Algorithms and Decision-Making in the Public Sector

This article surveys the use of algorithmic systems to support decision-making in the public sector. Governments adopt, procure, and use algorithmic systems to support their functions within several contexts—including criminal justice, education, and benefits provision—with important consequences for accountability, privacy, social inequity, and public participation in decision-making. We explore the social implications of municipal algorithmic systems across a variety of stages, including problem formulation, technology acquisition, deployment, and evaluation. We highlight several open questions that require further empirical research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Reimagining Girlhood in White Settler-Carceral States

We are deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to edit this special issue of Girlhood Studies, given that it is dedicated to rethinking girlhood in the context of the adaptive, always-evolving conditions of white settler regimes. The contributions to this issue address the need to theorize girlhood—and critiques of girlhood—across the shifting forces of subjecthood, community, land, nation, and borders in the Western settler states of North America. As white settler states, Canada and the United States are predicated on the ongoing spatial colonial occupation of Indigenous homelands. In settler states, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “the settler never left” (2012: 20) and colonial domination is reasserted every day of active occupation. White settler colonialism functions through the continued control of land, resources, and racialized bodies, and is amalgamated through a historical commitment to slavery, genocide, and the extermination of Indigenous nationhood and worldviews. Under settler colonial regimes, criminal justice, education, immigration, and child welfare systems represent overlapping sites of transcarceral power that amplify intersecting racialized, gendered, sexualized, and what Tanja Aho and colleagues call “carceral ableist” violence (2017: 291). This transcarceral power is enacted through institutional and bureaucratic warfare such as, for example, the Indian Act, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the child welfare system to deny, strategically, Indigenous claims to land and the citizenship of racial others.

The Black One

Some faculty are like father figures to the students. The other younger White males are scholarly and tough but brilliant. Then, there is you, the Black One. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as White men. Hispanic men are 2.3 times as likely. In corrections alone, people of color are overrepresented. This chapter will discuss the disparities in the criminal justice system and why students of color are attracted to the field. Microaggressions in a criminal justice program show up as machismo, as a joke, or even as witty, but never as racist. This chapter will tell the narrative of being a Black woman in a predominately White male department and why Black scholars belong in a criminal justice education.

The Vanishing Middle Class

This book analyses the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis. Adapting the subsistence and capitalist sectors characterized by Lewis, the American dual economy contains a low-wage sector and a FTE (Finance, Technology, and Electronics) sector. The transition from the low-wage to the FTE sector is through education, which is becoming increasingly difficult for members of the low-wage sector because the FTE sector largely abandoned the American tradition of quality public schools and universities. Policy debates about public education and other policies that serve the low-wage sector often characterize members of the low-wage sector as black even though the low-wage sector is largely white. The model of a modern dual economy and the American history of race relations explain difficulties in both current politics and governmental actions in criminal justice, education, infrastructure and household debts.

California's Police Professors and the Birth of Criminal Justice Education

In the 1960s and '70s, police reformers lost two important battles in the struggle to develop an educated and professionalized police force. First, they were forced out of the American Society of Criminology—an organization they had founded—by sociologists. Second, the School of Criminology at Berkeley closed amid large-scale protests from students. In its heyday, the School of Criminology was the most respected program in the world for the study of police by police and for providing officers with a liberal arts education. This essay documents these failures and explains how they gave rise to criminal justice—the academic discipline that has replaced police science at colleges and universities across the United States. California law enforcement—particularly the protégés of Berkeley police chief August Vollmer—are the key actors in this story. They participated in critical conversations about the role of police in a democratic society and envisioned a future for police work that has yet to come to fruition.