Mona Lynch
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594944 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mona Lynch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mona |
| FAMILY NAME | Lynch |
| SIGNATURE | LYNCH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5594-9016 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 459 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Downstream Effects of Frayed Relations: Juror Race, Judgment, and Perceptions of Police
Building on research demonstrating significant differences in how Black and White Americans view law enforcement, this study assesses how those differential views shape potential jurors’ decision-making in the context of a federal drug conspiracy case in which the primary evidence against the defendant is provided by an FBI agent and an informant cooperating with the agent. A sample of 649 Black and White jury-eligible U.S. citizens were exposed …
Trawling for minnows on the high seas: Criminal law's coercive capacities and the U.S. Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act
The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA) was passed in 1986 by the U.S. Congress at the height of the American drug war frenzy, further empowering the U.S. government to arrest and prosecute suspected drug traffickers nearly anywhere in the world when transporting drugs by sea. In this article, we use a case study of MDLEA prosecutions in the District of Puerto Rico to identify and delineate five distinct characteristics of criminal law's co…
Police talk in the jury room: The Production of Race-Conscious Reasonable Doubt Among Racially Diverse Jury Groups
A central goal of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to deconstruct the "jurisprudence of color-blindness" that is infused with the language of equality while operating to maintain racial hierarchies. Color-blind ideology extends to the procedures governing criminal juries, ensuring they are disproportionately white while constraining diversity of perspectives, especially regarding policing issues. In this paper, we merge CRT insights about color-blin…
Prosecutors as punishers: A case study of Trump-era practices
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 r…
The subtle effects of implicit bias instructions
Judges are increasingly using “implicit bias” instructions in jury trials in an effort to reduce the influence of jurors' biases on judgment. In this article, we report on findings from a large‐scale mock jury study that tests the impact of implicit bias instructions on judgment in a case where defendant race was varied (Black or White). Using an experimental design, we collected and analyzed quantitative and qualitative data at the individual an…
Race, witness credibility, and jury deliberation in a simulated drug trafficking trial
OBJECTIVE: The present study integrates several distinct lines of jury decision-making research by examining how the racial identities of the defendant and an informant witness interact in a federal drug conspiracy trial scenario and by assessing whether jurors' individual racial identity and jury group racial composition influence their judgments. HYPOTHESES: We predicted that jurors would be biased against the Black defendant and would be more …
Prosecutors, court communities, and policy change: The impact of internal DOJ reforms on federal prosecutorial practices
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 prosecutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charg…
Focally Concerned About Focal Concerns: A Conceptual and Methodological Critique of Sentencing Disparities Research
“Focal concerns” is the predominant theoretical framework in criminology for explaining disparities in sentencing outcomes. While the framework has generated a large body of empirical scholarship, its postulates remain inadequately tested in the criminological literature. In this paper, I offer a conceptual and methodological critique of focal concerns as it is being deployed in a large body of sentencing research. I first trace the genealogy of …
Death Qualification in Black and White: Racialized Decision Making and Death‐Qualified Juries
Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the very large gap between black and white Americans' current support for capital punishment raises the…
Crack as Proxy: Aggressive Federal Drug Prosecutions and the Production of Black-White Racial Inequality
In this article, we empirically examine jurisdictional variations in federal crack prosecutions to measure whether aggressive crack prosecutorial practices are associated with racial inequality in federal caseload characteristics and outcomes. Building on theories that address the production of inequality in institutional settings, we hypothesize that U.S. Attorneys' offices that are more proactive in charging defendants with crack, relative to o…
A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor
Introduction: 20Th Anniversary Special Issue
The Narrative of the Number: Quantification in Criminal Court
Scholars have documented the explosion in quantification of social phenomena within organizational settings. A key site of the quantitative turn has been in the penallegal field, with purported transformative effects. This article draws from a field research project examining the on-the-ground implementation of the federal sentencing guidelines to explore how the guidelines' numbers-based logic is both articulated and reconstituted by legal actor…
Backpacking the Border: The Intersection of Drug and Immigration Prosecutions in a High-volume US Court
Drawing from data obtained in a comparative study of US district courts' criminal justice practices, this paper examines adjudication processing responses at the intersection of immigration and drug offences in a Southwestern federal district court, where the logic of immigration enforcement subsumes more traditional federal drug law enforcement. I demonstrate how characteristics of 'drug cases' are constructed at this intersection in such a mann…
The Imprisonment Boom of the Late Twentieth Century
This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony d…
Capital Punishment
This essay reviews foundational and cutting‐edge social science research on capital punishment. It first describes policy‐relevant work on the death penalty as legal punishment, and then provides a brief overview of the more recent contributions on capital punishment and social theory. The scope of relevant scholarship is limited to more empirically based social science scholarship on the American death penalty. Specifically, relative to the long…
The calculus of the record: Criminal history in the making of US Federal Sentencing Guidelines
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, developed by the United States Sentencing Commission in the 1980s, appear to exemplify the turn from individualization toward aggregated, rationalized risk management that ostensibly became hegemonic in the late 20th century. In this article, we challenge that presumption by building on Harcourt’s (2007) argument that penal actuarialism emerged as part of the individualization project rather than as a repudiatio…
Emotion, Authority, and Death: (Raced) Negotiations in Mock Capital Jury Deliberations
This article explores the role of emotion in the capital penalty‐phase jury deliberations process. It is based on the qualitative analysis of data from ninety video‐recorded four to seven person simulated jury deliberations that examined the influence of race on death sentencing outcomes. The analysis explores when and how emotions are expressed, integrated into the jury's sentencing process, and deployed in penalty‐phase decision making. The fin…
Legal Change and Sentencing Norms in the Wake of Booker: The Impact of Time and Place on Drug Trafficking Cases in Federal Court
The federal sentencing guidelines have lost some authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a series of recent cases that the guidelines are advisory, rather than presumptive, in determining criminal sentences. While these court decisions represent a dramatic legal intervention, sociolegal scholarship suggests that organizational norms are likely to change slowly and less dramatically than the formal law itself. The research report…
Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how hi…
Theorizing punishment’s boundaries: An introduction
Theorizing the role of the ‘war on drugs’ in US punishment
Numerous scholars have described how the ‘war on drugs’ has played a central role in US penal change, especially its racialized impact. Yet there remain aspects of this ‘war’ that are under-explored in punishment and society scholarship. This article delineates five distinct modes by which the contemporary regulation of drugs in the USA speaks to penal change, and in so doing suggests that its reach is much more diffuse, insidious, and variegated…
Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence
Research Summary In this article, I have three major aims. First, I examine in detail the role that changes to legal policies and practice have played in the rise of mass incarceration. I look at four distinct aspects of legal change and argue that the law (and legal change) in these varied forms is the engine that has driven prison growth and, therefore, must be addressed in explanations of this phenomenon. This discussion leads to my second maj…
Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence
Crack Pipes and Policing: A Case Study of Institutional Racism and Remedial Action in Cleveland
This article uses a case study of selective drug law enforcement in Cleveland, Ohio, to explore the contours of institutional racism in criminal justice policy and practice. Using the multilevel theoretical framework developed by Ian Haney López (2000) that highlights the processes underlying how institutional racism is manifested, I analyze how and why racially discriminatory arrest and charging practices were able to persist in this case as wel…
Waste Managers? The New Penology, Crime Fighting, and Parole Agent Identity
This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) "new penology" paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger "risk managers." Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law enforcement role for themselves that primarily takes an individualistic approach to the clientele and…
Rehabilitation as Rhetoric: The Ideal of Reformation in Contemporary Parole Discourse and Practices
This article reports on a set of findings from an ethnographic research project conducted in a parole field office in central California, specifically addressing how the notion of rehabilitation is expressed in parole discourse and practices. It appears that while the agency (and its field agents) still espouse the validity of normalization and reformative goals in this arm of corrections, the resources and commitment to carry out those aims are …
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. David Garland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
Theorizing punishment’s boundaries: An introduction
Legal Change and Sentencing Norms in the Wake of Booker: The Impact of Time and Place on Drug Trafficking Cases in Federal Court
The federal sentencing guidelines have lost some authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a series of recent cases that the guidelines are advisory, rather than presumptive, in determining criminal sentences. While these court decisions represent a dramatic legal intervention, sociolegal scholarship suggests that organizational norms are likely to change slowly and less dramatically than the formal law itself. The research report…
Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how hi…
Theorizing the role of the ‘war on drugs’ in US punishment
Numerous scholars have described how the ‘war on drugs’ has played a central role in US penal change, especially its racialized impact. Yet there remain aspects of this ‘war’ that are under-explored in punishment and society scholarship. This article delineates five distinct modes by which the contemporary regulation of drugs in the USA speaks to penal change, and in so doing suggests that its reach is much more diffuse, insidious, and variegated…
Crack Pipes and Policing: A Case Study of Institutional Racism and Remedial Action in Cleveland
This article uses a case study of selective drug law enforcement in Cleveland, Ohio, to explore the contours of institutional racism in criminal justice policy and practice. Using the multilevel theoretical framework developed by Ian Haney López (2000) that highlights the processes underlying how institutional racism is manifested, I analyze how and why racially discriminatory arrest and charging practices were able to persist in this case as wel…
Pedophiles and Cyber-predators as Contaminating Forces: The Language of Disgust, Pollution, and Boundary Invasions in Federal Debates on Sex Offender Legislation
As a distinct class of criminals, sex offenders stand out as being particularly subject to the new “risk management” penal strategies that, according to a number of scholars, have come to dominate punishment rhetoric and practices in recent years. Nonetheless, the criminal justice policymaking that targets sex offenders appears to have a more emotionally based underside. In this paper, I examine the emotional drive that appears to undergird conte…
Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence
Mapping the Racial Bias of the White Male Capital Juror: "Jury Composition and the "Empathic Divide
This article examines the nature of racial bias in the death sentencing process. After reviewing the various general explanations for the continued significance of race in capital cases, we report the results of an empirical study in which some aspects of racially biased death sentencing are examined in depth. Specifically, in a simulated capital penalty-phase trial setting where participants were assigned to small group "juries" and given an opp…
The Narrative of the Number: Quantification in Criminal Court
Scholars have documented the explosion in quantification of social phenomena within organizational settings. A key site of the quantitative turn has been in the penallegal field, with purported transformative effects. This article draws from a field research project examining the on-the-ground implementation of the federal sentencing guidelines to explore how the guidelines' numbers-based logic is both articulated and reconstituted by legal actor…
Crack as Proxy: Aggressive Federal Drug Prosecutions and the Production of Black-White Racial Inequality
In this article, we empirically examine jurisdictional variations in federal crack prosecutions to measure whether aggressive crack prosecutorial practices are associated with racial inequality in federal caseload characteristics and outcomes. Building on theories that address the production of inequality in institutional settings, we hypothesize that U.S. Attorneys' offices that are more proactive in charging defendants with crack, relative to o…
Emotion, Authority, and Death: (Raced) Negotiations in Mock Capital Jury Deliberations
This article explores the role of emotion in the capital penalty‐phase jury deliberations process. It is based on the qualitative analysis of data from ninety video‐recorded four to seven person simulated jury deliberations that examined the influence of race on death sentencing outcomes. The analysis explores when and how emotions are expressed, integrated into the jury's sentencing process, and deployed in penalty‐phase decision making. The fin…
Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence
Research Summary In this article, I have three major aims. First, I examine in detail the role that changes to legal policies and practice have played in the rise of mass incarceration. I look at four distinct aspects of legal change and argue that the law (and legal change) in these varied forms is the engine that has driven prison growth and, therefore, must be addressed in explanations of this phenomenon. This discussion leads to my second maj…
On-line Executions: The Symbolic Use of the Electric Chair in Cyberspace
Execution by electrocution-with its attendant smoke and flames and blood and screams-is a spectacle whose time has passed. The fiery deaths of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina and the recent bloody execution of Allen Lee Davis are acts more befitting a violent murder than a civilized state. Leander Shaw, Florida State Supreme Court, dissenting in Provenzano v. Moore, 1999It's a mockery to care about scorching a man's scalp, or bloodying his nose, in…
Prosecutors, court communities, and policy change: The impact of internal DOJ reforms on federal prosecutorial practices
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 prosecutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charg…
Prosecutors as punishers: A case study of Trump-era practices
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 r…
The calculus of the record: Criminal history in the making of US Federal Sentencing Guidelines
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, developed by the United States Sentencing Commission in the 1980s, appear to exemplify the turn from individualization toward aggregated, rationalized risk management that ostensibly became hegemonic in the late 20th century. In this article, we challenge that presumption by building on Harcourt’s (2007) argument that penal actuarialism emerged as part of the individualization project rather than as a repudiatio…
Capital punishment as moral imperative: Pro-death-penalty discourse on the Internet
Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one venue where this relationship is evident: among pro-death penalty communications on the Internet. I exa…
Punishing Images: Jail Cam and the Changing Penal Enterprise
This article explores the use of web cameras inside a local penal facility in Phoenix, Arizona through which jail detainees’ daily routines were broadcast on the Internet over a two-year period. I question whether and how the logic behind broadcasting these penal images and the actual practice of capturing and distributing such images may indicate a significant change in the penal enterprise. In the end, I suggest that this phenomenon further res…
Theorizing Punishment: Reflections on Wacquant's Punishing the Poor
In this essay, I consider how Loic Wacquant's Punishing the Poor adds to the diverse and growing body of scholarship about contemporary penal change. I begin with an overview of Wacquant's major arguments and elucidations, then I focus in on how this work fits specifically within theorizations about, and empirical examinations of, late modern punishment. In so doing, I describe the ways in which this work seems to contribute to an ongoing convers…
Selling ‘securityware’: Transformations in prison commodities advertising, 1949-99
In this article, I examine how the marketing of penal commodities and the use of ‘security’ as a selling point has developed and proliferated over the past 50 years in the US corrections market. Using data obtained from a contextual analysis of display advertisements from the correctional trade periodical, Corrections Today and its predecessors, I trace the transformation of the major message modes of the sales pitches, from how the promoted prod…
The subtle effects of implicit bias instructions
Judges are increasingly using “implicit bias” instructions in jury trials in an effort to reduce the influence of jurors' biases on judgment. In this article, we report on findings from a large‐scale mock jury study that tests the impact of implicit bias instructions on judgment in a case where defendant race was varied (Black or White). Using an experimental design, we collected and analyzed quantitative and qualitative data at the individual an…
Death Qualification in Black and White: Racialized Decision Making and Death‐Qualified Juries
Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the very large gap between black and white Americans' current support for capital punishment raises the…
Waste Managers? The New Penology, Crime Fighting, and Parole Agent Identity
This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) "new penology" paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger "risk managers." Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law enforcement role for themselves that primarily takes an individualistic approach to the clientele and…
Rehabilitation as Rhetoric: The Ideal of Reformation in Contemporary Parole Discourse and Practices
This article reports on a set of findings from an ethnographic research project conducted in a parole field office in central California, specifically addressing how the notion of rehabilitation is expressed in parole discourse and practices. It appears that while the agency (and its field agents) still espouse the validity of normalization and reformative goals in this arm of corrections, the resources and commitment to carry out those aims are …
On-line Executions: The Symbolic Use of the Electric Chair in Cyberspace
Execution by electrocution-with its attendant smoke and flames and blood and screams-is a spectacle whose time has passed. The fiery deaths of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina and the recent bloody execution of Allen Lee Davis are acts more befitting a violent murder than a civilized state. Leander Shaw, Florida State Supreme Court, dissenting in Provenzano v. Moore, 1999It's a mockery to care about scorching a man's scalp, or bloodying his nose, in…
Capital punishment as moral imperative: Pro-death-penalty discourse on the Internet
Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one venue where this relationship is evident: among pro-death penalty communications on the Internet. I exa…
Selling ‘securityware’: Transformations in prison commodities advertising, 1949-99
In this article, I examine how the marketing of penal commodities and the use of ‘security’ as a selling point has developed and proliferated over the past 50 years in the US corrections market. Using data obtained from a contextual analysis of display advertisements from the correctional trade periodical, Corrections Today and its predecessors, I trace the transformation of the major message modes of the sales pitches, from how the promoted prod…
Pedophiles and Cyber-predators as Contaminating Forces: The Language of Disgust, Pollution, and Boundary Invasions in Federal Debates on Sex Offender Legislation
As a distinct class of criminals, sex offenders stand out as being particularly subject to the new “risk management” penal strategies that, according to a number of scholars, have come to dominate punishment rhetoric and practices in recent years. Nonetheless, the criminal justice policymaking that targets sex offenders appears to have a more emotionally based underside. In this paper, I examine the emotional drive that appears to undergird conte…
Sarat's When the State Kills and the Transformation of Death Penalty Scholarship
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. David Garland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
The Truth of Verdicts? A Social Psychological Examination of A Theory of the Trial
The Truth of Verdicts? A Social Psychological Examination of A Theory of the Trial
Punishing Images: Jail Cam and the Changing Penal Enterprise
This article explores the use of web cameras inside a local penal facility in Phoenix, Arizona through which jail detainees’ daily routines were broadcast on the Internet over a two-year period. I question whether and how the logic behind broadcasting these penal images and the actual practice of capturing and distributing such images may indicate a significant change in the penal enterprise. In the end, I suggest that this phenomenon further res…
Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence
Research Summary In this article, I have three major aims. First, I examine in detail the role that changes to legal policies and practice have played in the rise of mass incarceration. I look at four distinct aspects of legal change and argue that the law (and legal change) in these varied forms is the engine that has driven prison growth and, therefore, must be addressed in explanations of this phenomenon. This discussion leads to my second maj…
Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale: Understanding and remediating American penal overindulgence
Crack Pipes and Policing: A Case Study of Institutional Racism and Remedial Action in Cleveland
This article uses a case study of selective drug law enforcement in Cleveland, Ohio, to explore the contours of institutional racism in criminal justice policy and practice. Using the multilevel theoretical framework developed by Ian Haney López (2000) that highlights the processes underlying how institutional racism is manifested, I analyze how and why racially discriminatory arrest and charging practices were able to persist in this case as wel…
Mapping the Racial Bias of the White Male Capital Juror: "Jury Composition and the "Empathic Divide
This article examines the nature of racial bias in the death sentencing process. After reviewing the various general explanations for the continued significance of race in capital cases, we report the results of an empirical study in which some aspects of racially biased death sentencing are examined in depth. Specifically, in a simulated capital penalty-phase trial setting where participants were assigned to small group "juries" and given an opp…
Theorizing Punishment: Reflections on Wacquant's Punishing the Poor
In this essay, I consider how Loic Wacquant's Punishing the Poor adds to the diverse and growing body of scholarship about contemporary penal change. I begin with an overview of Wacquant's major arguments and elucidations, then I focus in on how this work fits specifically within theorizations about, and empirical examinations of, late modern punishment. In so doing, I describe the ways in which this work seems to contribute to an ongoing convers…
Theorizing punishment’s boundaries: An introduction
Theorizing the role of the ‘war on drugs’ in US punishment
Numerous scholars have described how the ‘war on drugs’ has played a central role in US penal change, especially its racialized impact. Yet there remain aspects of this ‘war’ that are under-explored in punishment and society scholarship. This article delineates five distinct modes by which the contemporary regulation of drugs in the USA speaks to penal change, and in so doing suggests that its reach is much more diffuse, insidious, and variegated…
Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how hi…
Emotion, Authority, and Death: (Raced) Negotiations in Mock Capital Jury Deliberations
This article explores the role of emotion in the capital penalty‐phase jury deliberations process. It is based on the qualitative analysis of data from ninety video‐recorded four to seven person simulated jury deliberations that examined the influence of race on death sentencing outcomes. The analysis explores when and how emotions are expressed, integrated into the jury's sentencing process, and deployed in penalty‐phase decision making. The fin…
Legal Change and Sentencing Norms in the Wake of Booker: The Impact of Time and Place on Drug Trafficking Cases in Federal Court
The federal sentencing guidelines have lost some authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a series of recent cases that the guidelines are advisory, rather than presumptive, in determining criminal sentences. While these court decisions represent a dramatic legal intervention, sociolegal scholarship suggests that organizational norms are likely to change slowly and less dramatically than the formal law itself. The research report…
Capital Punishment
This essay reviews foundational and cutting‐edge social science research on capital punishment. It first describes policy‐relevant work on the death penalty as legal punishment, and then provides a brief overview of the more recent contributions on capital punishment and social theory. The scope of relevant scholarship is limited to more empirically based social science scholarship on the American death penalty. Specifically, relative to the long…
The calculus of the record: Criminal history in the making of US Federal Sentencing Guidelines
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, developed by the United States Sentencing Commission in the 1980s, appear to exemplify the turn from individualization toward aggregated, rationalized risk management that ostensibly became hegemonic in the late 20th century. In this article, we challenge that presumption by building on Harcourt’s (2007) argument that penal actuarialism emerged as part of the individualization project rather than as a repudiatio…
The Imprisonment Boom of the Late Twentieth Century
This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony d…
Introduction: 20Th Anniversary Special Issue
Political science (32 works) · Law (29 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (27 works) · Criminology (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (14 works) · Social Psychology (12 works)