Kasey Henricks is a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research engages with innovative methodologies to foreground familiar objects— from lottery tickets to parking citations—within broader changes of the political economy. With his work, Henricks takes empirical detours through these highly recognizable objects to theorize how institutionalized consequences of racism, classism, and many other “-isms” endure through quotidian practices in public finance.
Working at the intersections of public law, criminology, and sociology, much of Henricks’ scholarship focuses on two ongoing developments in public revenue systems. In one area of research, he uncovers ways government bodies have increasingly commodified vice-related activities (e.g., gambling) and monetized impositions of punishment (e.g., fines and fees) to redefine who pays for state capacity. In another area, his work shows how revenue systems have become increasingly extractive, expropriative, and/or exploitive through finance structures that disproportionately burden the racialized poor and upwardly redistribute their resources to profit-seeking interests.
Henricks has held fellowships at the American Bar Foundation; the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law; the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI); and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at UIC. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Chicago Community Trust, and the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
In addition to these fellowships and grants, Henricks’ work has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Association of Black Sociologists, the Association for Humanist Sociology, the Southern Sociological Society, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Southwestern Sociological Association.
Henricks is the author of State Looteries: Historical Continuity, Rearticulations of Racism, and American Taxation (with coauthor David G. Embrick, Routledge, 2016) and over twenty scholarly articles. His research has been featured in journals including Law & Society Review, Social Problems, Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Race & Class, and American Behavioral Scientist.
Prior to his current position, Henricks was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. Henricks completed his PhD with distinction at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a BA from Austin Peay State University and an AAS from Chattanooga State Technical Community College.