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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.

This article investigates the discourse individuals use when talking about desisting from criminal offending. I analyze the links between offenders’ accounts of past negative behavior, their construction of their possible “clean” future selves, and the social and structural conditions in which they were raised and continue to be embedded. Applying Scott and Lyman's (1968) framework on accounts and Markus and Nurius's (1986) framework of possible selves to interview data with twenty-eight criminal offenders, I illustrate how excuses for past behavior provide a way for people to distance themselves from their past selves in attempts to preserve or re-create a possible self that is still worthy to be redeemed in the future. This discourse becomes one mechanism that motivates individuals to change their lives—but it can be short-lived. The analysis highlights how limited structural opportunities influence individuals’ lifestyles and behaviors, how individuals approach the desistance process even in the face of structural deprivation, and how they attempt to sustain this desistance process.

This paper investigates institutional decision-making processes and identify mechanisms that link case processing with subsequent outcomes. Using a sample of juvenile court cases containing probation officers’ narratives, this study investigated court actors’ focal concerns and how such priorities shape attributions about youth. This paper adds to existing sociological work on institutional decision-making by (1) illustrating court actors’ focal concerns that are used to process juvenile cases, (2) identifying decision-making mechanisms that link norms and values to case assessments and outcomes, and (3) theorizing about the ways in which individual and case characteristics can influence institutional decision-making.

Shaming is a mechanism theorists have highlighted as an important means of social control. However, this concept and the ways in which officials use shame in the context of formal social control is not easily studied. Interviews with a Southern California juvenile court judge and observations of his interactions with youths on probation are used to illustrate the reflexive nature of social control interactions. This ethnographic study illustrates how the emotion of shame is used to manage delinquent and defiant young people in a justice setting. A nuanced analysis of the various strategies used by this juvenile court judge to evoke signs of remorse, accountability, and deference from young offenders is provided. Such an investigation informs theoretical perspectives on how social control is employed, highlights the important role of power in the interactions, and provides a better understanding of theoretical concepts, such as reintegration and stigmatization.

This study investigates the types of decision-making models that frame people-processing decisions. An analysis of the judicial waiver hearing will be used as an example of such institutional processing. I investigate how decision makers engage in practical reasoning by exploring the methods they use to organize information about youth and accomplish their judicial duties. Observational and interview data from a case study of three juvenile courthouses in a California county are used to investigate official case processing. The study offers three important theoretical insights for research in sociology and criminology; a revised theoretical framework for understanding juvenile justice decision making that incorporates criminal justice frameworks, an analysis of how substantive factors (e.g., values, stereotypes, assumptions) can enter into decision making, and an illustration of how decision making is organizationally situated.

This article provides a literature review of research that investigates the relationship between the United States education and criminaljustice systems. From a sociological perspective, our aim is to explore mechanisms that have been identified as leading to successes and failures within the two respective institutions. In particular, we highlight research conducted on alternative school programs. Furthermore, we provide a discussion about the processes that link the two systems, namely state funding and punitive policies within schools.