This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor. The carceral system continues to disproportionately harm racial minorities and people living in poverty. The foundations of many laws regulating and policing racialized bodies have created a culture where Blackness, in particular, is equivalent to criminality.
While a penal abolitionist framework is helpful in getting rid of the harmful criminal and civil consequences of criminal penalties, a labor framework shifts the narrative in a way required to transform the perception of crime to one of labor.
In what will become a series of several pieces, this first Article proposes a narrative shift that allows us to critique and reimagine our conceptions of work. She participates in this illicit transaction in an effort to provide for her three children, while her husband, Lucious Lyon, [3] tends to a hopeful music career by writing raps and producing music anywhere he can find the space.
Unfortunately for Cookie, one of her buyers is an undercover federal law enforcement officer. Cookie gets busted and spends seventeen years in prison. While this is a fictional example, it nevertheless rings true to the experiences of many who engage in criminalized activity to provide for themselves and their loved ones. There are people who engage in criminalized activity, not for power or riches, but just to get by.
Unfortunately, under our criminal system, the penalty for a crime of survival can be death. Garner died during a police encounter on July 17, When people like Garner die at the hands of police, the lasting scars of that trauma can lead to questioning the utility of police. Eric got killed because I called.
