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.

About the Author

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.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Crumbling Foundations of Justice
2. Juvenile Courts Monetizing Child Removals
3. Judicial Child Support Factory
4. Prosecuting the Poor for Profit
5. The Probation Business
6. Policing and Profiting from the Poor
7. Bodies in the Beds: The Business of Jailing Children and the Poor
8. Racialized Harm of the Injustice Enterprise
Conclusion

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Hatcher, a professor of law and advocate for social justice, delivers a well-researched, scholarly, disturbing synthesis of social history and legal treatise, tracking the long-term monetization of the justice system. . . . A useful, bleak exposé of a little-understood legal labyrinth constructed to harm the most vulnerable.”
— Kirkus Reviews

"Hatcher meticulously reveals a nefarious, unethical operation within juvenile and criminal justice systems. . . . This book will serve as a valuable contribution to many fields and provides an insightful resource for educators, families, and communities."
— CHOICE

"Hatcher’s Injustice, Inc. provides an entirely new line of inquiry examining the hidden internal juvenile legal practices that center on capturing money— from federal funds to individuals’ income and assets. This book provides a dizzying eye opening deep dive into the juvenile legal system to highlight the strategies and practices which courts, police, prosecutors, probation offices, and confinement institutions use to generate revenue for state and local jurisdictions and even for personal profit."
— Social Forces

“Daniel L. Hatcher, in his book Injustice, Inc., describes in detail a frankly apartheid system finely designed to milk every source of revenue from poor children.. He describes ‘factory-like operations’, ‘industrialization of harm’, ‘child support mercenaries’. He quotes official contracts that describe foster children as ‘units’, children as ‘data match algorithms’ for ‘predictive analytics’, and children as a ‘revenue generating mechanism.’ Paraphrasing poet Walt Whitman: ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking … [to] death, death, death, death.’”
— Counterpunch

"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

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews