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1. Translating Gun Violence into Reckoning with Structural Racism: Intersectional Social Justice Mobilization after the Pulse Shooting in Orlando, Florida.

   Nolan Kline (July 2022, Law and Society Association Annual Meeting)

   On June 12, 2016, a shooter entered the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, and fatally shot 49 people. Pulse was a barwhere lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer identifying (LGBTQ+) people regularly gathered, and the shooting occurred on Latin night, disproportionally impacting people at the intersection of being LGBTQ+, Black, and Latinx. Afterthe shooting, organizations focusing on LGBTQ+ people of color, including undocumented queer people, emerged and mobilized for improved political protections, economic rights, criminal justice reform, and representation of LGBTQ+ people of color insocial justice organizations. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2016, this presentation summarizes findings from an ongoing study examining the impacts of social justice mobilizing after gun violencethat targeted queer people of color. It reports findings from participant observation experiences with LGBTQ+ Latinx organizations and interviews with social justice organization members (n=52), local legislators (n=8), health providers (n=3), law enforcement officers (n=3), and national organization leaders (n=3). Findings highlight how the Pulse shooting sparked an intersectional social justice movement workingto dismantle structural racism, xenophobia,and homophobia from within multiple settings. Using theories of biopolitics and frameworks of legal, political, and queer mobilization, I argue that the movement forged out of the Pulse shooting works to advance what I call “an assertive politics of belonging” that pervades multiple social spaces, including within local and state government, law enforcement agencies, and social justice organizations. Situating this movement in a broader US context of deep political polarization and persistent white supremacy, findings from this study underscore the tensions that emerge in challenging structural racism by asserting claims of belonging for people at the intersection of multiple minoritized identities. 

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2. Prosecutors as punishers: A case study of Trump-era practices

   https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745231166311  

   Lynch, Mona (December 2023, Punishment & Society)

   Recent punishment and society scholarship has addressed the limits of policy reforms aimed at reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. This work has focused in particular on the political dimensions of penal legal reform and policy-making, and the compromises and shortcomings in those processes. Nearly absent in this scholarship, however, has been empirical and theoretical engagement with the role of front-line prosecutors as facilitators and/or resistors to downsizing efforts. Using the case of the U.S. federal criminal legal system's modest efforts to decrease the system's racially disparate and punitive outcomes, this paper elucidates the fragile nature of such reforms by delineating the critical role that front-line prosecutors play in maintaining punitive approaches. Focusing specifically on federal prosecutorial policy and practices in the Trump era, I draw on a subset of data from an interdisciplinary, multi-methodological project set in distinct federal court jurisdictions in the U.S. to examine how front-line prosecutors were able to quickly reverse course on reform through the use of their uniquely powerful charging and plea-bargaining tools. My findings illustrate how federal prosecutors pursued more low-level defendants, and utilized statutory “hammers,” including mandatory minimums and mandatory enhancements to ensure harsh punishments in a swift return to a war-on-crime. 

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3. Strategic Adaptation in a Crisis: Treatment Court Responses to COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2022.93  

   Rowen, Jamie (March 2023, Law & Social Inquiry)

   This article draws on a case study of how Massachusetts treatment courts responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to address two intersecting theoretical and policy questions: (1) How do actors who work within criminal legal organizations use the law to solve complex social and political problems? (2) How do organizations working within multiple, fragmented organizational fields respond to an exogenous shock? The findings draw on interviews with eighty-four treatment court judges and practitioners and build from neo-institutional approaches to the study of courts to show that legal actors and organizations pursue pragmatic approaches, strategically adapting to their external environments through buffering, which is protective, and innovation, which is transformative. Each strategy reflects the courts’ autonomy or dependence on other organizations in the criminal legal and social service fields. The findings also provide insight into the social process of legitimation as personnel aligned beliefs with adaptation strategies, shifting understandings of surveillance practices and the utility of sanctions to meet overall court goals. 

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4. A review of predictive policing from the perspective of fairness

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-021-09286-4  

   Alikhademi, Kiana; Drobina, Emma; Prioleau, Diandra; Richardson, Brianna; Purves, Duncan; Gilbert, Juan E. (April 2021, Artificial Intelligence and Law)

   null (Ed.)

   Machine Learning has become a popular tool in a variety of applications in criminal justice, including sentencing and policing. Media has brought attention to the possibility of predictive policing systems causing disparate impacts and exacerbating social injustices. However, there is little academic research on the importance of fairness in machine learning applications in policing. Although prior research has shown that machine learning models can handle some tasks efficiently, they are susceptible to replicating systemic bias of previous human decision-makers. While there is much research on fair machine learning in general, there is a need to investigate fair machine learning techniques as they pertain to the predictive policing. Therefore, we evaluate the existing publications in the field of fairness in machine learning and predictive policing to arrive at a set of standards for fair predictive policing. We also review the evaluations of ML applications in the area of criminal justice and potential techniques to improve these technologies going forward. We urge that the growing literature on fairness in ML be brought into conversation with the legal and social science concerns being raised about predictive policing. Lastly, in any area, including predictive policing, the pros and cons of the technology need to be evaluated holistically to determine whether and how the technology should be used in policing. 

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5. Prosecutors, court communities, and policy change: The impact of internal DOJ reforms on federal prosecutorial practices*

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12275  

   Lynch, Mona; Barno, Matt; Omori, Marisa (January 2021, Criminology)

   The current study examines how key internal U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy changes have been translated into front-line prosecutorial practices. Extending courts-as-communities scholarship and research on policy implementation practices, we use U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2004 to 2019 to model outcomes for several measures of prose- cutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charges and prosecutor-endorsed departures, to test the impact of the policy changes on case processing outcomes. We contrast prosecutorial measures with measures that are more impervious to discretionary manipulation, such as criminal history, and those that represent judicial and blended discretion, including judicial departures and final sentence lengths. We find a significant effect of the policy reforms on how prosecutorial tools are used across DOJ policy periods, and we find variation across districts as a function of contextual conditions, consistent with the court communities literature. We also find that a powerful driver of changes in pros- ecutorial practices during our most recent period is the confirmation of individual Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys at the district level, suggesting an important theoretical place for midlevel actors in policy translation and implementation. 

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