Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780197507902)

Whenever the topic of large jails and public hospitals in urban America is raised, a single idea comes to mind. It is widely believed that because we as a society have dis-invested from public health, the sick and poor now find themselves within the purview of criminal justice institutions. In Redistributing the Poor, ethnographer and historical sociologist Armando Lara-Mill疣 takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and argues that such received wisdom is a drastic mischaracterization of the way that states govern urban poverty at the turn of the 21st century. Rather than focus on our underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, his idea of "redistributing the poor" draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered. By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Mill疣 shows how certain forms of social suffering-the premature death of mainly poor, people of color-are not a result of the state's failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.

Author: Armando Lara-Mill疣
ISBN-10: 0197507905
ISBN-13: 9780197507902
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 04/09/2021
Pages: 254
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2022