Settler Colonialism and Financial Predation

In this essay, we extend an invitation to scholars to engage with settler colonialism as an ongoing condition of possibility for racial capitalism penology and a foundational element of the contemporary LFO regime. We argue that criminal justice debt should not be viewed merely as a symptom of neoliberal austerity or as collateral consequence of punitive excess, but as a structural feature of settler governance. We reconceptualize criminal legal debt not as a marker of the punitive turn in U.S. criminal justice policy nor even as the application of recent neoliberal austerity policies to the administration of carceral institutions. Instead, we contend that such forms of state financial extraction must be understood as an integral feature of settler colonialism. In doing so, we shift attention from recent policy frameworks such as neoliberalism toward the deeper and underlying historical trajectories of criminal legal extraction that are rooted in the long-standing pattern of settler-colonial financial predation.