08/07/2025
CRIMINALIZATION
"Criminalization is the process through which actions become illegal. Actions become crimes only after they have been culturally or legally defined as crimes. Ideas about what is criminal reach far beyond specific actions. What counts as crime changes across both time and space, and sometimes happens really fast. Often those changes happen because of political forces that are manipulating public fears instead of responding to them.
"Criminalization is also what happens when entire groups of people are targeted by law enforcement for punishment and control. The criminalization of poverty, for example, includes controlling poor people through laws that make everything from public urination to sleeping in the park to participation in informal economies illegal and punishable. The criminalization of youth of color includes directly folding police forces into school security, as well as laws in many cities that forbid young people from gathering in groups as small as three on the street. The criminalization of immigrants means that "foreign looking" people get stopped on the street and in airports more often and are vulnerable to police brutality.
"The process of criminalization is an important piece of the PIC [prison industrial complex]. It is one of the tools that make it possible for police and courts to target specific actions as well as specific groups of people. It sets us up to believe that everyone who breaks a law is a direct threat to us and to our families. Criminalization also adds to the myth that social, political, and economic problems are really law enforcement problems—that safety of all kinds, including economic security, can be guaranteed by watching, controlling and caging the groups of people who suffer most because of poverty or racism."
