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Introduction: A benevolent terror -- Black family destruction -- "They separate children at the Harlem border, too" -- Professional kidnappers -- Rotten at the root -- Strong-armed -- The foster industrial complex -- Family suerveillance -- Carceral entaglements -- Structured to harm -- The thin line -- Care in place of terror

The criminal justice system currently functions to exclude black people from full political participation. Myriad institutions, laws, and definitions within the criminal justice system subordinate and criminalize black people, thereby excluding them from electoral politics, and depriving them of material resources, social networks, family relationships, and legitimacy necessary for full political citizenship. Making criminal law democratic requires more than reform efforts to improve currently existing procedures and systems. Rather, it requires an abolitionist approach that will dismantle the criminal law's anti-democratic aspects entirely and reconstitute the criminal justice system without them.

In March of 1969, a Black man from Detroit named Abdul-Rasheed Karim arrived at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, after spending two years locked up in prison and a psychiatric ward for a fight that started when he was assaulted by three White boys, then brutalized by the police who responded. Mr. Karim, who suffered two broken ribs, a cracked tooth, and a deep skull laceration, made the mistake of hitting one of the officers who were beating him with clubs. As Metzl quotes, the clinical evaluation that led to Mr. Karim's transfer to Ionia noted "cultural retardation is thus a significant factor in his schizophrenic disease" because he had been "socialized toward ghetto survival" (p. 143) as a child. The doctor interpreted Mr. Karim's Islamic beliefs as "religious delusions," writing, "his identification with the Black Muslim group is a projection of his feelings of inadequacy" (p. 143). Once at Ionia, doctors treated Mr. Karim's hostility toward authority figures by confining him to a maximum supervision ward where he was injected daily with escalating doses of antipsychotic drugs.