Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Armando Lara-Millán
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Public Hospitals ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Hospital Closures ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Urban America ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
New Evidence

This chapter engages existing myths about the transformation of hospitals and jails in urban America and offers an alternative theory. First, it engages the explanation of “deinstitutionalization,” which holds that the mentally ill occupy the jails because of state hospital closures. Second, it offers counter-evidence that public hospitals are restricting access to medicine because states have underinvested in them. Finally, it counters the idea of mass imprisonment, in which the overinvestment in criminal justice systems would explain the use of medicine to socially control the urban poor. In light of these explanations, this chapter introduces the reader to the new evidence of the book and an alternative theory of redistributing the poor.

Fines and Monetary Sanctions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexes Harris ◽  
Frank Edwards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
System Involvement ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems

Despite the central role that fines and other fiscal penalties play in systems of criminal justice, they have received relatively little scholarly attention. Court systems impose fines and other monetary sanctions in response to minor administrative and traffic offenses as well as for more serious criminal offenses. Monetary sanctions are intended to provide a deterrent punishment to reduce lawbreaking, to provide opportunities for accountability through financial restitution, to restore harm caused to victims of crime, and to fund the operation and administration of courts and criminal justice systems. Fines, fees, and other monetary sanctions are the most common form of punishment imposed by criminal justice systems. Most criminal sentences in the United States include financial penalties, and monetary sanctions are routinely imposed for less serious, and far more common, infractions such as traffic or parking violations. For many, paying a monetary sanction for a low-level violation is an annoyance. However, for the poor and people of color who are disproportionately likely to be subject to criminal justice system involvement, monetary sanctions can become a vehicle for expanded social inequality and increasingly severe criminal justice contact. Failure to pay legal financial obligations often results in court summons or license suspensions that may have attendant additional costs and may trigger incarceration. In the United States, the criminal justice system is heavily and routinely involved in the lives of low-income people of color. These already-existing biases, coupled with the deep poverty that is common in many communities, join to widen the net of criminal justice involvement by escalating low-level infractions to far more serious offenses when people are unable to pay. Despite the routine justification of monetary sanctions as less-severe penalties, if imposed without restriction on the poor, they are likely to magnify the inequality producing effects of criminal justice system involvement.

Redistributing the Poor

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Armando Lara-Millán
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Hospitals ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Social Suffering ◽  
The Poor

This book argues that the changes taking place in the United States’ largest jails and public hospitals have been drastically misunderstood. And more generally, the way that states govern urban poverty at the turn of the twenty-first century has been misunderstood as well. It is widely believed that because US society has divested in public health, the sick and poor now find themselves subject to powerful criminal justice institutions. Rather than focus on the underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, this book argues that the fundamental problem of the state is a persistent crisis between budgetary catastrophe and expansive new legal rules. Redistributing the Poor pushes the reader to think about the circulation of people for the purposes of generating absent revenue, absolving new legal demands, and projecting illusions that crisis have been successfully resolved. This book delves into the heart of the state: the day-to-day operations of the largest hospital and jail system in the world. It is only by centering the state’s use of redistribution that one can understand how certain forms of social suffering—the premature death of mainly poor, people of color—are not a result of the state’s failure to act, but instead are the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.

“We’ll Take the Tough Ones”

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-584
Author(s):  
Chrysanthi S. Leon ◽  
Corey S. Shdaimah
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Diversion Programs ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Professional Goals ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Working Groups ◽  
Justice Systems

Expertise in multi-door criminal justice enables new forms of intervention within existing criminal justice systems. Expertise provides criminal justice personnel with the rationale and means to use their authority in order to carry out their existing roles for the purpose of doing (what they see as) good. In the first section, we outline theoretical frameworks derived from Gil Eyal’s sociology of expertise and Thomas Haskell’s evolution of moral sensibility. We use professional stakeholder interview data (N = 45) from our studies of three emerging and existing prostitution diversion programs as a case study to illustrate how criminal justice actors use what we define as primary, secondary, and tertiary expertise in multi-agency working groups. Actors make use of the tools at their disposal—in this case, the concept of trauma—to further personal and professional goals. As our case study demonstrates, professionals in specialized diversion programs recognize the inadequacy of criminal justice systems and believe that women who sell sex do so as a response to past harms and a lack of social, emotional, and material resources to cope with their trauma. Trauma shapes the kinds of interventions and expertise that are marshalled in response. Specialized programs create seepage that may reduce solely punitive responses and pave the way for better services. However empathetic, they do nothing to address the societal forces that are the root causes of harm and resultant trauma. This may have more to do with imagined capacities than with the objectively best approaches.

Fear of a School-to-Deportation Pipeline: How Teachers, Administrators, and Immigrant Students Respond to the Threat of Standardized Tests and Deportation

2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592110264
Author(s):  
Patricia Maloney ◽  
Duke W. Austin ◽  
SaunJuhi Verma
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Immigrant Students ◽  
Zero Tolerance ◽  
School Authority ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Authority Figures

Existing studies evaluate zero tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline. Additional research identifies the role of criminal justice systems in deporting immigrants. Our work bridges these two literatures by discussing how immigrant students navigate the criminal justice system within schools. Using interviews with immigrant students, teachers, and administrators, we address the question: How is the school-to-deportation pipeline maneuvered by stakeholders? Our study identifies how school authority figures react to and even use the fear of the pipeline to (1) either protect students from becoming criminalized or (2) exclude students from standardized exam participation so as to maintain funding sources.

scholarly journals Unintended consequences of drug policies experienced by young drug users in contact with the criminal justice systems

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Jacek Moskalewicz ◽  
Katarzyna Dąbrowska ◽  
Maria Dich Herold ◽  
Franca Baccaria ◽  
Sara Rolando ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Drug Policies ◽  
Justice Systems

Setting the parameters of ‘digital (criminal) justice’ in Scotland

2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-208
Author(s):  
Mike Nellis
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Policy Document ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Justice Systems ◽  
Scottish Government ◽  
Critical Literature

The term ‘digital justice’ has been used by the Scottish Government to delineate the potential of information and communication technology (ICT) in its civil, administrative and criminal justice systems. This paper concentrates on the latter area, outlining the content of the original 2014 digital justice strategy document and the subsequent Holyrood conferences used to promote it (Scottish Government, 2014). It notes gaps in the strategy, not least a failure to specify what human beings could and should be doing in digitized justice systems, and ambiguity about the endpoint of ‘full digitization’, which could be very threatening to existing forms of professional practice. It sets the policy debate in the broader context of increasing automation and the more critical literature on digitization, concluding with recommendations for a revised policy document, ideas which may be of interest outside Scotland.

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