Mona Lynch

Discrimination and Instructional Comprehension: Guided Discretion, Racial Bias, and the Death Penalty

This study links two previously unrelated lines of research: the lack of comprehension of capital penalty-phase jury instructions and discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim (Black or White) were varied orthogonally. Dependent measures included a sentencing verdict (life without the possibility of parole or the death penalty), ratings of penalty phase evidence, and a test of instructional comprehension. Results indicated that instructional comprehension was poor overall and that, although Black defendants were treated only slightly more punitively than White defendants in general, discriminatory effects were concentrated among participants whose comprehension was poorest. In addition, the use of penalty phase evidence differed as a function of race of defendant and whether the participant sentenced the defendant to life or death. The study suggest that racially biased and capricious death sentencing may be in part caused or exacerbated by the inability to comprehend penalty phase instructions.

Rehabilitation as Rhetoric The Ideal of Reformation in Contemporary Parole Discourse and Practices

This article reports on a set of findings from an ethnographic research project conducted in a parole field office in central California, specifically addressing how the notion of rehabilitation is expressed in parole discourse and practices. It appears that while the agency (and its field agents) still espouse the validity of normalization and reformative goals in this arm of corrections, the resources and commitment to carry out those aims are in short supply. Consequently, agency actors appear to have constructed the parolee subject as one who is dispositionally flawed, and who is ultimately responsible for his own improvement. The findings are discussed in relation to Simons (1993) analysis of the agencys struggle to construct a plausible account of paroles purpose in the face of shifting structural, political, and institutional demands.

Theorizing punishment’s boundaries: An introduction

Over the past few decades, a body of work known as ‘punishment and society’ has emerged at the juncture of the interdisciplinary fields of criminology and law and society. This line of scholarship has theoretical roots that date back to Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, but it was Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish that stimulated theoretically attuned studies of punishment. In 1990, David Garland’s Punishment and Modern Society provided punishment scholars with a blueprint for theorizing contemporary punishment, by integrating classical and contemporary thinking about the role of penality in our social world. Despite its inter-disciplinary commitment and ‘place’ in the scholarly world, the subfield of punishment and society has been somewhat constricted by its own success. Specifically, it is predominated by macro-level sociological approaches to theorization. Such works have come to define the level of analysis in much of the theoretical scholarship; they have also mapped out the definitional boundaries of the category of ‘punishment’. These contributions have been immensely valuable in revealing the complexities of contemporary penality and its social purposes, but they tend to neglect a number of questions about what constitutes punishment in diverse settings, and are limited in their ability to explain on-the-ground punitive practices, particularly in contexts that challenge traditional understandings of the penal realm. Our goal with this special issue is to expand and invigorate the theory and substance of ‘punishment and society’ scholarship. The articles in this volume explicitly question the taken-for-granted boundaries of punishment, and provide ideographic accounts of penal practices that challenge how objects, subjects, and levels of analysis are defined in most sociological work on contemporary penality. Together, they begin to remake substantive, theoretical, and disciplinary boundaries by directly confronting a number of questions: How have states expanded punitive power through ostensibly non-punitive means, and how do these innovations complicate theorizations about contemporary punishment? Where and how does state punishment overlap with the logics and practices of contemporary immigration control, and do these phenomena differ by locale? Is state punishment really distinct from the processes that precede it—law enforcement, adjudication, and sentencing—and how can punishment theory and empirical scholarship benefit from more fully engaging in these predecessor stages? How can non-sociological analyses be more fully integrated into the theoretical work on punishment? What do all of these things 443303 TCR16210.1177/1362480612443303EditorialTheoretical Criminology 2012

Theorizing the role of the ‘war on drugs’ in US punishment:

Numerous scholars have described how the ‘war on drugs’ has played a central role in US penal change, especially its racialized impact. Yet there remain aspects of this ‘war’ that are under-explored in punishment and society scholarship. This article delineates five distinct modes by which the contemporary regulation of drugs in the USA speaks to penal change, and in so doing suggests that its reach is much more diffuse, insidious, and variegated than suggested by prevailing conceptualizations of the drug war–punishment relationship.

Capital punishment as moral imperative: Pro-death-penalty discourse on the Internet

Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one venue where this relationship is evident: among pro-death penalty communications on the Internet. I examine these messages in part because they seem to reveal, rather explicitly, the affective, symbolic nature of popular support for capital punishment in the USA. I suggest that the death penalty becomes an unproblematic, indeed, preferred method and symbol of justice in this venue through a discursive process which reduces the underlying social issues to a battle between good (i.e. the innocent victims) and evil (i.e. capital murderers). Once so reduced, no costs of capital punishment can outweigh the justice achieved by state executions in the rhetoric of pro-death activists and pundits. Ultimately these communications reveal a set of sensibilities about crime and punishment which seem to long for a detour from the civilizing path, in that the communicators seek to deny any interdependencies or empathies with those who commit violent crime, while working to unleash punishment from its institutional restraints.

Capital Jury Deliberation: Effects on Death Sentencing, Comprehension, and Discrimination

This study focused on whether and how deliberations affected the comprehension of capital penalty phase jury instructions and patterns of racially discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim (Black or White) were varied orthogonally. The participants provided their initial “straw” sentencing verdicts individually and then deliberated in simulated 4–7 person “juries.” Results indicated that deliberation created a punitive rather than lenient shift in the jurors’ death sentencing behavior, failed to improve characteristically poor instructional comprehension, did not reduce the tendency for jurors to misuse penalty phase evidence (especially, mitigation), and exacerbated the tendency among White mock jurors to sentence Black defendants to death more often than White defendants.

Punishing Images Jail Cam and the Changing Penal Enterprise

This article explores the use of web cameras inside a local penal facility in Phoenix, Arizona through which jail detainees’ daily routines were broadcast on the Internet over a two-year period. I question whether and how the logic behind broadcasting these penal images and the actual practice of capturing and distributing such images may indicate a significant change in the penal enterprise. In the end, I suggest that this phenomenon further reshapes contemporary penality into a form of visual entertainment commodity, and as such, may be converging with several other social transformations to fundamentally reconfigure the penal subject.

Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement

This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how historically embedded local politics shape the varied styles and structures of policing that result in racially discriminatory enforcement patterns. Our goal is to begin sketching out a robust framework of ‘place’ as an orientation for examining discretionary local policing practices, especially as they impact marginalized groups and communities of color.

Crack Pipes and Policing: A Case Study of Institutional Racism and Remedial Action in Cleveland

This article uses a case study of selective drug law enforcement in Cleveland, Ohio, to explore the contours of institutional racism in criminal justice policy and practice. Using the multilevel theoretical framework developed by Ian Haney Lopez (2000) that highlights the processes underlying how institutional racism is manifested, I analyze how and why racially discriminatory arrest and charging practices were able to persist in this case as well as how they were eventually reformed. In doing so, I explore the role of institutional empathy (and its withholding) in institutional racism and illustrate how the exploitation of empathy can be used strategically to effect policy change.

Theorizing Punishment: Reflections on Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor

In this essay, I consider how Loic Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor adds to the diverse and growing body of scholarship about contemporary penal change. I begin with an overview of Wacquant’s major arguments and elucidations, then I focus in on how this work fits specifically within theorizations about, and empirical examinations of, late modern punishment. In so doing, I describe the ways in which this work seems to contribute to an ongoing conversation about penality, and then conclude with a discussion of how the arguments in Punishing the Poor might be complicated by attending to recent scholarship that looks at micro-level jurisdictional penal change, and the differences across place.