The Practice of Justice: New Methods and Meanings to Think About Fairness, Equity and Efficiency in the Courts

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

This panel explores contemporary discourses and practices of justice and punishment in the United States and beyond. Specifically, authors explore how stratification, politics, and context shape how courts and courtroom actors operate, how they relate to other criminal justice institutions and how they engage the public. These themes are explored through a range of emerging approaches that combine new theories on how institutions “think” and negotiate internal/external conflict with new strategies for fieldwork, data collection and analytical modeling.

Sub Unit

• Area VII: Criminal Justice Policy and Practice / 39: Courts and Juries

Individual Presentations

• Crack as Proxy: Aggressive Federal Prosecutions as Institutional Racism? - Marisa Omori, University of Miami; Mona Lynch, University of California, Irvine

• The Organizational Utility of Welfare Stigma in Criminal Court Processing - Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Temple University

• Making Valid Cross-County Comparisons in Criminal Justice Performance - Gipsy Escobar, Measures for Justice; Robert Hutchison, Measures for Justice

• Justice in Development: Process and Punishment in Arraignment Courts in the United States, Colombia and Mexico - Andres Rengifo, Rutgers University; Morgan McCallin, Rutgers University