Across the country, human service agencies, juvenile and family
courts, prosecutors, probation departments, police officers, sheriffs, and
detention and treatment facilities are churning impoverished children and
adults through revenue operations with starkly disproportionate racial impact.
Rather than being true to their intended missions of improving welfare and
providing equal justice for vulnerable populations, the institutions are mining
them with extractive practices that are harmful, unlawful, unconstitutional,
and unethical. This Essay considers such commodification schemes under the
lens of Professor Bernadette Atuahene’s excellent and important theory of
stategraft. The examples discussed provide support for Atuahene’s theory,
and this Essay simultaneously urges a broad understanding of the theory’s
definitional elements to fully capture the scope of stategraft practices—and to
help expand and link the community of scholars and advocates working to
expose, unravel, and end such state-led predatory mechanisms.
