PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Joshua Page
AU  - Victoria Piehowski
AU  - Joe Soss
TI  - A Debt of Care: Commercial Bail and the Gendered Logic of Criminal Justice Predation
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.07
DP  - 2019 Feb 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 150--172
VI  - 5
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/1/150.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/1/150.full
AB  - 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.