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Research Article
Open Access

A Debt of Care: Commercial Bail and the Gendered Logic of Criminal Justice Predation

Joshua Page, Victoria Piehowski, Joe Soss
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences February 2019, 5 (1) 150-172; DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.07
Joshua Page
aAssociate professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota
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Victoria Piehowski
bGraduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota
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Joe Soss
cCowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the University of Minnesota, where he holds faculty positions in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Political Science, and Sociology
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Abstract

Among the institutions that link criminal justice and inequality in the United States, commercial bail remains one of the most important yet least understood. Each year, the bail industry extracts millions of dollars from lower-income Americans, disproportionately draining resources from poor communities of color. We draw on ethnographic research to explore how the bail system operates as a predatory social process, arguing that gender interacts with class and race to structure resource extraction in this field. Poor women of color are especially subject to bail predation because they are seen within the larger social organization of care as bearing primary responsibility for defendants. Gendered care work and emotional labor are thus central to the field’s logic of practice and to bail industry profits.

  • bail
  • care
  • gender
  • ethnography
  • predatory industries
  • © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Page, Joshua, Victoria Piehowski, and Joe Soss. 2019. “A Debt of Care: Commercial Bail and the Gendered Logic of Criminal Justice Predation.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(1): 150–72. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.07. We are grateful to AshLee Smith Garret, Ryan Steel, and Chase Hobbs-Morgan for research assistance. Joshua Page received financial support for his research on the bail industry from the Talle Research Fund at the University of Minnesota. Direct correspondence to: Joshua Page at page{at}umn.edu, 909 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455.

Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: 5 (1)
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
Vol. 5, Issue 1
1 Feb 2019
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A Debt of Care: Commercial Bail and the Gendered Logic of Criminal Justice Predation
Joshua Page, Victoria Piehowski, Joe Soss
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences Feb 2019, 5 (1) 150-172; DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.07

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A Debt of Care: Commercial Bail and the Gendered Logic of Criminal Justice Predation
Joshua Page, Victoria Piehowski, Joe Soss
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences Feb 2019, 5 (1) 150-172; DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.07
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  • Article
    • Abstract
    • CARE, INEQUALITY, AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
    • BAIL AS A SITE OF INTERDEPENDENCE AND EXTRACTION
    • CARING OBLIGATIONS AND EMOTIONAL LABOR
    • SELLING CARE
    • ENGENDERING PREDATION
    • A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY
    • ON THE ETHICS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC BAIL RESEARCH
    • FOOTNOTES
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Keywords

  • bail
  • care
  • gender
  • ethnography
  • predatory industries

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