11th March 2026
This seminar is co-organised by the University of Glasgow’s Division of Sociological and Cultural Studies and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Speaker: Joshua Page, University of Minnesota
Over the past 40 years, public and private actors have turned U.S. criminal legal institutions into a vast network of revenue-generating operations. Today, practices such as fines, fees, forfeitures, prison charges, and bail premiums transfer billions of dollars from race-class subjugated communities to governments and corporations. Based on collaborative research with Joe Soss, Joshua Page will discuss the origins, operations, and consequences of this development. Criminal legal governance in the U.S. today operates as a regime of legal plunder, organized by the intersections of race, class, and gender. To understand it, one must locate it in the longer histories of race and capitalism, predatory uses of the state, and political resistance.
Bio: Joshua Page is the Beverly and Richard Fink Professor of Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
NB This is an in-person event at the University of Glasgow. There’s no need to register just turn up!