Contesting the Court: Reform and Retrenchment in Criminal and Racial Justice Activism

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 4: Criminal Justice System Actors (2)

Abstract

Criminal justice activism in the United States has largely targeted policing or prisons. But more recently, activists across the political spectrum have called attention to the criminal court as a key juncture in the criminal legal process and an important site of intervention. Over the past decade, reform-oriented activists have organized to elect District Attorneys intent on addressing systemic racism and mass incarceration. Meanwhile, law-and-order proponents have critiqued these DAs for being too soft on crime and instead invoke a seemingly colorblind notion of public safety. During the pandemic, some of these latter groups also took up the cause of racial justice, aligning with segments of the Asian American community to demand harsher prosecution of anti-Asian violence. As such, the court has become a site of contention over the meanings and practices of criminal justice and racial justice. I use the case of criminal court activism to explore the push-and-pull between reform and retrenchment in the politics of crime, punishment, and race more broadly. Bridging scholarship on punishment, social movements, race, and politics, I ask: How do competing social movements link criminal justice and racial justice into coherent political projects? I answer this question through a comparative political ethnography of anti-carceral and law-and-order activists in the Bay Area. Despite their divergent political aims, I find that these activists deploy a similar set of court interventions, including court watch, defendant or victim advocacy, and prosecutorial or judicial accountability programs. In these programs, a central organizing frame is “accountability” of the court to the community. While these tactics and frames are commonly associated with progressive aims like decarceration, I show that they are politically flexible. In particular, who is constructed as part of the “community”— an implicitly or strategically racialized category—can shape whether accountability efforts challenge or further entrench the carceral state.

Author

• Cathy Hu, University of California-Berkeley