ABSTRACT
In March 2015, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that the city of Ferguson, Missouri had been operating a predatory system of government. This chapter clarifies the origins, operations, and consequences of financial predation in the criminal justice field today. The neoliberal era of governance has been marked by a resurgence and transformation of state predation on poor communities of color. Contract conceptions of the state can be traced back to the European social contract theorists of the early modern period. They supply the liberal-democratic image of the state that frames most mainstream studies of US government today. Neoliberalism refers to the extension of market rationalities across an expanding range of social, economic, and political relations. The financialization of criminal justice practices has grown both wider and deeper over the past twenty-five years, with a burst of onset in the early-to-mid-1990s and a period of rapid expansion during the Great Recession that started in 2007.
