WGS373H5 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: A Common Thread, Welfare Fraud, Human Rights Watch
Document Summary
Gendered and sexualized carceral violence in north america. A common thread in the way governments and legal bodies handle issues of oppression is the use of the carceral system to uphold the status quo, without enacting any meaningful, structural change. Media and news outlets tend to exacerbate this phenomenon by lionizing police forces and excessively lauding these ineffective laws. Growing up with copaganda in fiction and biased news sources, i"m only recently realizing how insidious other forms of criminalization are. Welfare fraud and sex work as examples, though illegal in many places, are often survival tactics for poor black women (among others) who might not be able to provide for themselves and their families otherwise (maynard, 2017, p. 151). Criminalizing poverty does nothing to solve it, and instead awards law enforcement further legal justification for their violence, such as the ability for welfare agents to enter homes without warrants (maynard, 2017, p. 135).
