An in-depth look at
the consequences of New York City’s dramatically expanded policing
of low-level offenses
Felony conviction
and mass incarceration attract considerable media attention these
days, yet the most common criminal-justice encounters are for
misdemeanors, not felonies, and the most common outcome is not
prison. In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative
under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand
enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first
book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people
hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing
experiment.
Drawing on three
years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth
interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of
misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues
that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of
criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and
legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of
arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model--and the
implications are troubling. Kohler-Hausmann shows how significant
volumes of people are marked, tested, and subjected to surveillance
and control even though about half the cases result in some form of
legal dismissal. She describes in harrowing detail how the reach of
America's penal state extends well beyond the shocking numbers of
people incarcerated in prisons or stigmatized by a felony conviction.
Revealing and
innovative, Misdemeanorland shows how the lower reaches of our
criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and
surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal
punishment.
Issa Kohler-Hausmann
is associate professor of law and sociology at Yale University.