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Abstract

This Article contends that today’s eviction crisis in the United States is the civil equivalent of mass incarceration. Eviction, like mass incarceration, is a racialized and gendered system of social control heavily supervised by the state. State court judges order evictions, and law enforcement officers execute them. Eviction’s mechanisms of control are to punish, exploit, and surveil. Some tenants are forcibly removed from their homes as punishment for their poverty, while others pay their last dollar to remain housed. In nuisance and lease violation cases, tenants routinely are subjected to onerous “probationary” terms that place them under heightened surveillance. Low-income, single Black women with children face the highest rates of eviction, while white landlords and corporate investors net the highest profits in poor, majority-Black neighborhoods. Eviction exhibits the hallmarks of the carceral state, despite falling outside of the criminal legal system. Although eviction is a civil legal proceeding, it can be conceptualized as on the “carceral continuum.”

Theorizing eviction itself as a carceral-continuum institution of racial and gender capitalism and punitive social control opens the door to abolitionist critique. Abolition orients us toward the transformation of society and the role of the state within it rather than reform measures that fail to confront power. Past reforms to the summary eviction process, such as recognition of the implied warranty of habitability as an affirmative defense, have failed to shift the underlying power structure. Even the push by some cities and states to afford low-income tenants the right to counsel in eviction proceedings is more pragmatic than radical. Deeper resistance is afoot, however, in the grassroots housing justice movement on the left. Tenants and organizers demanding that landlords “cancel rent” in response to COVID-19 economic hardship—like similar calls to “defund the police”—envisioned a profound remaking of society in which housing is a social good and eviction is obsolete. Eviction, like mass incarceration, cannot be reformed. I argue that academics and activists alike must engage with the project of eviction abolition as a critical facet of the re-imagination of the state as responsible for the lives of Black women rather than the profits of white men.

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