دانلود کتاب تعقیب فقر، کیفری کردن مراقبت

At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crimewould help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law’s actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting “fetal assault” and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and farmore often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move toward robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities. Wendy A. Bach is Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee where she teaches primarily in the clinical program. Over the last twenty-five years, first as a practicing public-interest lawyer, and for the last seventeen years as a law professor, Bach has represented poor clients in the courts and systems highlighted in Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. She is a nationally recognized scholar in the field of poverty law and has published several law review articles on the relationship between social support and punishment.