Immigration detention is formally not a punishment, but governments do use it to deter illegal residence. This study examines whether and how immigration detention affects detainees’ decision-making processes regarding departure, thereby possibly resulting in de facto “specific deterrence.” Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted in the Netherlands with 81 immigration detainees, and their case files were examined. Evidence is found for a limited, selective deterrence effect at the level of detainee's attitudes: most respondents considered immigration detention a painful and distressing experience, but only a minority—mostly labor migrants without family ties in the Netherlands—developed a preference to return to their country of citizenship in hopes of ending their exposure, including repeated exposure, to the detention. In line with defiance theory, we find that eventual deterrent effects mostly occurred among detainees who also attributed some measure of legitimacy to their detention. Among some detainees, the detention experience resulted in a preference to migrate to a neighboring European country.

Responding to calls to “decenter” American penality beyond the carceral apparatus, this article ethnographically examines administrative process and dissects how it interlocks with criminal justice. To do so, it draws on an admittedly unusual, but theoretically generative, case: administrative gun boards, charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. While scholars have examined gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice, less attention has been paid to gun licensing as a state practice. Drawing on observations of over 900 cases from gun board meetings in two counties in Michigan, this paper examines how administrative process mimics, supplements, and facilitates criminal justice through three mechanisms: procedural pains, in which administrative process resembles criminal justice; parallel punishment, in which administrative process supplements criminal justice through withholding of benefits, entitlements or licenses; and valve-turning, in which administrative process funnels, or threatens to funnel, claimants into the criminal justice system. Revealing how administrative process and criminal justice become mutually reinforcing, the findings extend and integrate scholarship that shows the material, symbolic, and psychic implications of criminal justice contact, on the one hand, with the increased tendency of administrative contexts to resemble criminal justice institutions, on the other.

Over the past decade, inter- and intra-movement coalitions composed of organizations within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) and immigrant rights movements have formed at the local level. These coalitions speak to a massive organizing effort that has achieved some rights campaign successes. However, coalition unity that culminated in “wins” like marriage equality came at a cost. While both movements expanded and unified, they simultaneously ossified around goals that matter to the most privileged segments of their respective communities. The result is a paradox: coalitions do sometimes form within and across movements, promote enduring unity across seemingly divergent movements, and facilitate rights campaign “wins.” However, coalitions simultaneously reinforce hierarchical exclusions through the continued marginalization of issues that uproot conventional power dynamics, like police violence, economic inequality, and gender justice. This essay argues that the construction of a common “civil rights past” identity within coalitions can help to explain this paradox. The development of this collective identity expands movements, occasionally thwarting the power dynamics responsible for the centering of the interests of the most privileged constituencies within social movements. However, the episodic nature of rights-based campaigns simultaneously contains and undermines the formation of this collective identity, reinforcing movement divisions based on race, gender, and class.

On July 10, 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland was stopped by State Trooper Officer Brian Encinia for failing to signal a lane change. What began as a routine traffic stop quickly devolved into shouting, a physical confrontation, and Bland's subsequent arrest. We use discourse analysis to examine the rapid escalation of this encounter with a focus on procedural justice (Sunshine & Tyler 2003) and the dialogic approach to legitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe 2012). In analyzing the transcript of Sandra Bland's traffic stop, we address several key questions: How is procedural justice manifested linguistically? Can the dialogic legitimacy framework be used to understand the dynamics of individual police-citizen interactions? The conclusions of this analysis provide an interdisciplinary view of how procedural justice and legitimacy are manifested and negotiated in a police-citizen interaction.

How and why do groups employ law strategically in different venues? This article combines theoretical and methodological insights from sociolegal and interest-group studies to investigate how and why nonfederally recognized Indian groups used administrative and legislative strategies for federal recognition from 1977 to 2012. By detailing the circumstances leading Indian groups to employ varying strategies, it provides a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic interplay among the goals, motivations, and constraints influencing groups to use administrative and legislative processes over time.

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely been unexamined. That is surprising given that international legal prohibitions against human rights atrocities are designed to be enforced by domestic courts applying domestic criminal law. We argue that domestic criminal laws against genocide and crimes against humanity facilitate human rights prosecutions in post-authoritarian states by helping to overcome formal legal roadblocks to prosecution, such as retroactivity, amnesties, immunities, and statutes of limitations. Using original data on domestic atrocity laws and human rights prosecutions in new democracies, we find that atrocity laws increase the speed with which new democracies pursue prosecutions, as well as the overall numbers of trials they initiate and complete.

Since the 1990s, the number of women in Chinese courts has been increasing steadily. Many women judges have risen to mid-level leadership positions, such as division chiefs and vice-chiefs, in the judicial bureaucracy. However, it remains difficult for women to be promoted to high-level leadership positions, such as vice-presidents and presidents. What explains the stratified patterns of career mobility for women in Chinese courts? In this article, we argue that two social processes are at work in shaping the structural patterns of gender inequality: dual-track promotion and reverse attrition. Dual-track promotion is dominated by a masculine and corrupt judicial culture on the political track that prevents women from obtaining high-level promotions, but still allows them to rise to mid-level leadership positions on the professional track based on their expertise and work performance. Reverse attrition enables women to take vacant mid-level positions left by men who exit the judiciary to pursue other careers. Taken together, the vertical and horizontal mobility of judges in their career development presents a processual logic to gender inequality and shapes women's structural positions in Chinese courts, a phenomenon that we term the “elastic ceiling.”

Research on punitive attitudes has, so far, focused largely on people's retributive attitudes toward offenders. However, a large theoretical body of research indicates that concerns about different types of offenses and victims may be just as important in structuring punitive attitudes. Particularly, Moral Foundations Theory suggests that distinct punitive attitudes may be based in intuitive moral concerns (“moral foundations”) about offenses that victimize individuals, groups, and the “divine,” referring to bodily purity or sanctity. In this study, I develop measures of what I term “victim-centered punitiveness,” and use data from a nationwide survey of adult Americans (N = 915) to compare the sources of offender- and victim-centered punitiveness. As expected, different moral foundations shape offender- and victim-centered punitiveness in different ways, suggesting that they have distinct intuitive, moral bases. Other factors, including racial resentment, also have distinct effects on each type of punitiveness.

This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). This re-labeling begins a process of othering, which ends in categorical exclusions for both immigrants and supermax prisoners. As individuals experience this categorical exclusion, they cross multiple borders and boundaries—often against their will—moving from prison to detention center to other countries beyond the U.S. border, and from isolation to prison to “free” society. In both cases, the state action that subjects experience as punishment is civil and, therefore, nominally not punitive. Ultimately, excluded individuals find themselves in a space of legal nonexistence. By examining these common processes and experiences, we argue that a new kind of subject is revealed: a disintegrating subject (as opposed to a juridical or disciplinary subject) whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state.

Individuals’ choices about whether to resolve disputes via litigation can be affected by their relationship with the potential defendant. I explore whether gender also plays a role, with women being less aggressive in legal tactics than men as their connection to the potential defendant becomes closer. The study uses a survey design with vignettes to explore decisions across the legal process, including the willingness to sue, responses to settlement offers, and whether or not to appeal. The survey varies the extent of the relationship between the potential plaintiff and defendant and includes two types of injuries—a “slip and fall” and pay discrimination. The findings reveal that once litigation has begun, women have a greater preference than men for mediation in both types of cases, but they are more resistant than men to settlement in discrimination disputes. Neither men nor women's legal strategies seem to be affected by relational distance.

The use of paramilitary methods in civil policing tasks has become common in Western police agencies. Despite propositions that such methods should undermine the relationship between the police and the public, the effect of paramilitary policing on public trust in the police has not been empirically tested. In the present study, we examine this question in the context of protest policing, which has become a major concern for Western police agencies. Using a survey of 470 protesters who participated in “Occupy” protest events in Israel in 2012, we find that the perceived use of paramilitary methods has an independent and negative effect on trust, stronger than that of police effectiveness and the “neutrality” component of procedural justice. In-depth interviews suggest that the significance of paramilitarism may be the result of a sense of alienation and criminalization it elicits among protesters who generally perceive themselves as law-abiding citizens.

Civil legal problems are common in everyday life, but the costs of obtaining legal representation create barriers to legal action and contribute to disparities in access to justice. Some individuals, however, may have informal access to legal assistance through personal network ties with lawyers, enhancing their responses to justiciable problems. In this study, we draw from theories of social capital and network formation to examine the distribution and mobilization of network-based legal expertise. Using nationally representative survey data, we find that network-based access to lawyers is widespread, and most people who have ties to lawyers expect to informally mobilize legal assistance when facing a problem. But people who are most likely to afford formal legal representation are also most likely to have informal access to lawyers. Thus, while informal access to lawyers may shape responses to legal problems, it may also exacerbate inequalities in experiences with civil justice events.