In and Beyond Misdemeanorland

Misdemeanorland provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the lower courts’ response to the implementation of Broken Windows Policing in New York City and the flood of arrests this generated in the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on administrative police and court data, as well as extensive ethnographic observations and interviews with court actors and defendants, Kohler-Hausmann argues that the work of the lower courts, at least in New York City, is best understood as a form of “managerial justice” in which court actors seek to manage people whose governability has been called into question by their arrest. This mode of justice involves requiring and evaluating their interaction with the courts over time – often long periods of time. In developing this conceptual model, and by drawing on rich empirical data to bring its existence and effects to life, Misdemeanorland makes an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning literature on courts and social control more generally. Kohler-Hausmann begins by noting that many more people are arrested for misdemeanor offenses than for felonies, and that many of those entangled in the world of the lower courts are, in the end, neither convicted nor jailed. Still, she emphasises, this entanglement often has a range of destabilising effects and, in the aggregate, reinforce race and class inequality. Insofar as the relevant literature tends to focus on the felony side of the system, it fails to capture the reach of the criminal justice system and misrepresents the typical criminal justice encounter. Understanding how court processes and non-custodial sanctions create a diffuse and consequential mode of social control requires that we attend to the operations and effects of the lower courts. Kohler-Hausmann is particularly interested in how lower-court actors responded to the dramatic uptick in arrests that resulted from the implementation of Broken Windows Policing in New York City. Broken ∗Katherine Beckett is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. Email: kbeckett@wu.edu Criminal Justice Ethics, 2019 Vol. 38, No. 3, 221–229, https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2019.1682263