The Brokenness of Broken Windows: An Introductory Statistics Project on Race, Policing, and Criminal Justice

Punitive conditions ultimately contributed to the eruption of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. The uprising occurred within the distinctly punitive context of the war on drugs and gangs. Solutions to urban social problems, this chapter shows, had become so entangled with the city’s and LAPD’s various wars on crime that the responses to the uprising depended on partnership with law enforcement and criminal justice programs, leaving police power intact. As this chapter shows, the post-1992 reforms, such as Project Weed and Seed, expanded the criminal justice system into new areas of municipal governance through the adoption of community and broken windows policing, which focused police enforcement on low-level and quality of life offenses to maintain urban order.

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The Rise of Mass Misdemeanors

Misdemeanorland ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691196114.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 25-59

Author(s):

Issa Kohler-Hausmann

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Criminal Justice ◽

Law Enforcement ◽

New Record ◽

Broken Windows ◽

Criminal Courts ◽

Record Keeping ◽

Low Level ◽

Serious Offenders

This chapter briefly recounts the origins of the policing experiment of the early 1990s that flew under the Broken Windows banner. It also explores how that experiment has become an institutionalized feature of New York City's law enforcement since then. The history is tailored to highlight those changes in enforcement that most affected the flow and composition of cases into the lower criminal courts. It also portrays how the justifications for this policing model demanded bureaucratic practices that in turn shaped how these low-level cases came to be processed by criminal justice actors. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the new record-keeping and record-sharing practices that the police and courts innovated in this period in an effort to mark suspected persons for later encounters and to check up on prior records to identify and target persistent or serious offenders.

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Misdemeanorland

10.23943/princeton/9780691196114.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Issa Kohler-Hausmann

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Criminal Justice ◽

Social Control ◽

York City ◽

Justice System ◽

Broken Windows ◽

Criminal Courts ◽

Penal State ◽

Depth Interviews

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. This 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, the book 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. It 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.

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