Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice . By Joshua Page and Joe Soss. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Abstract

In the past two decades, the relationship between punishment and political economy has received renewed attention.This resurgence reflects several developments: influential structural accounts of penal and carceral systems (e.g., David Garland, Alessandro De Giorgi, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Loïc Wacquant, and others); innovative comparative and place-based research on how "varieties" of capitalism and local political economies shape punishment (e.g., Lacey 2008; Norton 2015; Simes et al. 2023); and critical organizing projects targeting the system's material injustices (e.g., prison work strikes, debt abolition campaigns, the Defund movement, and emerging scholar-activist groups such as the Law and Political Economy Project).Legal Plunder by Joshua Page and Joe Soss makes a significant contribution to the field by proposing a new analytic framework: predation.Predation synthesizes a range of exploitative and expropriative practices that permeate all aspects of the criminal legal system -from fines, administrative fees, and asset forfeitures to pay-for-service charges behind bars and labor requirements under supervision.New forms of criminal justice predation reflect changes in the U.S. political economy and reveal deepening ties between penal governance, public revenue, and private profit.While Page and Soss rightly describe predation as a "category of analysis" (20), and thus, its theoretical specifications and explanatory reach remain to be fully identified and tested, I see predation as offering a compelling new way to analyze penal systems.Three strengths stand out.First, the book breaks from a recent trend toward mid-level analyses, which focus on single sites or domains of the criminal legal system.Instead, Page and Soss take a big swing, offering predation as a framework for interpreting the system as a whole.This invites our field to interrogate, prove or disprove, and build on the concept.Second, predation offers a new lens to extend or critique other major accounts of the penal system's extra-penological functions.It adds an inclusionary dimension to descriptions of penal institutions as exclusionary or isolating (e.g., Beckett and

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Law & Society Review, 2026 · DOI ↗