an abolitionist approach to
CRIMINAL LAW on research by
D O R OT H Y R O B E R T S George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
According to noted scholar of race, gender, and the law Dorothy Roberts, making the criminal justice system democratic requires more than reform. The problem is not black communities’ alienation from law enforcement because criminal law is not democratic enough, she argues; the problem is that criminal law excludes black people from democratic participation. In an article in the Northwestern Law Review titled “Democratizing Criminal Law as an Abolitionist Project,” Roberts sets out an alternative vision of criminal justice. The article arose from Roberts’s participation in a conference at Northwestern in November 2016, which gathered leading criminal law scholars to discuss their work on democratic criminal justice. Reform is inadequate to democratize criminal law, Roberts writes. So instead of reform, she proposes another path: an abolitionist approach. Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell __ 2
Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the university’s 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, holding joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and at the Law School. The twentieth anniversary edition of her groundbreaking book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, was released this year. “As an initial matter, democratizing criminal law requires acknowledging that the very definition of law breaking in the United States is biased against black people,” Roberts writes. She details how prosecutors addressed drug use during pregnancy by turning the issue into a crime rather than a public health problem, and incarcerated black women rather than provide them with needed health care. In addition, loitering laws incorporated racist notions of criminality in the guise of promoting norms of orderliness. When reform efforts focus on why black people break the law, they ignore the question of how racism affects the definition of law breaking.
