Search

The article analyzes different diversion models used for decarceration or reduction of mass incarceration and mass criminalization in the U.S. and considers the benefits and challenges associated with each approach. Topics discussed are court-supervised diversion and the case of drug courts, pre-booking and pre-arrest police diversion, law enforcement diversion, community referrals and community-based approaches, and alternative crisis response initiatives.

An essay is presented on the uses and abuses of police discretion. Topics include an overview of the history and evolution of police discretion from the 1960s to at present, explanation on how the exercise of police discretion has been impacted in recent decades by the war on drugs and the adoption of "broken windows policing' and municipalities to be well-advised to implement alternatives to the war on drugs and broken windows policing.

In post-civil rights America, the ascendance of 'law-and-order' politics and 'postracial' ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has witnessed the rise of private transnational institutions that increasingly influence the organization and management of urban space. Two institutions are especially powerful in this regard: bond-rating agencies and global security firms. Bolstered by a discourse of risk and the need to securitize cities, these institutions have garnered enormous amounts of power with respect to urban social and spatial control. They are implicated in the imprisonment and displacement of marginalized populations, the intensification of gentrification, and general shifts in municipal funding priorities. The authors illustrate these themes through a case study of New York City, followed by an example of the transnational movement of these forces and their exportation to sites such as Mexico City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many analysts have argued that the most harmful fonns of drug use are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities of color, and that this pattern—combined with law enforcement's tendency to focus on out- door drug activity—explains racial disparity in drug arrests. Others contend that comparatively high black and Latino drug arrest rates result from racial bias or racist intent on the part of the architects or lieutenants of the drug war. This article offers an alternative explanation of racial disparity in drug arrests in Seattle, Washington. Specifically, we argue that the racialization of imagery surrounding drugs in general and crack cocaine in particular had long-lasting institutional and cultural effects that continue to shape police perceptions and practices, and that these effects explain much of the disparity that characterizes drug possession in Seattle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas most sociolegal studies concerned with hegemony and resistance focus on the resistances of ordinary citizens in everyday life, this article focuses on the development of a particular social movement—the alternative birth movement—and analyzes the process by which this movement emerged and has achieved significant legislative victories. The analysis makes several contributions to the literatures on hegemony, resistance, and the law. First, by demonstrating the importance of medicine's assertion of its authority for the expansion and mobilization of the alternative birth movement, we show that the mobilization of the law by a dominant group may trigger the emergence of social movements seeking to resist hegemonic understandings and arrangements. At the same time, by examining how birth activists' organizational resources developed over time and were rendered meaningful in legislative debates, our study demonstrates the importance of avoiding dichotomous conceptions of structure and culture. In addition, by analyzing culture as a process of meaning-making rather than an independent and hierarchical set of values, the analysis shows how cultural and legal hegemony—even that of modern medicine—may be destabilized, even as it sets the terms of the effort to destabilize it and shapes the nature of the hegemony that will replace it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews two books on the subject of crime and control in the culture of late modernity. "The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary society," by David Garland; "Crime and Social Change in Middle England: Questions of Order in an English Town," by Evi Girling, Ian Loader, and Richard Sparks.

On the basis of the converging evidence showing regulation of drinking behavior by 5-HT receptors and the serotonin transporter, we hypothesized that the interactive effects of genetic variations in the genes HTR3A, HTR3B, and SLC6A4 confer greater susceptibility to alcohol dependence (AD) than do their effects individually. We examined the associations of AD with 22 SNPs across HTR3A, HTR3B, and two functional variants in SLC6A4 in 500 AD and 280 healthy control individuals of European descent. We found that the alleles of the low-frequency SNPs rs33940208:T in HTR3A and rs2276305:A in HTR3B were inversely and nominally significantly associated with AD with odds ratio (OR) and 95 % confidence interval of 0.212 and 0.073, 0.616 ( P = 0.004) and 0.261 and 0.088, 0.777 ( P = 0.016), respectively. Further, our gene-by-gene interaction analysis revealed that two four-variant models that differed by only one SNP carried a risk for AD (empirical P < 1 × 10 for prediction accuracy of the two models based on 10 permutations). Subsequent analysis of these two interaction models revealed an OR of 2.71 and 2.80, respectively, for AD ( P < 0.001) in carriers of genotype combinations 5′-HTTLPR:LL/LS( SLC6A4)-rs1042173:TT/TG( SLC6A4)-rs1176744:AC( HTR3B)-rs3782025:AG( HTR3B) and 5′-HTTLPR:LL/LS( SLC6A4)-rs10160548:GT/TT( HTR3A)-rs1176744:AC( HTR3B)-rs3782025:AG( HTR3B). Combining all five genotypes resulted in an OR of 3.095 ( P = 2.0 × 10) for AD. Inspired by these findings, we conducted the analysis in an independent sample, OZ-ALC-GWAS ( N = 6699), obtained from the NIH dbGAP database, which confirmed the findings, not only for all three risk genotype combinations ( Z = 4.384, P = 1.0 × 10; Z = 3.155, P = 1.6 × 10; and Z = 3.389, P = 7.0 × 10, respectively), but also protective effects for rs33940208:T ( χ = 3.316, P = 0.0686) and rs2276305:A ( χ = 7.224, P = 0.007). These findings reveal significant interactive effects among variants in SLC6A4- HTR3A- HTR3B affecting AD. Further studies are needed to confirm these findings and characterize the molecular mechanisms underlying these effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that the use of monetary sanctions as a supplementary penalty in state and federal criminal courts is expanding, and that their imposition creates substantial and deleterious legal debt. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence the discretionary imposition of these penalties. This study offers a comprehensive account of the role socio-cultural factors, especially race and ethnicity, have in this institutional sanctioning process. We rely on multilevel statistical analysis of the imposition of monetary sanctions in Washington State courts to test our theory. The theoretical framework emphasizes the need to treat race and ethnicity as complex cultural categories, the meaning and institutional effects of which may vary across time and space. Findings indicate that racialized crime scripts, such as the association of Latinos with drugs, affect defendants whose wrong-doing is stereotype congruent. Moreover, all individuals accused of committing racially and ethnically stigmatized offenses in racialized contexts may experience the courtesy stigma that flows from racialization. We find that race and ethnicity are not just individual attributes but cultural categories that shape the distribution of stigma and the institutional consequences that flow from it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]