An Author Event featuring Wendy A. Bach

517 Union Avenue,Knoxville TN 37902

11 February, 2023

Description

Union Ave Books is excited to announce we will be hosting Professor Wendy A. Bach as she discusses her work and her new title, Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. This event will take place on February 11, 2023 @ 4 pm at Union Ave Books. While this is a free event, we ask that you register for your spot. About the Author: Professor Wendy A. Bach is a nationally recognized expert in both clinical legal education and poverty law. She has been with UT Law since fall 2010. From 2005 to 2010, she taught at the City University of New York School of Law. Before entering the academy, she was director of the Homelessness Outreach and Prevention Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City and a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Brooklyn. Professor Bach has dedicated her career to representing children and families in poor communities in a variety of legal settings. Her scholarship focuses on the interaction between systems of support and care and systems of punishment in poor communities. She has been published in the William and Mary, Wisconsin, Brooklyn, and Michigan Law reviews, The Florida Tax Review and The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Her first book Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care is being published in the Fall of 2022 by Cambridge University Press. About the Book: At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crime would help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law's actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting 'fetal assault', and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and far more often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move towards robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities. “Accessible and riveting, Bach’s story shows how Tennessee legislators, bureaucrats, doctors, and social workers came to assume that caring for poor people demands punishment and surveillance. Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care sheds light on how our health care and social welfare bureaucracies have been absorbed by the criminal legal system - not just in Tennessee, but across the nation. A must-read.” Angela P. Harris, Professor Emerita, Davis School of Law, University of California “Tennessee promised that its 2014 fetal assault law would provide care for pregnant opioid-using women. Inspired by an organizer from Healthy and Free Tennessee, Professor Bach did a deep and moving dive into what actually happened, brilliantly revealing why it is that jail is not treatment and punishment is not care.” Lynn Paltrow, Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women “Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care could not be more important at this moment. With the Supreme Court turned away from justice, it is urgent to attack the criminalization of race, health care, and child welfare systems. You will not put it down.” Peter Edelman, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy, Georgetown Law Center “At the harrowing moment when women’s reproductive health is besieged, Bach warns how far states will go to criminalize women’s reproductive care. Her expose illuminates the frightening hazards for women seeking prenatal and substance-use treatment and offers solutions that provide care and not punishment." Jane M. Spinak, Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor of Law, Columbia Law School “Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care provides a compelling account of Tennessee’s fetal assault law. The book adds to the mounting evidence that these approaches are ineffective and harmful, to mothers, infants, and communities. Pregnant people should be able to access treatment without fear of losing their children or ending up in jail." Stephen W. Patrick, Director Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN