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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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94 different countries? Time, place, and variations in federal criminal justice
Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins’s 1991 book, The Scale of Imprisonment, was a pioneering intellectual effort to explain what was then just coming into view to social scientists and legal scholars: the massive growth and transformation of American criminal justice, particularly as manifested in what soon came to be called mass incarceration. Zimring and Hawkins endeavored to disentangle multiple forces in play, ranging from formal law, to local and regional legal norms, to a series of broader social and political transformations. In doing so, Zimring and Hawkins set out to disentangle the complex, multi-jurisdictional political and legal structures that govern imprisonment policy in the U.S. In this Article, I apply their insights about locale-based variations in criminal justice operations over time to the case of federal sentencing. Specifically, I empirically examine variations in how the “criminal history” provision of the federal sentencing guidelines is applied as a function of both time and place to demonstrate the limits of formal law in accounting for punishment outcomes. In doing so, I hope to shed additional light on how vast differences in legal practices and outcomes are produced, especially in response to top-down legal change.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1251700
- PAR ID:
- 10225092
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Berkeley journal of criminal law
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1934-9629
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 134-163
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38KW57J58
