Punishing Poverty: A Lockean Immanent Critique of American Incarceration and the Criminalization of Survival

As a joint thesis in public policy and philosophy, this project interrogates the American criminal justice system’s violation of foundational social contract principles through its criminalization of poverty. Grounded in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and the Capabilities Approach, I develop the concept of “poverty-induced crime” to argue that survival-based criminal offenses, committed in pursuit of basic needs, are morally defensible yet rendered invisible by prevailing formal legal frameworks. This theoretical intervention responds to the legal system’s failure to adequately account for motivational context in formal criminal adjudication. The thesis presents a comparative analysis of Locke’s political theory and the structural realities of poverty-induced crime. Moreover, the latter portion of this thesis uses real-word case studies to uncover the deep contradictions within American society that risk precipitating a regression toward the very state of nature the social contract seeks to overcome.