Pink Crime Book Talk with Miriam Mack and Valena Elizabeth Beety

The Review of Law & Social Change invites you to join us for an important discussion on the criminalization of motherhood, pregnancy, and queer identity with Valena Elizabeth Beety, the Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and Miriam Mack, Campaigns & Advocacy Director at Movement for Family Power. We’ll be discussing Professor Beety’s new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. Pink Crime as a term encapsulates what we’re seeing unfold in real time, and connects the dots between pregnancy, parenting, and queer criminalization. The false Child Protective Services report filed against Pete Buttigieg exemplifies what the book covers: queerness is still a crime, and marginalized genders are targeted and punished to be silenced. With the ramp up of state actors and prosecutors weaponizing the criminal legal system, Pink Crime exposes how prosecutors use the same key tools to restrict gender affirming healthcare, abortion healthcare, and to prosecute “bad moms” for their pregnancies and their parenting. We know these tools because prosecutors have used them before: against women wrongly convicted where no crime occurred.

Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, innocence litigator, and former federal prosecutor who has exonerated the wrongfully convicted, secured presidential grants of clemency, and produced scholarship cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her work centers the women and queer people most targeted by the U.S. criminal legal system. Beety is the Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project.

Miriam Mack is the Campaigns & Advocacy Director, Senior Legal Counsel at Movement for Family Power, where she uses litigation, policy advocacy, and organizing to help grow, support, and build capacity for the movement to abolish family policing.

Miriam is a Black mama, movement lawyer, and learner committed to working toward a world rooted in racial, reproductive, and birth justice. She fundamentally believes that building this world is achievable and is dependent on our divesting from systems of punishment, oppression, and isolation, investing in systems of care, support, and interconnectedness, and centering the expertise and leadership of those most impacted by policing systems.

Prior to joining MFP, Miriam was the Policy Director of The Bronx Defenders’ Family Defense Practice, where she led a team of advocates focused on creating and supporting policies and campaigns that narrow the pathways to (and ultimately end) New York’s family policing system. Also while at The Bronx Defenders, Miriam represented hundreds of parents facing family policing cases, including neglect, abuse, and termination of parental rights cases. Miriam also previously worked at the ACLU of Massachusetts and Ropes & Gray LLP. Miriam clerked for the Honorable Solomon Oliver, Jr., in the Northern District of Ohio, and the Honorable Justice Geraldine S. Hines of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

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