The Organizational Utility of Welfare Stigma in Criminal Court Processing

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

Abstract

A growing body of research examines criminal justice settings that combine poverty management goals like rehabilitative programing with traditional crime control goals like incapacitation. I extend this inquiry into a new empirical site: the felony criminal court system in a large urban jurisdiction. Through ethnography and interviews, I show how gatekeepers like judges and prosecutors mobilize welfare stigma—moral evaluations about the worthiness of poor people for public resources—to create stricter eligibility criteria for due process in criminal courts. The number of appearances in court, motions, trials, and rehabilitative services in sentencings are considered the benefits that offenders seek to access and abuse. Professionals view their role as preventing (rather than granting) access to these rights and resources. This welfare rationale has organizational utility by serving organizational goals: it streamlines convictions in the courts, which pulls offenders through the adjudicative process in an efficient manner and also at the expense of defendants’ rights. These findings have important implications for understanding the changing role of American criminal justice in social service provision and how these changes impact discretion in our criminal courts.

Author

• Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Temple University