Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and mass incarceration

Penn Law student Raymond Magsaysay has an article forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of Race & Law about the absence of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the conversation about criminal justice reform.

In a forthcoming article in the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Raymond Magsaysay explores the multifaceted problem of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) being largely left out of recent conversations about overhauling the criminal justice system to address racial injustice. The selection of Magsaysay’s article for publication is a distinguished honor as law students rarely have the opportunity to publish full-length articles in legal journals.

Raymond Magsaysay
Raymond Magsaysay. (Image: Penn Law News)

In “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the Prison Industrial Complex,” Magsaysay breaks new ground with an in-depth discussion of AAPIs and mass incarceration—a topic that has received virtually no attention among legal scholars.

“Raymond’s article is a wonderful extension of the learning he’s done at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School into an innovative and impactful scholarly article,” says Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law Ted Ruger. “It is extremely rare for a current law student at any law school to place an article for publication in another top school’s journal, and it speaks to the strength of Raymond’s scholarly contribution that the Michigan editors selected his piece from a pool that included many submissions from tenured law professors from around the country. I had a chance to work with Magsaysay as a research and teaching assistant this past Spring, and saw firsthand his extraordinary intellectual curiosity and his ability to take a fresh look at our oldest and most important constitutional questions.”

“Identifying and addressing this issue, I intercalate AAPIs into powerful, contemporary critiques of the prison industrial complex, including emergent abolitionist legal scholarship,” says Magsaysay. “I argue that the model minority myth, an anti-Black racial project, leads to the exclusion of AAPIs in both mainstream and critical studies of crime and carcerality. I also highlight how various AAPI subgroups are stereotyped and criminalized in distinct forms.”

Read more at Penn Law News.