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Brazil occupies third place in the world ranking in terms of the prison population in the National Penitentiary System, reflecting a policy of zero tolerance and mass imprisonment of citizens in conditions of vulnerability. Even though incarcerated women are a minority group in Brazil, there is an increase in the percentage of them being subjected to criminal control. According to the latest official data, the number is approximately 38,000 women, representing an increase of 675% between 2000 and 2016 – which puts Brazil in third place among those countries that most imprison women, behind the USA and Thailand. Criminal selectivity works in an explicit way, given that the majority of incarcerated women in Brazil are young, Black, poor and semi-literate. The crime of drug trafficking accounts for more than 62% of female imprisonments, which is a much higher percentage than that of men for the same crime (41%). From a feminist perspective, this chapter analyses and reflects on the specific characteristics of female criminality related to drug trafficking, highlighting how the intersection between gender, race, class and age informs the criminalisation process of women in Brazil.

This conversation focuses on the reproduction of vulnerability incarceration and homelessness and presents the reflections of scholars, writers, activists and practitioners.

This paper is based on the conversations that took place on Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast livestream on the 31st of March 2022.

The prominent themes in this conversation include homelessness, incarceration, stigma and marginalisation.

The conversation contributes to the ongoing discussions around the reproduction of vulnerability and the importance of understanding its root causes of disaster scholarship, practice and activism.

Purpose – Religious addiction treatment has experienced a rise both in its reach and exposure to attention from medical professionals. Largely autonomous conversion-based programs have received unprecedented support and legitimacy. We investigate “Victory Ministries,”11The organization ‘Victory Ministries’ is a pseudonym. Any resemblance to actual locales of this name or similar is entirely coincidental. All names have been change to protect the identity of the participants. a large Midwestern evangelical rehab facility, exploring the similarities and differences between formulations of addiction-as-disease found in “secular” rehab and the moral binaries that guide Victory's program.

Methodology/approach – Qualitative case study: Interviews and ethnography.

Findings – Working from in-depth interviews, we explore the inner workings of Victory's curriculum and program design, as it transmutes dominant therapeutic concepts and methods into its own Manichaean frame. Aided by superior financial resources and support of a tight-knit network of churches, it delivers its most successful clients into a new life “redeemed by Christ.”

Social implications – Proponents of conversion-based service provision position religious institutions as the primary agents of willing compassion and generosity beyond the family compass, stripping the rest of civil society of any claims to promote the greater good. In Victory's metaphor of “invisible war,” a Manichaean vision is quite explicit. Every definition of recovery and reintegration in terms of conversion and submission to religious authority inherently suggests that substance use stems largely from immorality and that the unsaved in general are sinful and dangerous. By funding a conversion-based shadow welfare apparatus, we argue, the US government is intensifying the criminalization of poverty, the steady downgrading of more inclusive institutions, and ultimately the materialization of Victory's Manichaean vision in a polarized nation.

Criminal law has dramatically expanded since the 1970s. Despite popular and academic attention to overcriminalization in the United States, empirical research on how court actors and, in particular, prosecutors, use the legal tools associated with overcriminalization is scarce. In this chapter, we describe three forms of overcriminalization that, in theory, have created new tools for prosecutors: the criminalization of new behaviors, mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, and the internal expansion of criminal laws. We then use a unique dataset of felony filings and dispositions in Florida from 1995 to 2015 to test a series of hypotheses examining how overcriminalization influences prosecutorial practices given three changes to the political economy during this time: the decline in violent and property crime, the Great Recession, and a growing call for criminal justice reform. We find that prosecutors have been unconstrained by declining crime rates. Yet, rather than rely on new criminal statutes or mandatory minimum sentence laws, they maintained their caseloads by increasing their filing rates for traditional violent, property and drug offenses. At the same time, the data demonstrate nonviolent other offenses are the top charge in almost 20% of the felony caseload between 2005 and 2015. Our findings also suggest that, despite reform rhetoric, filing and conviction rates decreased due to the Recession, not changes in the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal justice reform.

A growing body of work suggests that welfare and punishment should be understood as alternative, yet interconnected ways of governing poor and marginalized populations. While there is considerable evidence of a punitive turn in welfare and penal institutions over the past half century, recent studies show that welfare and carceral institutions increasingly comanage millions of people caught at the intersection of the welfare and penal sectors. The growth of “mass supervision” and the expansion of the social services sector help explain the blurring of welfare and punishment in the United States in daily practice. We suggest that these developments complicate the idea of an institutional trade-off and contend that welfare and punishment are best understood along a continuum of state management in which poor and socially marginalized populations are subjected to varying degrees of support, surveillance, and sanction. In presenting the punishment–welfare continuum, we pay particular attention to the “murky middle” between the two spheres: an interinstitutional space that has emerged in the context of mass supervision and a social services–centric safety net. We show that people caught in the “murky middle” receive some social supports and services, but also face pervasive surveillance and control and must adapt to the tangle of obligations and requirements in ways that both extend punishment and limit their ability to successfully participate in mainstream institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the variation in migrant labour market regimes and what these reveal about variant patterns of state and extra state regulation in two contemporary political economies.

Research based upon a participatory action research agenda in Mexico and the north of Ireland. Migrant workers and their families where involved in the project and its development. This included participation in the research design, its focus and purpose.

Migrant workers experiences of labour market subordination are part of wider processes of subordination and exclusion involving both the state, but also wider, often meta- and para-state, agents. In different locations, states and contexts, the precarity experienced by migrant workers and their families highlights the porosity of the formal rational legal state and moreover, in the current economic context, the compatibility of illegality and state sponsored neoliberal economic policies.

It is important to extend this study to other geographic and political economy spaces.

The study challenges the limits of state agency suggesting the need for extra state, i.e. civil society, participation to support and defend migrant workers.

Notwithstanding the two very different socio-economic contexts, the paper reveals that the interaction, dependence and restructuring of migrant labour markets can be understood within the context of meta- and para-state activities that link neoliberal employment insecurities. Migrants’ experiences illustrate the extent to which even formal legal employment relations can also be sustained by para- and meta- (illegal and alegal) actions and institutions.

The rise of Black Lives Matter (BLM), as an intentionally intersectional movement, challenges us to consider the ways in which BLM is reimagining the lines of Black activism and the Black Liberation Movement. BLM may be considered the “next wave” of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), guiding how and with whom the movement will progress. We use a content analysis of public statements and interviews of the founding members from October 2014 to October 2016 to discuss the ways in which the founders of BLM frame the group’s actions. We bring together the critical feminist concept of intersectionality with framing theory to show how the founders of BLM have strategically framed the movement as one that honors past Black Liberation struggles, but transforms traditional framing of those struggles to include all Black lives inclusive of differences based on gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, or criminal status.

Purpose – Since the mid-20th century, drug addiction in America has increasingly been redefined as a disease and diagnosed as a widespread yet treatable disorder. The idiosyncrasies of addiction as a disease, however, have tended to block the journey of the addict from stigmatized moral failure to therapeutic reprieve. Centering in on the process of the “court-led diagnosis” of addiction, this qualitative case study uses ethnography and interviewing at a county drug court and one of its “partner” therapeutic communities to examine the process in detail, from the first negotiations between treatment and court personnel over the eligibility of the client, to the gradual inculcation of an addict identity by means of intensive cognitive education and behavioral modification.

Methodology/approach – Qualitative: ethnography and interviews.

Findings – We demonstrate that a shift from moral judgment to therapeutic sympathy is particularly unlikely for the fast-growing mass of criminal offenders whose diagnosis is spearheaded by the state in the form of the therapeutic jurisprudence of the drug court. For this group, the emphasis on the need for comprehensive resocialization and the close cooperation between the intimacies of therapeutic “rehab” and the strong arm of criminal justice “backup” not only maintains, but intensifies, moral tutelage, and stigmatization.

Social implications – The convergence of drug treatment and criminal justice tends to produce yet another stigmatizing biologization of poverty and race, lending scientific validity to new forms of criminalizing and medicalizing social hardship.

The chapter situates the role of narrative power in shifting media policy amidst calls for police abolition, defunding, and media reparations following the documentation of media harm. Community-based narrative intervention is not only focused on those aspects of reporting and media that deal with harms perpetuated by discourses on public safety, but also about developing what I refer to as “collective narrative self-determination” to reflect the needs and desires of communities. The chapter documents how grassroots media efforts attempt to reconfigure the space of media policy and shift narratives toward the community power needed to reckon with the consequences of vital public resources being systematically defunded for budgets and policies that entail greater police powers. The chapter concludes this is an important moment for community-based initiatives and interventions that can shift media narratives around policing and urban violence and also shift who is served by those narratives, contributing to the long-term process of building narrative power and racial justice across a wide range of community and media organizations.