An in-depth look at the consequences of New York City’s dramatically expanded policing of low-level offenses Felony conviction and mass incarceration attract considerable media attention these days, yet the most common criminal-justice encounters are for misdemeanors, not felonies, and the most common outcome is not prison. In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing experiment. Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model--and the implications are troubling. Kohler-Hausmann shows how significant volumes of people are marked, tested, and subjected to surveillance and control even though about half the cases result in some form of legal dismissal. She describes in harrowing detail how the reach of America's penal state extends well beyond the shocking numbers of people incarcerated in prisons or stigmatized by a felony conviction. Revealing and innovative, Misdemeanorland shows how the lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal punishment.
Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor.
Similarly, restrictions on access to public housing, the availability of criminal records to potential renters, and bans on living near schools, parks, or other areas may cumulatively contribute to homelessness and recidivism.
In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions.
Drawing on remarkably extensive fieldwork, this book compares five cities that have been home to major trafficking organizations for the past four decades: Cali and Medellín in Colombia, and Ciudad Juárez, Culiacán, and Tijuana in Mexico ...
In Hard Bargains, social psychologist Mona Lynch investigates the increased power of these prosecutors in our age of mass incarceration.
James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee • Winner of the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Book Award, Association of Black Sociologists • Winner of the C. Wright Mills Award, the Society for the Study of Social Problems A vivid portrait of African ...
"This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to tackle mass incarceration, by one of the country's most thoughtful scholars.
... in the reshaping of asian states by Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth the language of statutes: laws and their interpretation by Lawrence M. Solan belonging in an adopted world by Barbara Yngvesson making rights real: activists, ...
"Indefinite is the first major ethnographic study of American jails since the advent of racialized mass incarceration.
When court watchers submitted their forms, they were given an “exit” interview or debriefing session. They were asked the following questions: Do you think your appearance affected your experience in court?