Species extinction and loss of biodiversity may seem like twenty-first century concerns, but, according to Wai Chee Dimock, nineteenth-century thinkers like Thoreau anticipated irreversible changes to the natural world. Thoreau, she asserts, was deeply concerned about the fate of both wildlife and Native American populations.

Wiggins, Fornoff, and Kim, eds. Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Wai Chee Dimock, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival University of Chicago Press, 2020

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Over a decade ago — in response to grassroots organizing against mass incarceration and police violence — a bipartisan coalition took shape. It brought together billionaires, large liberal non-profits, universities, rightwing think tanks, and politicians from both parties. Its stated aim was to reform the bloated criminal justice system on humanitarian grounds. Kay Whitlock argues that it spawned an industry of its own that stood to gain politically and economically from altering and often expanding the carceral system, instead of cutting it back.

Resources:

Prison Policy Initiative “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie”

Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg, Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform UC Press, 2021

The post Criminal Justice Reform Inc. appeared first on KPFA.

If emancipation is what we seek, what form should it take? How far can legal reforms and rights decrees take us toward a better world? Peter Burdon mines Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” essay for insights into how to think about emancipation and whether legal initiatives can deliver true freedom and equality.

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Peter Burdon, Earth Jurisprudence: Private Property and the Environment Routledge, 2015

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While the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border drew intense condemnation, the practice has been going on in this country for centuries. Historian Laura Briggs argues that it has been part of strategy of counterinsurgency, as during the anti-communist wars in Latin America, in which rebellious populations are terrorized by having their children taken. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Laura Briggs, Taking Children: A History of American Terror UC Press, 2021

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Is policing in the U.S. primarily about catching criminals, maintaining order, or brutalizing African Americans? Ben Brucato locates the origins of U.S. police in the early slave patrols, patrols whose mandate was to uphold white racial domination over Blacks. He argues that the institutions of police and of race were created in tandem.

Social Justice

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