Lisa L. Miller

What’s violence got to do with it? Inequality, punishment, and state failure in US politics

This paper offers a reframing of the dynamics of crime and punishment in the United States by exploring lethal violence and situating both violence and punishment within the larger capacity of the US political system to shield citizens from a range of social risks. I argue that security from violence is an important state obligation and then illustrate the exceptionally high rates of lethal violence in the US, relative to other rich democracies, and their clustering with a range of other racialized social risks, including poverty and imprisonment. I then provide a framework for understanding the exceptional status of the US by exploring the fragmented, racialized and legalistic institutions of American politics and the role they play in producing a range of socio-economic insecurities. I argue that both violence and punishment in the US can be seen as limited forms of state failure, particularly with respect to African-Americans.

The Representational Biases of Federalism: Scope and Bias in the Political Process, Revisited

In 1960, E.E. Schattschneider noted that every change in the scope of political conflict has a bias; political conflicts that are localized tend to be highly restrictive, while nationalizing conflicts can draw in previously excluded groups. In contrast to this conventional wisdom, this paper suggests that the question of which venues are open to which interests is an empirical one. Lisa L. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University (miller@polisci.rutgers.edu). The author would like to thank Frank Baumgartner, Regina Lawrence, Beth Leech, Michael McCann, and Marie Gottschalk, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts.

Power to the people: Violent victimization, inequality and democratic politics:

Contemporary scholarship on punishment, politics and society generally treats democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix. In this view, when crime comes onto democratic political agendas, it generates perverse political incentives that result in politicians pandering to and/or manipulating mass publics bent on harsh punishment. In this article, I argue that an examination of violent victimization complicates this conventional wisdom. Using violence as a framework, I challenge three fundamental assumptions about the relationship between democracy and crime. From there, I suggest how different democratic institutional arrangements might facilitate broader public participation in crime politics, and how that participation can lead to promoting less, rather than more punishment.

Black women, victimization, and the limitations of the liberal state:

This article challenges contemporary understandings of the US carceral state by confronting the realities of exceptionally high rates of homicide victimization among Black women and considering the implications for equality and understandings of the carceral state. We propose that neither the US state nor the US penal order can be fully understood without taking account of the exceptionally high rates of violence to which Black women are exposed. Conceptions of the carceral state that do not situate criminal justice within the larger context of raced and gendered subject formation depict criminal “justice” as an arena composed almost entirely of adult males. This obscures the realities of how state form contributes not only to criminal justice practices but also to risk of violence. Black women are uniquely situated at the intersection of risk of violence, and risk of experiencing the collateral damage of the carceral state. Without significant attention to issues of connectivity and care, which are directly affected by the carceral state and by inter-personal violence, we cannot fully understand the concepts of “carceral” or “state”.

Introduction to the special issue on the state of the State

The aim of this special issue is to examine the constitutive relationship between the state and penal orders—that is, the uses and structures of criminal law and punishment.1 It investigates how various criminal justice tools—its staff, sanctions, and symbolic resources—help to produce and reproduce particular political entities and how particular political configurations lead to specific penal outcomes. Just as the early modern state depended upon and claimed a monopoly of violence against rule violators to establish its political authority and legitimacy (Garland, 1996; Weber, 1919), 21st-century democratic states continue to use penal power to produce social order. As our contributors show, building on foundational work, policing practices, criminal law, and penal sanctions have been used to shore up political power, define political communities, reflect economic inequalities, and reproduce social, gendered, and racial hierarchies. But they seek to go further, to develop new ways of thinking, mapping, and conceptualizing this mutually constitutive relationship, and to challenge taken for granted concepts of the state and its relationship to punishment. Contributors analyze under-explored sites of penal power, and by doing so recast our understanding of its forms and functions. Over the past few decades, changes in migration, global economic arrangements, and patterns of violence, have posed new challenges for modern states, and new forms of punishment have emerged that are directly tied to state sovereignty, degrees of citizenship, and national identity. These developments have pushed scholars to reconsider extant theories, which often treat state form as exogeneous to penal orders. Many of these new punishment forms and practices—particularly with respect to national borders, immigrants, and marginalized populations—pose challenges to the legitimacy of the state, in particular around principles of equality, citizenship, and territory. Mass migration due to civil conflict and economic devastation, for example, has put pressure on Europe’s most robust welfare states (e.g. Sweden), resulting in the deployment of routine criminal justice processes and procedures to national borders. And violent conflict and criminal activity pose particularly difficult challenges for countries transitioning 724909 TCR0010.1177/1362480617724909IntroductionTheoretical CriminologyIntroduction research-article2017

Book review: Invisible punishment: The collateral consequences of mass imprisonment

‘brooming’ some of the less serious incidents, mediating other cases rather than requesting charges and excluding cases where evidence is less clear-cut. Language operates as evidence, rather than an offense in itself. For example, cases involving language alone (except criminal threats) are not classified as crimes at all. Cases are routinely channeled away from civil rights charges if the only evidence of a bias motive consists of ‘slurs’ made during the course of a crime. Moreover, if other motives are evident, cases are not classified as bias-motivated. These findings should alleviate critics’ concerns about how language is used in these cases and whether the laws are applied too broadly. In fact, a concern raised by Bell is that the laws are most likely under-applied. The unit, however, does not always function smoothly. Bell discusses the organized resistance to the ABTF by the white residents of Gertown, a neighborhood undergoing integration by racial and ethnic outsiders. Despite being only 10 percent of the population, Gertown accounts for more bias-crime incidents than any other neighborhood in Central City. The white residents see themselves as under siege and perceive the ABTF as allied with the minority invaders. They protest the classification of certain incidents involving minority victims as bias-motivated and lobby for the unit to intervene in cases involving white victims. As Bell shows, however, the ABTF is able to buffer itself from the pressure and obstruction it confronts from this community, which is sometimes exercised through their colleagues stationed in the police precinct in Gertown. The ABTF is able to do this because of its strong culture and autonomy and the commitment of the detectives who work in the unit, many of whom started off skeptical about the unit’s goals, but later underwent what Bell calls a ‘conversion’ – typically as a result of an experience with a victim of a bias crime. At its heart this is an outstanding study of police decision making and classification and, thus, its implications stretch beyond the confines of hate crime law enforcement. Bell offers a model of decision making that emphasizes official procedures, organizational norms, interpretive schemas, relations between the unit and other segments of the larger police organization and relations between the unit and the communities it polices as factors that shape how officers apply the law. The result is an excellent contribution to research on policing.