In effect, court officials, on the whole, legitimate racist and class-biased policing. One common frustration among the disadvantaged criminal defendants I interviewed and observed in Boston was that their defense attorneys rarely attempted to use procedural tools – such as motions to dismiss charges or suppress evidence – to hold police accountable for unjust practices. For working-class and poor people of color, negative encounters with police produce feelings of cynicism and distrust that bleed into their mistrust of court officials, prosecutors and even their own defense attorneys. In my work, I draw a link between the injustices of policing and the injustices of court processing. White people living in privileged communities likely could not imagine such routine, negative interactions with police occurring in their own lives. It has become the norm in many Black communities to be stopped, questioned, abused and arrested by police. Numerous studies in sociology and criminology have documented police surveillance, the way it manufactures crime rates, and the way it fosters cynicism among people of color. What are some of the daily life interactions between communities of color and police that have ramifications in the court system?Ĭommunities of color – especially poor Black, Latino and Native American communities – are routinely surveilled by police. And it is something that has been, no doubt, inflamed by the pandemic, economic inequality and high levels of unemployment. But the upswell of multiracial and cross-class collective outrage is something new, I think. These issues are not new, especially not in poor Black communities. These punitive tools have grown so massive over the last 40 years that even “non-targets,” such as white people and middle-class people, are more likely to have negative encounters with police, courts, jails and prisons than in previous decades. We often think of policing and court processing as less severe forms of system contact, but policing can be just as costly as incarceration a police officer can take your life with little or no accountability. Mass criminalization speaks to state punishment beyond the prison, including policing and court processing. Today, the protests we see erupting in city streets across the country in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many others are symptoms of mass criminalization – of the state’s heavy-handed, race- and class-targeted violence against its civilians.įor me, mass criminalization – unlike terms like mass incarceration – better articulates the vast scope of the problem. How does your work pertain to this moment in the United States? His book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court, which will be released in November, shows how race and class inequalities are embedded in the criminal legal system. society, and how it intersects with racial and economic injustice.”Īs a professor, he has continued to add to the body of work around race and injustice in the U.S. “As I conducted interviews and ethnographic observations among police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges and defendants in courthouses in the Northeast, I began to understand just how massive the legal system’s imprint is in U.S. Matthew Clair (Image credit: Harrison Truong)Ĭlair became interested in criminal justice issues after seeing how the legal system plays a central role in the lives of Black people in the United States.
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