence and accountability are complementary, not antagonistic.

This chapter explores the principled limits on the appropriate use of the criminal law for preventive purposes, and considers the extent to which other legal forms (such as regulation) may be more fitting where criminalization is not justifiable. It explores the contours of preventive criminal law, in particular inchoate offences, pre-inchoate or preparatory offences, crimes of possession, of membership, and of endangerment. The chapter goes on to examine the justificatory arguments that are claimed to support these categories of preventive offences and to develop some restraining principles that ought to apply to preventive offences—principles relating to problems of remoteness and to rule-of-law standards. The chapter also examines the use of regulation in place of criminalization to address less serious prospective harms.