How lack of economic resources and access to basic needs becomes reframed as criminal behavior, penalizing survival rather than addressing systemic deprivation.
Sor Juana achieved relative security through intellectual talent and religious vocation—unusual pathways for women. Most people lack such alternatives and face criminalization for survival: theft driven by hunger, sex work driven by economic desperation, drug possession related to untreated pain or addiction. Mass incarceration functions as a response to poverty that punishes deprivation rather than addressing it. This concept examines how criminalizing survival choices—rather than ensuring housing, healthcare, education, employment—makes incarceration inevitable for those denied resources. Sor Juana's security through intellectual life reveals what most lack: genuine alternatives to survival crime. The concept demands distinguishing between actual harm and behavior criminalized due to poverty, questioning whether imprisonment addresses root causes or simply removes inconvenient poor people from public view. Genuine reform requires transforming the systems that create desperation: ensuring living wages, housing, healthcare, and education. Understanding incarceration through survival criminalization reveals it as a failure of distributive justice that carceral punishment cannot remedy.
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