Current scholarship has explored how the carceral state governs and regulates populations. This literature has focused on prison and on the wide-reaching collateral consequences of a felony conviction. Despite the obvious importance of these findings, they capture only a portion of the criminal justice system’s operations. In most jurisdictions, misdemeanors, not felonies, constitute the bulk of criminal cases, and the number of such arrests is rising. This article explores a puzzling fact about New York City’s pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests: the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this article explores how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing. The author details the operation of penal power through the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing, and mandated performance evaluated by court actors to show the social control capacity of the criminal justice system.
Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Established in 1895 as the first US scholarly journal in its field, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) presents pathbreaking work from all areas of sociology, with an emphasis on theory building and innovative methods. AJS strives to speak to the general sociology reader and is open to contributions from across the social sciences—political science, economics, history, anthropology, and statistics in addition to sociology—that seriously engage the sociological literature to forge new ways of understanding the social. AJS offers a substantial book review section that identifies the most salient work of both emerging and enduring scholars of social science. Commissioned review essays appear occasionally, offering the readers a comparative, in-depth examination of prominent titles.
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