This is a quote from Wendy L. Wright’s article Running Head: Bail, Reform, and Foucault’s Dangerous Individual published in the December 2021 issue of the Journal of Working-Class Studies.
In this paper, Wright uses a political theory approach to argue that racial capitalist ideologies that construct accused individuals as specifically ‘dangerous’ impede just policy transformation. She centralizes Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the ‘dangerous individual’ as a frame for analyzing the logics and movement of the dangerous figure, and then re-situates the concept of the dangerous person in the contemporary US bail context. Wright argues that the dominance of oppressive ideologies in bail discourse demonstrates the pervasive race and class biases that persist in the criminal justice apparatus, even in policy reform approaches that promise unbiased outcomes like algorithmic assessments.
To read Wright’s full paper, click here! For more information on the Journal of Working-Class Studies, you can visit us here or head on over to the journal’s website where you can browse our open source, publicly accessible material or submit your work for consideration.