Don't Call It a Comeback: The Criminological and Sociological Study of Subfelonies

After featuring prominently in early law and society research, the study of subfelony enforcement and processing was largely eclipsed by the study of mass incarceration. Of late, the subject matter has enjoyed a resurgence. This review addresses what things might be included in a study of subfelonies, what aspects about them researchers have studied, and why it might be theoretically interesting to study them.

Unshackling the Mind, Body, and Spirit: Reflections on Liberation and Creative Exchange between San Quentin and Auckland Prisons

This article explores a creative project entitled Performing Liberation which sought to empower communities with direct experience of incarceration to create and share creative work as part of transnational dialogue. One of the aims of the project was to facilitate creative dialogue and exchange between two incarcerated communities: prisoners at Auckland Prison and prisoners at San Quentin Prison in San Francisco. Written using autoethnographic methods, this co-authored article explores our recollections of key moments in a creative workshop at Auckland Prison in an attempt to explain its impact on stimulating the creativity of the participants. We begin by describing the context of incarceration in the US and New Zealand and suggest that these seemingly divergent locations are connected by mass incarceration. We also provide an overview of the creative contexts at San Quentin and Auckland Prison on which the Performing Liberation project developed. After describing key moments in the workshop, the article interrogates the creative space that it produced in relation to the notion of liberation, as a useful concept to interrogate various forms of oppression, and as a practice that is concerned with unshackling the body, mind, and spirit.

Reducing Mass Incarceration Through Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

This chapter outlines strategies and practices that align with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's trauma-informed approach applied to school pedagogy in the United States to minimize or prevent trauma, especially for students referred to the school-to-prison pipeline, consequently reducing mass incarceration. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the United States' health crisis exposed a vulnerability for people of color, poorer communities, and those incarcerated, stressing a need to respond expediently to address trauma in marginalized communities. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Connection referred to childhood trauma as “America's hidden health crisis.” Focusing on trauma for school-aged youth offers a path to preventing or minimizing trauma. Research suggests that more robust, multidisciplinary research, with an intentional purpose to transform teacher practices and responses to disciplinary conduct, is needed.

Due Process & the Theater of Racial Degradation: The Evolving Notion of Pretrial Punishment in the Criminal Courts

Most theorists assume that the criminal courts are neutral arbiters of justice, protected by the Constitution, the rule of law, and court records. This essay challenges those assumptions and examines the courts as a place of punitive excess and the normalization of racial abuse and punishment. The essay explains the historic origins of these trends and examines how the categories of “hardened” and “marginal” defendants began to assume racialized meanings with the emergence of mass incarceration. This transformed the criminal courts into a type of public theater for racial degradation. These public performances or “racial degradation ceremonies” occur within the discretionary practices and cultural norms of mostly White courtroom professionals as they efficiently manage the disposition of cases in the everyday practice of law. I link these historical findings to a recent study of the largest unified criminal court system in the United States–Cook County, Chicago–and discuss court watching programs as an intervention for accountability and oversight of our courts and its legal professionals.

Smart Decarceration

After a period of mass incarceration that spanned the 1970s through the 2010s, the United States remains the leading incarcerator in the world. Incarceration rates in the United States outpace those of other countries by several hundred per 100,000. Incarceration rates began to decline slightly in 2009, when there was a loss of fiscal, political, and moral will for mass incarceration policy and practices. First, the onset of smart decarceration approaches, the historical context from which smart decarceration stems, and the societal momentum that led to the conceptualization of smart decarceration are described. Smart decarceration is a lead strategy in social work that has been adopted by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare as one of the 12 Grand Challenges for Social Work for the decade 2015–2025. Finally, an overview of the current status of smart decarceration and details shifts and initiatives to pursue at the intersection of social work and smart decarceration is provided.

The Rise, the Fall, and the Reinvention of the Prison Ethnography

This chapter traces the emergence, maturation, and subsequent decline of ethnographic studies of prisons and jails in the United States. It provides a summary and overview of classic and contemporary prison ethnographies and identifies key issues and themes that animate qualitative research on prisons and carceral facilities. These include questions about the forms that punishment, surveillance, and control take, the ways that incarcerated men and women experience, resist, and make sense of the conditions of confinement, and the impact incarceration has for their relationships with families, communities, and one another. The chapter considers the dramatic reduction in the number of ethnographic studies of prisons and jails at century’s end and identifies how punitive policies associated with mass incarceration made it all but impossible for ethnographers to gain entry to carceral institutions. Contemporary ethnographers have reinvented the form by documenting practices and ideologies of control in alternate carceral spaces including visiting rooms, drug treatment programs, and group homes. A summary of recent work is included, along with a review of the ways that contemporary ethnographers foreground issues related to race and gender inequality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of prison ethnography in Europe where ethnographers enjoy greater access to carceral facilities and have considerable influence over public policy. For comparative purposes, I include a summary of ethnographic research from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France.