Prosecuting Poverty Criminalizing Care

Professor Wendy A. Bach is a nationally recognized expert in both clinical legal education and poverty law. She has been with UT Law since fall 2010. From 2005 to 2010, she taught at the City University of New York School of Law. Before entering the academy, she was director of the Homelessness Outreach and Prevention Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City and a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Brooklyn.

Professor Bach has dedicated her career to representing children and families in poor communities in a variety of legal settings. Her scholarship focuses on the interaction between systems of support and care and systems of punishment in poor communities. She has been published in the William and Mary, Wisconsin, Brooklyn, and Michigan Law reviews, The Florida Tax Review and The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Her first book Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care is being published in the Fall of 2022 by Cambridge University Press.

At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crime would help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law's actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting 'fetal assault,' and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and far more often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move towards robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities.