Ethnographies of Race, Crime, and Justice: Toward a Sociological Double-Consciousness

Abstract

This review discusses contemporary developments in qualitative research on race, crime, and criminal justice, focusing on ethnographic studies of race and policing, criminal justice, prisons, and mass incarceration. These ethnographies inform us about the day-to-day contexts in which crime, law, and punishment are produced. They help to make visible structures of power that contribute to inequality, push for a more reflexive approach to ethnography, and sophisticate our understanding of culture. A methodological paradigm has emerged that informs the research process and helps us understand the root causes and consequences of some of the most pressing issues in the United States: race and racism in the justice system, police harassment, police violence, police–community relations, antiauthoritarian social movements, crime prevention, and reentry. This body of scholarship is collectively developing a more reflexive paradigm in ethnography, which we term the sociological double-consciousness approach.

Security Culture: Surveillance and Responsibilization in a Prisoner Reentry Organization

“…The related field of ethnographies of race, crime, and justice also anticipated many of the issues that were present at my fieldsite (Rios, Carney, and Kelekay 2017). At a minimum, the spatially concentrated and racially disproportionate effects of mass incarceration were readily apparent at my fieldsite given that 86 percent of Afterward's clientele was black.…”

“…I went into the field with broad interest in mass incarceration and its consequences particularly with respect to race and urban poverty. In this way, this current research follows in the tradition of ethnographies of race, crime, and justice, as described by Rios, Carney, and Kelekay (2017) in their annual review article. In the article, they put forward a reflexive sociology of double-consciousness as a methodological orientation that is explicitly derived from the accumulated practice and scholarship of ethnographic research on race, crime, and justice.…”

“…Ethnographers of race, crime, and justice have been concerned about the significance that the social identity of ethnographers has for the kind of work they produce (Rios, Carney, and Kelekay 2017). The primary concern is that when an ethnographer who is an outsider observes a group of people that is socially marginalized, that their interpretive framework is likely to be prejudiced and wrongheaded in a manner similar to a colonialist eighteenth-century anthropologist with distinctions between primitive and civilized peoples (Steinberg 2007).…”

Deportation Decisions: Judicial Decision-Making in an American Immigration Court

“…In offering a framework of immigration judges as street-level bureaucrats, this article also demonstrates the value of studying the viewpoints of agents of the law-not only those of its targets. Ranging from Minutemen who patrol the Mexico-U.S. border (Shapira 2017(Shapira [2013) to police agencies who cooperate with federal immigration officers (Armenta 2017), these actors contribute to social exclusion (Rios et al 2017). Objective dimensions of exclusion encoded into immigration law are one part of this dynamic; the beliefs and actions of those who interpret and implement the law are another.…”

“…In-depth data on judges' real-time decision-making-including but not limited to asylum and bond hearings-would improve our understanding of the social processes underlying removal outcomes. In addition, theorizing how immigration judges, key actors in the removal process, make decisions alongside the structural, organizational, and personal constraints they may perceive to their decision-making could shed light on how their decisions perpetuate the social control capacity of the federal immigration regime (see Rios et al 2017: 500-501).…”