This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor.

The carceral system continues to disproportionately harm racial minorities and people living in poverty. The foundations of many laws regulating and policing racialized bodies have created a culture where Blackness, in particular, is equivalent to criminality. While a penal abolitionist framework is helpful in getting rid of the harmful criminal and civil consequences of criminal penalties, a labor framework shifts the narrative in a way required to transform the perception of crime to one of labor. This shift is particularly important given the renewed attention to penal abolitionist logic and conservative and libertarian attempts to resurrect greater protection for economic liberty through the “right to earn a living.”

In what will become a series of several pieces, this first Article proposes a narrative shift that allows us to critique and reimagine our conceptions of work. People engaged in survival crimes are often subject to the criticism that they should pursue “real work.” After reading this Article, I hope the legal community will question the continued criminalization of poverty, reconsider our understanding of work, and invest in this transformative project to protect the victims of state-sponsored oppression.