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What logics underlie the call to “defund the police,” and how do those logics matter in policy debate? In the wake of widespread protests after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of police violence during the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to “defund the police” captured the national imagination. Several municipal governments promised to cut funding and contracts for their respective police departments, with mixed results. Because we expect police defunding and reinvestment to remain a central movement demand, this Article explores the demand’s discursive and normative terrain. It does so by describing and critically engaging three logics of criminal system alternatives that we have observed in activists’ demands and organizing efforts. Specifically, we theorize investments in social welfare, safety production, and racial reparation as deeply connected but distinct logics that might guide decisions about where and how money should be spent as part of defund initiatives, and we discuss some implications of each for transformational change within and beyond policing.

In 2012 we urged scholars to explore the extension of penal power through the "shadow carceral state." The shadow carceral state operates through legally hybrid and institutionally serpentine forms that stretch beyond the criminal legal system. Theoretical Criminology's special issue invited us to reflect on the issues we raised in that piece. We are impressed by the transformation of punishment and society scholarship, which has grown deeper and more sophisticated with each wave of activism. Yet it will take more than a thriving subfield to confront the present and likely future: tenacious and expansive carceral and shadow carceral states that are continually deployed to address the compounding global crises of climate change, mass displacement, and structural poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing theories of poverty governance emphasize how political and economic constraints associated with urban neoliberalism have led to the retraction of protective welfare commitments and an increased criminalization of poverty. While research on this "disciplinary turn" has been generative, it tells us little about countervailing trends or how institutional responses to poverty change over time. Addressing these gaps, this article offers a case study of the emergence and acceptance by the business community of a supportive Housing First and harm reduction initiative called JustCARE—a distinct technique of poverty governance not readily explicable within existing theoretical frameworks. By situating JustCARE within a wider strategic action field of poverty governance, we reveal the macro-, meso-, and micro-level dynamics that together facilitated its inception, growth, and eventual embrace by members of the formerly hostile business establishment. Specifically, we underscore how two exogenous shocks (COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter [BLM] uprisings) enabled a well-positioned advocacy organization to articulate and implement a non-punitive homelessness response alternative. We conclude that field-based scholarship centering "theoretically deviant" cases can reveal how the contradictions and failures of neoliberal poverty management can generate unique opportunities for meaningful institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes different diversion models used for decarceration or reduction of mass incarceration and mass criminalization in the U.S. and considers the benefits and challenges associated with each approach. Topics discussed are court-supervised diversion and the case of drug courts, pre-booking and pre-arrest police diversion, law enforcement diversion, community referrals and community-based approaches, and alternative crisis response initiatives.