This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.ishments. Unfortunately, much of this expanding literature has focused on the experiences and impacts of systems of monetary sanctions on people who are Black, Latinx, or White-
Native Americans and Monetary SanctionsroBert stewa rt, Br ie a n na wat ters, v eronica Horow it z, rya n P. l a rson, Br i a n sa rgen t, a nd cHr istoPHer uggen Native Americans are disproportionately affected by the criminal legal system, yet comparative analyses of criminal legal outcomes and experiences among racial and ethnic groups rarely center the experiences of Native Americans. This multimethod study examines how monetary sanctions are affecting Native American populations in Minnesota. Drawing on administrative criminal court data and qualitative fieldwork, we find that Native Americans are subject to among the largest overall legal financial obligations (LFOs) in criminal court and carry the largest average LFO debt loads relative to other racial and ethnic groups in Minnesota, particularly when proximal to tribal lands. Moreover, monetary sanctions exacerbate existing poverty and spatial isolation in rural areas, compounding and further entrenching historical, systemic disadvantages that Native communities already face. We contextualize these findings within the broader history of U.S. settler colonialism, resource extraction, and dispossession.
Readers coming from sociology should be aware, however, that these chapters do not read like conventional sociology-with references to the classic sociological literature (in social movement or consumption studies) and assessed in their relation to theory. This is probably not surprising, since the authors are primarily historians; they can be forgiven for not being sociologists. But, notwithstanding an introductory chapter that hints at broader themes, an opportunity was lost to connect the moments documented in the volume to other work that transcends the particulars of the cases. Even if a more robust appeal to sociological work were not practical, some additional analytical work heresuch as assessing the cases in relation to each other-would have been a welcome addition. Perhaps the easiest solution would have been to end the volume with a chapter or two that synthesized themes from the preceding chapters and, if possible, made connections to work being done in other areas. As it is, the volume ends with an engaging and well-told intellectual history of the idea of ''demand'' in economic writing (Chapter 24), but I would have appreciated something that evaluated the chapters more holistically.That said, the contributors to this volume might rightly respond to this critique by arguing that sociologists often get so caught up with trying to make broad claims that they pay insufficient attention to the details. If that critique has some truth to it, and I believe it does, then it would seem good practice for a sociologist of social movements (or consumption) to occasionally take time to become, simply, reacquainted with the raw stuff that, one hopes, informs their theorizing. That is, it would make sense for sociologists to read the histories of movements and their participants without, necessarily, an eye toward constructing or testing theory. In that light, this volume is a worthy resource.
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