Abstract
In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy A. Bach offers a rigorous criminological and sociolegal critique of the criminal justice system's expanding role in responding to poverty, substance use, and reproductive health. The book centers on Tennessee’s fetal assault law (2014–2016), enacted during the opioid crisis, which criminalized pregnant women for substance use that could allegedly harm a fetus. While policymakers framed the statute as a compassionate intervention designed to connect women to treatment, Bach demonstrates that, in practice, it operated primarily as a punitive mechanism that intensified criminal justice involvement among economically marginalized women.
Drawing on court records from approximately 120 prosecuted cases, Bach shows that enforcement overwhelmingly targeted poor women with limited access to healthcare, housing, and voluntary treatment options. Rather than functioning as a pathway to care, criminal prosecution often became a prerequisite for accessing services, rendering treatment coercive, inconsistent, and contingent on legal compliance. Criminal justice actors—including prosecutors and courts—thus became central gatekeepers of care, blurring the boundary between punishment and support.
Although the empirical focus is narrow, Bach situates the statute within broader trends in criminal justice policy, particularly the expansion of problem-solving courts and treatment-oriented interventions. In doing so, the book advances a wider critique of how criminal justice institutions increasingly absorb responsibilities traditionally associated with social welfare systems, reframing structural disadvantage as individual criminal culpability.
The book is clearly organized and analytically coherent. Bach begins by situating criminal law within a broader framework of social governance, positioning the criminal justice system as an increasingly central mechanism for managing social problems. The analysis then proceeds from legislative history to prosecutorial decision-making and case outcomes, enabling the reader to trace how policy rationales translate into everyday criminal justice practices.
The empirical chapters are particularly effective. Bach integrates quantitative case analysis with qualitative insights from court records to illustrate how criminal justice processes operationalize “care” through supervision, threat of incarceration, and legal coercion. This methodological integration strengthens the book’s credibility for criminological audiences and grounds theoretical claims in institutional practice.
The final chapters broaden the scope by connecting fetal assault prosecutions to other criminal justice interventions, including drug courts and therapeutic justice models. This progression reinforces the book’s central argument that treatment-based criminal justice reforms often extend, rather than constrain, punitive power.
One of the book’s central strengths is its ability to expose the contradictions embedded in contemporary criminal justice reform. Bach convincingly demonstrates that criminalization framed as compassion frequently fails to address the structural conditions—poverty, limited healthcare access, housing instability—that underlie substance use and related harms. Instead, the criminal justice system converts social need into legal risk.
The book makes an essential contribution to feminist criminology and legal studies by foregrounding pregnancy as a site of governance within criminal justice. Bach resists moralizing narratives and instead emphasizes how criminal law individualizes responsibility while obscuring systemic failures. Her critique of problem-solving courts and therapeutic jurisprudence is particularly salient, offering a cautionary account of how treatment-oriented reforms may expand surveillance and punishment under the guise of rehabilitative rhetoric.
A potential limitation is the book’s focus on a single state statute. However, Bach addresses concerns about generalizability by situating the Tennessee law within national trends in criminal justice. The statute functions not as an anomaly but as an illustrative case of how criminal justice systems increasingly manage social policy failures through punitive means.
Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care makes a timely contribution to criminological scholarship on punishment, criminalization, and reform. It aligns with critical analyses of the carceral state while extending them by interrogating the moral language through which criminal justice interventions are increasingly justified. The book is especially relevant to debates surrounding problem-solving courts, treatment mandates, and the limits of rehabilitation-focused reform.
For criminal justice scholars and practitioners, Bach’s analysis serves as a caution against reform strategies that rely on criminal justice involvement to deliver care. The book underscores the risks of expanding prosecutorial and judicial authority in the name of treatment, particularly for marginalized populations already subject to heightened surveillance. As jurisdictions continue to pursue treatment-based alternatives within criminal courts, Bach’s work offers an empirically grounded reminder that reforms embedded within punitive systems may reproduce the very harms they seek to address.
