Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor - Hardcover

by Daniel L. Hatcher (Author)

An unflinching exposé of how the family, juvenile, and criminal justice systems monetize the communities they purport to serve and trap them in crushing poverty

Injustice, Inc. exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations.

Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long.

Back Jacket

"Once again, Daniel Hatcher powerfully exposes how government systems operate an extractive poverty industry motivated by profit rather than justice. This eye-opening book is essential for understanding carceral system mechanics and for working to halt them."--Dorothy Roberts, author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

"A powerful book that shows how foster care and justice systems have been turned into for-profit enterprises wherein companies and governments alike grab revenue and squeeze needy children and families."--Peter Edelman, author of Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America

"In the spirit of The Jungle, Injustice, Inc. is an excoriating revelation. Anyone with a beating heart will be touched, and hopefully energized to act, as a result of reading the wrenching wrongs described in this book."--Eileen D. Gambrill, University of California, Berkeley

Author Biography

Daniel L. Hatcher is Professor of Law in the University of Baltimore's Civil Advocacy Clinic and author of The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America's Most Vulnerable Citizens. A former Maryland Legal Aid and Children's Defense Fund attorney, he has long been a scholar, advocate, and teacher on poverty and justice.