In the past two decades, the relationship between punishment and political economy has received renewed attention. This resurgence reflects several developments: influential structural accounts of penal and carceral systems (e.g., David Garland, Alessandro De Giorgi, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Loïc Wacquant, and others); innovative comparative and place-based research on how “varieties” of capitalism and local political economies shape punishment (e.g., Lacey Reference Lacey2008; Norton Reference Norton2015; Simes et al. Reference Simes, Beck and Eason2023); and critical organizing projects targeting the system’s material injustices (e.g., prison work strikes, debt abolition campaigns, the Defund movement, and emerging scholar-activist groups such as the Law and Political Economy Project).
Legal Plunder by Joshua Page and Joe Soss makes a significant contribution to the field by proposing a new analytic framework: predation. Predation synthesizes a range of exploitative and expropriative practices that permeate all aspects of the criminal legal system – from fines, administrative fees, and asset forfeitures to pay-for-service charges behind bars and labor requirements under supervision. New forms of criminal justice predation reflect changes in the U.S. political economy and reveal deepening ties between penal governance, public revenue, and private profit.
While Page and Soss rightly describe predation as a “category of analysis” (20), and thus, its theoretical specifications and explanatory reach remain to be fully identified and tested, I see predation as offering a compelling new way to analyze penal systems. Three strengths stand out. First, the book breaks from a recent trend toward mid-level analyses, which focus on single sites or domains of the criminal legal system. Instead, Page and Soss take a big swing, offering predation as a framework for interpreting the system as a whole. This invites our field to interrogate, prove or disprove, and build on the concept. Second, predation offers a new lens to extend or critique other major accounts of the penal system’s extra-penological functions. It adds an inclusionary dimension to descriptions of penal institutions as exclusionary or isolating (e.g., Beckett and Herbert Reference Beckett and Herbert2012; Gilmore Reference Gilmore2007; Loic Wacquant Reference Wacquant2004), an extractive dimension to work on discipline (De Giorgi Reference De Giorgi, Simon and Sparks2012), and a concrete way to understand penal governance’s latest adaptation to capitalist crisis – new folk devils (the indebted), responsibilized subjects (their loved ones), and opportunities for accumulation (consider Simon Reference Simon2007; Brayne et al. Reference Brayne, Lageson and Levy2023; Deckard Reference Deckard2025 with links to Stuart Hall’s early work). Finally, the book is methodologically and analytically ambitious. The authors adeptly use “past as prologue” to trace predation’s development and contemporary construction, toggle between three analytical levels (macro, meso, micro), and remain attentive to intersectional analyses of race, class, and gender.
To pull off these feats, Legal Plunder is long and detailed. Following an introduction and opening chapter, it unfolds across four parts: Operations (Chapters 2–3), Development (Chapters 4–5), Making Bail (Chapters 6–8), and Significance and Struggle (Chapters 9–10). I organize the remainder of this review around the conceptual work I see predation performing and focus on questions it opens for further inquiry. I consider how Page and Soss define predation, analyze its scale and development, examine it in practice, and assess possibilities for ending it.
Defining predation
According to Page and Soss, predation “refers to unequal relations of a particular kind, the practices that constitute and enact them, and projects that operate on the basis of such relations and practices” (19). It occurs when a dominant group extracts “takings” from a subordinate group or establishes conditions for future extraction. Understanding predation, therefore, requires a relational analysis of power.
This relational approach offers several analytic payoffs. It sharpens the concept relative to existing work on monetary sanctions and predatory states. The relational approach resists collapsing monetary sanctions into a single category and treating predation as a given characteristic of actors, institutions, or types of sanctions. Instead, predation is best understood through socially, institutionally, and geographically variable power relations. Embracing a relational analysis, Page and Soss also extend Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s (Reference Taylor2019) concept of “predatory inclusion” into the criminal legal system. They show how predation operates through incorporation into arrangements that make people into productive future prey. Rather than operating through social seclusion (e.g., Wacquant’s (Reference Wacquant2004) concept of deadly symbiosis), predation works through conditional inclusion.
Despite these important contributions, at times I still found the boundary between predation and existing monetary sanctions scholarship somewhat unclear. One strength of Alexes Harris’s work, and that of her many collaborators, is its treatment of monetary sanctions as a method of social control. Monetary sanctions can monitor, tether, immobilize, and sort people, even when they do not generate profit (similar to predation) or immediately target a structurally subordinate group (different from predation) (A. Harris Reference Harris2016, Reference Harris2020; A. Harris et al. Reference Harris, Pattillo and Sykes2022). I felt this tension when Page and Soss suggest that small-town speed traps are not predatory if “pursuit and targeting are not based on social structural inequalities” (21). Across the U.S., some municipalities abruptly lower speed limits and ticket drivers who fail to slow in time. These “speed traps” are widely criticized as revenue-generating practices, with police positioned out of sight to issue citations at spots where speed limits suddenly change. While these traps are designed to capture all drivers, it is difficult to identify cases that fully evade spatial, and therefore social, inequalities. Whether motivated by revenue or public safety or enacted by a wealthy or poor town, traps may burden low-income drivers or force certain groups to reroute (e.g., Black and Brown people, immigrants, and trans and queer people concerned about documents or bias), producing what Brittany Friedman (Reference Friedman2020) terms “carceral immobility.” Rerouted drivers pay in extra gas, time, and emotional strain and may be preyed upon by another entity the next town over. Furthermore, relational vulnerability is not static: a fine that is manageable at one moment may become burdensome as debts accumulate or circumstances change. This raises important questions for further understanding predation: Should all forms of social control, positive or negative, be understood as potentially predatory? And, thinking through thresholds, if unequal relations are ubiquitous, what forms and degrees of inequality constitute a predatory relation?
Scale and development
The book also argues criminal justice predation is expanding in scale, modes, and directness of “takings.” After tracing predation’s historical roots in capitalism and white supremacist projects, the authors argue it found its most recent institutional home in the criminal legal system.
To pinpoint the 1970s as a moment of change in predation’s scale, they draw on Soss’s excellent work on the neoliberal turn. Public and private actors justified new predatory practices and projects through market- and security-oriented narratives, both underwritten by racialized logics. While the authors emphasize that they are not offering a causal account (“why”), their analysis of development (“how”) mirrors explanations for the rise of mass imprisonment. Given their caution that predation is not reducible to punishment, an important next step is clarifying where these trajectories converge and diverge, and what this implies for theories of punishment. For example, predatory projects clearly relate to carceral capacity, but Heather Schoenfeld’s (Reference Schoenfeld2018) concept is often measured through the number or size of prisons (J. Harris et al. Reference Harris, Sims and Eason2024). Page and Soss do not offer a way to measure predation (the relational piece makes it tricky). Future work might consider how to operationalize predation to assess its scale over time and its relationship to other changes during the rise of mass incarceration.
Predation in practice
A vivid case study of the commercial bail industry marks the second half of the book. Analyses draw on Page’s 18 months of fieldwork as a participant-observer bail agent in “Rocksville.” The authors brilliantly apply Bourdieusian frame analysis to reveal how bail agents “develop beliefs and stories about what they do” (189). Agents’ perceptions and practices are guided by assessments of defendants’ and their loved ones’ social statuses and reinforce hierarchies: people of color pathologized as “risky” clients, Black women cast as responsible caregivers, and whiteness deemed “normal” and reliable. Relational inequality is not only imposed structurally but constructed in real-time within and between organizations and among people. This demonstrates one of the ethnography’s strengths: The authors connect findings to earlier chapters, showing how macro-level forces (e.g., market logics) are mirrored or transformed on the frontlines of predation.
This meso-level work should inspire further case studies that, in the spirit of the extended case method, refine how predation works in different contexts. As I read, I found myself wanting more details about the specific political economy and racial dynamics of Rocksville itself and how that shapes the structure of the bail industry and racism in its local criminal legal organizations. To this end, research comparing predatory projects across different types of racialized political economies could be especially generative (e.g., Gordon Reference Gordon2022 offers a useful comparative model; see also Schoenfeld et al. Reference Schoenfeld, Walker and Rosa2025).
Ending predation
The authors end with an analysis of efforts to reduce or end predation. They make a convincing case for abolition and redistributive mechanisms such as reparations, emphasizing non-reformist reforms paired with building alternatives. The political economy framework recedes somewhat in these analyses of struggles, giving way to more descriptive accounts of political terrains (294). Future work could take a more systematic approach to analyzing reforms that bring economic and spatial analyses back in, asking how local political economies shape anti-predation efforts. For example, how do successful pushes for “divest/invest” agendas or city-level reparations map onto the constraints or opportunities of local political economies?
This returns to a point I made earlier: a key challenge of this work is specifying political economies (like Rocksville’s) and, importantly, determining their relationship to capitalism (or other economic systems) and interlocking racial structures. The conceptualization of political economy influences whether we understand predation’s development as distinctly “American” (Page and Soss refer to an “American-style capitalism”) or as part of an open, globally connected system of racial capitalism. This requires engaging with debates in related literatures (e.g., Go Reference Go2021; Thurston Reference Thurston2025; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2023). While this book may not have been the place for Page and Soss to pursue this line fully, it is especially important given predation’s growing transnational dimensions (e.g., offshore detention centers and the role of private equity), and, as the authors suggest, a need to follow decolonial movements calls for radical political restructuring (318). This would require internationalist forms of struggle. Greater clarity here could improve accounts of predation’s development and persistence vis-à-vis organizing projects.
Overall, Legal Plunder is an exceptional contribution to the literature. I recognize that my comments ask for the scholarship of predation to be both more nuanced and broader at the same time: work that will require many hands. All told, it is clear that future work on the growth, persistence, and consequences of the U.S. penal system must attend to its predatory dimensions.
Acknowledgements
N/A.
Conflict(s) of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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