Professor Anna Arons’s article, Private Prosecution and the State, is slated for publication in the NYU Law Review, and was selected for the AALS Family and Juvenile Law Section’s Emerging Scholar Award.

Here is the abstract:

The modern family regulation system is paradigmatically public. In the common account, the state plays a monopolistic role. It decides which cases to investigate and which to prosecute, which families to surveil and which to separate, and which services and benefits to provision for families. Yet this public family regulation paradigm obscures the role of private prosecution. Nearly half of states permit private individuals to initiate dependency prosecutions, through which private prosecutors allege parents have neglected or abused their children and seek state intervention on the fundamental right to family integrity.

This Article surfaces the understudied and undertheorized private prosecutions of the family regulation system and situates them within the carceral state. Drawing on sources including statutes, legislative history, case law, accounts developed by other scholars, information obtained through records requests, and interviews with practitioners and state officials, it sketches out the legal framework for these prosecutions and traces recurring patterns of use. This study reveals private prosecutions to be a tool of last resort: private individuals opt to prosecute their loved ones—or even themselves—after the state has failed to meet their needs through other means.

The Article makes two central contributions. First, it develops an initial descriptive account of these private prosecutions in the family regulation system. Second, the Article builds from that account to develop a theoretical claim. It argues that private prosecutions illustrate the state’s decision to operate an expansive carceral state in place of a robust welfare state. These private prosecutions illustrate the central role of private individuals in maintaining and even expanding the carceral state, for private prosecutors increase the reach of the carceral apparatus while entrenching its logics. Ultimately, this account of private prosecution muddies any normative gloss on the practice—in the family regulation system and across the carceral state—for it is a tool that shores up the carceral state even as it allows private individuals to extract support from it.