Recorded on April 19, 2021, this Social Science Matrix "Authors Meet Critics" panel featured the book Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, by Armando Lara-Millán, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
In "Redistributing the Poor," Lara-Millán, an ethnographer and historical sociologist, takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered.
By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering — the premature death of mainly poor, people of color — are not a result of the state's failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.
Panelists included: Angèle Christin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University; and Jonathan Simon, Professor at Berkeley Law.
This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS). Learn more about Matrix at https://matrix.berkeley.edu.
