Evaluating care: Anti-Blackness and sexual assault sentencing in Milwaukee, WI

Abstract

This article considers how care emerges as an integrated phenomenon that enfolds defendants, victim-witnesses, and their kin in complex ways. Care capacitates forms of racial sorting and resource allocations that manifest within sentencing hearings of persons found guilty of committing sexual offenses, a mode of dysselection as described by Sylvia Wynter. During sentencing hearings, the state asserts its authority to evaluate the inadequacies of the infrastructures of care to which the person being sentenced has access. While Black men are ostensibly the focus of these hearings, their participation in sentencing hearings becomes a portal through which the court scrutinizes Black women and girls who are often proclaimed to be inadequate caretakers. Simultaneously, the state claims that it can provide the care that will result in the rehabilitation of the person being sentenced, while protecting the community from the potential harms of the criminalized subject. The stark contrast between the state's characterizations of Black kinship and care, and the complex, subtle, and creative tactics narrated by Black interlocutors demonstrates the ways in which the state seeks to surveil Black mores of kinship, assign particular categories of worthiness or unworthiness to modes of care, and fix an anti-Black racial hierarchy in place.