Criminalization. Each State Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences, and/or violations of immigration laws and regulations, smuggling of migrant workers by land, sea and air, trafficking in persons, illegal recruitment and abusive employment conduct when committed by an actor with the knowledge that his/her participation will contribute to the achievement of a transnational crime involving migrant workers.
Criminalization. In this dissertation, I make a third argument, which I test by controlling for variables posited in the existing literature to be relevant. I posit that the biopolitics inherent to the neoliberal state creates a system in which the carceral powers of the state are the primary means of social control. This has meant that some communities have become effectively targeted by the criminal justice and immigrant control systems, increasing system avoidance among members of these communities and effectively rendering them functionally stateless as they live largely outside of the boundaries of the formal state bureaucracy. Given the existing literature on the “bare life” experienced by people outside of the rubric of the state, I argue that widespread criminalization renders already vulnerable members of these communities particularly susceptible to exploitation on the commercial sex market – effectively becoming commodities to be bought and sold. In making this argument, I engage with disparities in the levels of criminalization legislation, policy and practice within the United States. Given widely varying historical and political circumstances, which are beyond the scope of this dissertation, the degree to which counties and states espouse punitive methods of social control has varied – and with it the degree of carcerality to which residents are subjected. In keeping with Wacquant (2008; 2009; 2010; 2011), Xxxxxxx and Xxxxx (2012), and Xxxxxx (2008), I make the argument that the criminalization of economically disenfranchised communities is a function of a larger neoliberal movement both in the United States and globally. I recognize, however, the existence of another dynamic that must be acknowledged in the context of this dissertation – the mezzo-level processes that predict levels of carcerality at the case area level. One long-standing, and extensively empirically corroborated, explanation for disparities in carcerality across geographic lines is disparities in the racial histories of differing jurisdictions in the United States (Alexander 2012). Simply, race means something very different in Atlanta than it does in Salt Lake City, and much of that distinction can be traced to the historical meaning of race in these two difference spaces. Xxxxxxx and Western (2012) note the very disparate rates of ethnic fractionalization in the most, and least, punitive states – with states with the greatest number of African Americans also the most punitive. Indeed, rac...
Criminalization. Criminal law is founded on the basic notion of criminalization, or deeming an act wrongful in the eyes of the law.21 Identifying these acts assumes a valid reason for which they are wrong or should not be committed, and it should reflect something greater than oneself; this could be morality, divinity, or the polity’s values depending on the thinker, but regardless of which, all converge in the name of justice. Criminalization opens the door to force being permissible (1) if an individual is doing a wrongful act, (2) to prevent an individual from doing a wrongful act, or (3) after the individual has done the wrongful act. With the power to arrest ex ante and ex post, police officers and private enforcement personnel determine the reasonable amount of force necessary to have an effective arrest under supposed merited suspicion or 20 Xxxxxx X. Xxxxxxx, “’Broken Windows’ and Police Discretion,” (1999): 6. 21 Xxxxx Xxxxxxx, “Theories of Criminal Law,” (2018).
