exam 1 intro -ch 3 cjus 3500

ch 2

CHAPTER 2 Criminology and the Study of Class, Race, Gender, and Crime The story of criminology is the story of three revolutions: the revolution of reason, of science, and of reflexivity. These classical, positivist, and critical revolutions, respectively, are spaced roughly one hundred years apart, at 1764, 1876, and 1976—although each of these schools of criminology has also coexisted more or less throughout the past 250 years. Today, each of the three schools of criminology still has its adherents and is expanding its ideas, methods, and research, and each of these schools still has its relevance to the varied practices of, respectively, equal, restorative, and social justice. These revolutions in criminological thinking or theory may also be thought of as moving from supernatural to naturalistic, to scientific, to critical explanations of crime and justice. For most of early Western history, the dominant theory of crime was the "demonic perspective" (Pfohl 1985) that saw crime as sinful behavior or an offense against God (or the gods). People engaged in crime because evil forces either possessed them or they had succumbed to the temptations of evil forces, such as Satan or demons. Brutal methods, including torture, were used to discover and to punish those who were possessed or who had surrendered to the devil. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the demonic perspective was dominant. Then, it was challenged by a group of individuals who would become known as classical criminologists. Characteristic of the Enlightenment, classical theory argued that crime was the result of natural, observable, or "worldly" forces, such as the absence of swift, certain, and effective punishments. According to the classical perspective, all people were more or less equal, rational, and free willed; they had self-control and chose to engage or not engage in crime because they were rationally pursuing their own interests, trying to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. The response to the pursuit of self-interested criminal behavior, therefore, became the rational employment of "swift, certain, and appropriate" punishment to deter potential offenders who calculated the pleasure of crime versus the pain of punishment. This criminology was developed in reaction to the harsh, corrupt, and often arbitrary nature of criminal justice in the 1700s and was inspired by a desire to bring about rational legal reforms. This classical perspective dominated criminology from the late 1700s until the late 1800s, when it was challenged by a more modern and scientific approach. The positivist school, with its biological, psychological, and sociological orientations to the study of criminal behavior, argues that criminals are not in fact normal, rational human beings who choose to engage in crime to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. Instead, criminals are viewed as different from noncriminals—and it is their differences that compel them to engage in crime. Such "criminogenic properties" call for intervention, reform, treatment, and reconstruction to environmentally control crime and to socially engineer individual criminals away from deviance. While still the dominant model or paradigm in criminology today, positivism has been successfully challenged by the emergence of the critical school of criminology in the 1970s, which was part of a larger philosophical critique of "value-free, objective, and neutral" social and behavioral science. Rooted in the sixties and in the crisis in American institutions, critical criminology in the United States reflected the reality that with racism, sexism, imperialism, and other types of inequality, social justice remained an American dream. Both classical and positivist criminologies ignored, and thus left unchallenged, the powerful interests that benefit from the attention paid to crime in the streets rather than crime in the suites; both criminologies lacked concern about inequality, and so recreated it. In contrast, critical criminologies—feminist, peacemaking, queer, green (environmental), constitutive, and so on—turn their focuses not only to the social relations of crime and punishment but also to the very structural forces that sustain them. They examine, for example, the mean streets of American inner cities, complete with drive-by shootings, as well as the wilding of a deregulated Wall Street, where gangs of executives rob people through very sophisticated Ponzi schemes and financial weapons of mass destruction. Finally, the critical school of criminology focuses its attention on social, political, and economic justice rather than on retributive and therapeutic justice per se. The institutional and structural emphases of critical criminologists would move away from policies and practices of adversarialism (e.g., war-making) and toward those of mutualism (e.g., peacemaking). In general, critical criminology focuses on the "justice" part of criminal justice by striving to bring about more equitable and peaceful societies, locally and globally. Criminology is the study of the nature and causes of crime as well as the treatment of offenders. It includes theories of criminal behavior as well as criminal law and the operation of the criminal justice system. There are essentially two types of criminology at work in the contemporary world: the positivists and classicists are both "mainstream" criminologists, with "critical" criminologists being the other type. Most mainstream criminology uses the individual as the unit of analysis and is at the micro level; it examines a person's beliefs and characteristics in connection to crime. A minority of mainstream research is at the ecological or macro level, which studies why crime varies across neighborhoods, cities, and larger areas. Such ecological analysis is important because many criminals say they got into crime because it was what was going on in their neighborhood. One of the most in-depth reviews of the research, covering 214 macro-level studies, concluded that "resource/economic deprivation theory" was "well supported" with "relatively strong effects" that "remain stable across various methodological conditions." (Pratt and Cullen 2005: 412-13) Mainstream criminology debates whether the mechanisms involve strain (limited legitimate opportunities and high cultural value placed on economic success), relative or absolute deprivation, concentrated disadvantage, poverty, reduced loyalty to an unfair society, social disorganization or reduced collective efficacy (the ability of people to come together to solve community problems), and/or subcultural values. In contrast, critical criminology is "informed by sociology, which concerns itself with meaning and power, and understands that humans create cultural solutions to their life problems in social structures which are largely not of their own making" (Young 2011: 222). Young people, for example, do not choose to be born into a poor, high-crime neighborhood. While they do exercise choices within it, understanding neighborhood crime also requires examining economic policies about employment, public assistance benefits, education, resource allocations, and taxes. Factors such as the distribution of income, wealth, and economic power shape these policies and the context within which individuals make choices. In neighborhoods with high arrest rates, criminal justice policy that reinforces differential arrest rates and economic power thus needs to be part of larger conversations about who benefits and who bears the burdens of contemporary social arrangements (Reiman and Leighton 2017). Further, the focus on human liberation and social justice shifts the question, "Why do we need 'social disorganization' theory—can't there be less of the festering inner-city streets there to have theory about?" (Tregea 2014: 8, emphasis in original). Whatever their perspective, researchers approach topics of study with a theory implicitly or explicitly in mind. Their theories, perspectives, and assumptions thus shape decisions about what constitutes a problem worthy of study (or publication), what method is appropriate for the study, and what the results mean. Further, researchers are embedded in a world where class, race, and gender dynamics affect many aspects of life: theories of crime, approaches to studying criminal law, and understanding the operation of the criminal justice system—and the ability of a researcher to get published and to be seen as a credible criminologist. Thus, the first part of this chapter elaborates on the opening narrative by further exploring the classical, positive, and critical perspectives on criminology. The second part of the chapter explores the roles that class, race, and gender have played in the field of criminology. Classical, Positive, and Critical Criminologies Classical criminology emerged during the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries in the midst of the Enlightenment in Europe, especially in France and England because of their strong emphasis on rationalism and humanitarianism. As part of a reaction to the harsh and barbaric punishments administered by a highly arbitrary state and the many rebellions and occasional revolution, the classical school of criminology set out to study the relationship of citizens to the state's legal structure. It emphasized reforming the state's arbitrary, ineffective, and cruel systems of administering punishment, which would result in increased legitimacy for the state and its rule of law. Influenced by part of two new doctrines, the social contract and free will, classical criminologists adopted the view that "reason and experience, rather than faith and superstition, must replace the excesses and corruption of feudal societies" (Beirne and Messerschmidt 1991: 286). Classical criminology builds on the idea of the social contract, Thomas Hobbes's (1588-1679) notion that people create government and civil society rather than pursue their own narrow self-interests in a perpetual, unproductive "war of all against all." Other philosophers explored the idea of a social contract, not as a historic event but as a theory that citizens submit to government in exchange for order, represented by the idea of an agreement (a contract) that specified the rights and duties of both people and the government: citizens were to "surrender some measure of their individuality so that government [could] enact and enforce laws in the interests of the common good; the government, in return, [was to] agree to protect the common good but not to invade the natural, inviolable liberties and rights of individual citizens" (Beirne and Messerschmidt 1991: 287). As part of the Enlightenment agenda, the doctrine of free will asserted that men, at least those who were free and who possessed property, rationally and voluntarily chose to participate in the social contract. Further, "those who challenged the social contract, those who decided to break its rules, and those who pursued harmful pleasures and wickedness were liable to be punished for their misdeeds" (Beirne and Messerschmidt 1991: 287). The two principal classical theorists were Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), both of whom applied the doctrines of free will and rational, pleasure-maximizing choices to the study of crime and punishment. Reacting against the cruel and inhumane legal practices of the time, these two leading classical criminologists objected to the inequities in the administration of the criminal law. They proposed substantive and procedural reforms of penal justice consistent with their conceptions of human life, reforms that sought to balance the good of society with the rights of the individual. Human beings were to be viewed as responsible for their own actions because they were rational and free to engage in rightful or wrongful behavior. Accordingly, punishment was to fit the social harm caused by the crime, with the formal and institutionalized reactions to crime more important than the informal and individualized efforts to control crime. Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, classical theory has been an integral part of legal and economic thought, and it has influenced the nature of punishment and sentencing in this society, moving it toward and then away from treatment as a rationale for punishment. Recent related approaches would include "crime as rational choice" and "routine activity theory" developed in the 1980s and later. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of positivism, which began to study crime as a social phenomenon and furthered a scientifically based criminology. Relying on the point of view of the natural sciences and borrowing from their methodology, positivist criminology sought to analyze crime not by speculation and observation alone but also by the collection of scientific "facts" through systematic data collection and analysis. The positivist analyses of crime, following such disciplines as physics, chemistry, and biology, began a process that still continues of uncovering, explaining, and predicting the ways in which observable facts occurred in regular patterns. Positivist criminology turned its focus away from law and crime and toward behavior as a reaction to the failures of classical criminology to stem the rising tides of criminality through moral reformation (e.g., religious teachings) and humanitarian reform (e.g., incarceration rather than corporal or capital punishment) and to differentiate between delinquent and pathological inmates (who included the likes of syphilitics, alcoholics, idiots, vagabonds, immigrants, prostitutes, and petty as well as professional thieves). Based on a variety of determining forces or causal factors, positivist criminologists also began to assert that the "treatment should fit the criminal" rather than the "punishment should fit the crime." In effect, positivist criminology maintained that criminal actions were not the product of free wills but rather arose as a result of biological, psychological, economic, and social forces that propelled individuals into engaging in them. One of the most influential early positivists was the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874). Using scientific methods and social statistics, he set out to develop a "social mechanics" of crime in which he attempted to demonstrate that the same lawlike regularity existing in the world of nature also existed in society. Quetelet argued that there were many causes of crime that could be divided up into three categories: accidental (wars, famines, tsunamis), variable (personality), and constant (age, gender, occupation). Society, too, was a cause of crime, but Quetelet ultimately concluded that crime had biological causes. Other influential theorists came from the fields of anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry in the early and middle nineteenth century, such as Francis Gall's work on phrenology (head shape), Gregor Mendel's work on genetics, Charles Darwin's work on evolution, and Benjamin Rush's work on the diseases of the mind. Biology found its criminological proponent in the father of modern criminology, Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909). Rounding out the Italian school of positivism were two of Lombroso's students. First, Enrico Ferri (1856-1929) argued for a sociopolitical criminality that emphasized the interrelatedness of social, economic, and political factors that contribute to crime. Second, Raffaele Garofalo (1852-1934) argued for a doctrine of "natural crimes," a social Darwinist approach that viewed crimes as offenses "against the law of nature." Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, positivist criminologists debated the relative importance for crime of nature versus nurture, or heredity versus social environment. The turn of the twentieth century had already seen the rise and fall of biological determinism as exemplified by the discrediting of Lombroso's "born criminal," who was an "atavistic throwback" to an earlier evolutionary stage. Rising to replace biology in popularity was the psychogenesis school of criminal causation, influenced by the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), followed by the rise of sociology and the related influence of sociologist-criminologist Edwin Sutherland, who presented his theory of "differential association" in 1939. During the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century, the powers of positivism and the methods of quantitative science have dominated much of criminology. Each of the theoretical orientations or schools of positivist criminology has continued to develop, including those exploring the relationship between crime and individual traits, social disorganization, learning, anomie/strain, control, and labeling. The past several decades also witnessed the rise of integrated theories within (and without) positivist criminology. Among the shortcomings of positivism is its overemphasis on individual as compared with social or organizational analyses of criminality and the belief that changes in the behavior of offenders can occur independent of changes in the social conditions, including the political and economic arrangements. The newest school is critical criminology. Almost fifty years old, this school first emerged as radical criminology and now encompasses feminist, left-realist, peacemaking, constitutive, newsmaking, cultural, postmodern, green (or environmental), queer, and anarchist perspectives. Despite the diversity of critical criminologies, they have in common an agreement on the limitations of criminological knowledge and justice policy inherent in the classical and positivist criminologies. For example, critical criminologists are skeptical of the rational and positivist belief about objectivity and point out that there are no "value-free" standpoints—everyone has some assumptions and values. Certain assumptions and points of view may seem "natural" or objective because they are widely shared by the dominant groups, but they contain hidden values that can reproduce existing inequalities. Critical criminologists therefore acknowledge their subjectivity, that they are part of a moral and political endeavor. Finally, with their rejection of mechanistic conceptions about how facts are related and gathered, critical criminologists typically do not present causal models of crime; research about crime and justice revolves around both social and cultural interactions as well as the structural relations of the political economy as these intersect with the everyday activities of people (Barak 2009). The emergence of a critical criminology in part represents a departure from the traditional practices of criminology that have focused attention on changing the behavior of the lawbreakers either through punishment (classical criminology) or treatment (positivist criminology). Not that critical criminology is unconcerned with punishment and treatment or with reforming the administration of criminal justice—on the contrary, it is—but it prefers to locate these changes within the contexts of social, political, and economic justice. Critical criminology is thus concerned not so much with "law and order," but "whose law?" and "what order?" (Chambliss and Mankoff 1976)—that is, with the power relations involved in the law, the fairness of social order that law is protecting, and solutions that promote justice rather than simply repress criminals. In sum, unlike classical and positivist criminologists, critical criminologists are also reflexive criminologists, meaning they question the privilege that goes with having one's viewpoint be seen as "objective" and how such privileged standpoints and "knowledge" contribute to inequality. They have turned the activity of explanation back on itself: in the process of reflection and introspection, critical criminology asks about "first principles," such as the basic assumptions and thought processes of criminological inquiry that generate our "knowledge" about crime. Morally and politically, critical criminology questions the status quo, official versions of reality, and prevailing ideologies about the "solutions" in crime control. Critical criminology represents alternative modes of analysis and better pathways to human liberation and crime reduction in all its forms, but it also remains committed to empirically supporting its scholarship and interventions into policy formation. Class and Criminology Social and economic class are generally discussed less than race or gender. Indeed, analysis of the distribution of income and wealth happens less than reaffirmations that most people are middle class and "anyone can make it if they try hard enough." Unfortunately, both income and wealth are unequally distributed, and class mobility is more limited than most people would like to believe. These assertions are developed in chapter 3, and this section reviews some of the important ways that understanding class, inequality, and economic power relates to criminology. For example, criminological theory is frequently based on an unquestioning acceptance of how the criminal law defines crime. But class is related to political power and lawmaking, so it is also deeply implicated in understanding what has been defined as crime and why almost fifty years of being "tough on crime" has hardly applied to white-collar crime. Economic resources also play a role in the working of a justice system to process those defined as criminal. The first part of this section provides an overview of these issues, followed by a discussion of the link between inequality and crime and the relative neglect of white-collar, corporate, and governmental crime. Crime theory frequently assumes that criminal law is a reflection of consensus rather than the outcome of a political process that includes class conflict and class biases. As Jeffrey Reiman notes, "Criminology is in the unusual position of being a mode of social inquiry whose central concept is defined officially, by governments," so "politics openly, necessarily, insinuates itself into the heart of criminology. Political systems hand criminology a ready-made research agenda" (Reiman and Leighton 2017: 232). Large corporations and wealthy individuals lobby lawmakers to ensure that harmful behavior of the powerful is minimally criminalized, so when criminologists focus on street crime and the crimes of the poor, it is seen as a "natural state of affairs" rather than as an expression of inequality and privilege. Criminology develops theories about the criminality of the poor rather than examining harms of the rich. In turn, the criminal law's controlling of the offenses of the poor rather than the offenses of the rich appears to reflect the legitimacy of an agreed-on definition of "dangerous" crime and typical criminals. When crime theory unreflectively takes the criminal law as a given, the fiction of crime as neutral law sets in (Platt 1974). Working within the confines of "crime" as defined by the law cedes control of criminology to lawmakers and the political process that produces criminal law. Thus, many social harms—environmental pollution, workplace injuries, defective products, neocolonialism, and crimes against humanity—are excluded from study, even though they present more of a threat to people's well-being and security than much of what is officially designated as crime (Barak 1991; Reiman and Leighton 2017). Among the main theorists in exposing the myth of the neutral criminal law were the nineteenth-century philosophers and political economists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who noted that the law, along with the order it upholds, is one based on a very unequal distribution of property and resources. Marx and Engels thus "insisted that the institutions of the state and law, and the doctrines that emerge from them, serve the interests of the dominant economic class" (Beirne and Messerschmidt 2000: 110). For them, crime was not about the defects of morality or biology, but rather about the defects of society and the product of the exploitation and alienation caused by the repressive conditions of industrial capitalism. Subsequent Marxian analyses of crime and crime control in the United States can be subdivided into "instrumental" and "structural" models of crime and criminal control. Some of the earlier work, for example, of Richard Quinney (1977), is representative of the instrumental model. He argued that within the overall conditions of the capitalist political economy, two kinds of crimes emerge: crimes of domination and crimes of accommodation. Crimes of domination include "crimes of control" (i.e., acts by the police and the FBI in violation of civil liberties), "crimes of government" (i.e., political acts such as Watergate, Iran-Contragate, or torturing suspected terrorists), "crimes of economic domination" (i.e., corporate acts involving price-fixing or pollution), and "crimes of social injury" (i.e., acts that may not be illegal but that deny basic human rights, such as racism, sexism, and economic exploitation). The crimes of domination, according to the instrumentalist view, are necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist system itself. In contrast, relatively powerless people of the lower and working classes commit crimes of accommodation. Quinney identified three crimes of accommodation, or adaptation to the oppressive conditions of capitalism and to the domination of the capitalist class: "predatory crimes" (i.e., burglary, robbery, drug dealing), "personal crimes" (i.e., murder, assault, rape), and "crimes of resistance" (i.e., protests, sabotage). For Quinney, the real (greater) danger to society comes from the crimes of domination rather than the crimes of accommodation. However, the former acts are not criminalized (or are minimally so) because they serve the interests of the ruling classes; the latter acts are criminalized and punished as they threaten the political and economic status quo. Hence, crime control becomes class control. As an example, consider the following quotation taken from one of the founding fathers of the classical school, Beccaria, in his book, Essay on Crimes and Punishments. In trying to reason through the appropriate punishment for an offender, he takes the imagined voice of the criminal: What are these laws that I am supposed to respect, that place such a great distance between me and the rich man? He refuses me the penny I ask of him and, as an excuse, tells me to seat at work he knows nothing about. Who made these laws? Rich and powerful men who have never deigned to visit the squalid huts of the poor, who have never had to share a crust of moldy bread amid the innocent cries of hungry children and the tears of a wife. Let us break these bonds, fatal to the majority and only useful to a few indolent tyrants; let us attack justice at its source. I will return to my natural state of independence; I shall at least for a little time live free and happy with the fruits of my courage and industry. The day will perhaps come for my sorrow and repentance, but it will be brief, and for a single day of suffering I shall have many years of liberty and of pleasures. (quoted in Vold and Bernard 1986: 29) The speaker points out the social injuries that are part of the crimes of domination that help secure the unequal distribution of resources. At the same time, the speaker advocates unspecified crimes of accommodation in response to oppression. George Vold and Thomas Bernard (1986) note that the revolutionary implication behind the passage is obvious and that crimes of need could be better prevented by a more equal distribution of money than by the severity of the penal law. (Instead, Beccaria argues that the death penalty is an ineffective deterrent that should be replaced by the more protracted suffering of life imprisonment.) In contrast to the instrumental view, William Chambliss (1988) articulates a structural-contradictions theory of crime and class control, in which recognition is given to the resistance and pressures from other classes besides the ruling classes. In his model, Chambliss identifies certain contradictions inherent within capitalism, such as those between profits, wages, and consumption. These contradictions ultimately culminate in crime as low wages mean underclasses cannot consume the goods that they were socialized to believe are necessary. One solution for these underclasses is to resort to criminal or illegal behavior. The state then responds to these acts in the name of crime control. Research on the link between social disadvantage and crime is no longer a priority as it once was for a brief period during President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, and inequality is rarely an explanatory factor, and reducing inequality is even less frequently a recommended policy. By not being studied, or considered appropriate for policy recommendation, the current level of inequality becomes taken for granted and seen as natural. Among those who look at issues related to class, an important finding is that poverty itself is not the key, because "if that was the case, then graduate students would be very dangerous people indeed" (Currie 1998: 134). The important theoretical concepts relate to inequality, relative deprivation, and blocked opportunities. As Elliott Currie (1998: 134) points out, the important contribution to crime and violence is "the experience of life year in, year out at the bottom of a harsh, depriving, and excluding social system [that] wears away at the psychological and communal conditions that sustain healthy human development." Braithwaite discusses the importance of poverty, but within the context of inequality. High levels of inequality mean that there are more poor and destitute than would exist under a more equal distribution. Thus, "there are criminals motivated by the need for a decent standard of living, where 'decent' can mean what they perceive most people in their community enjoy, what whites but not blacks enjoy, what they used to enjoy before they lost their jobs, or what they were led to expect to enjoy by advertising and dramatization of bourgeois lifestyles on television" (Braithwaite 1992: 82). Inequality also produces more structural degradation, which John Braithwaite argues is important because of the links among humiliation, rage, and violence. Further, a "classless" criminology does not apply strain theory to the rich. They, too, want more money but have limited legitimate opportunities to make additional millions or billions. They can innovate with their wealth to create novel and sophisticated illegitimate opportunities. Crime is also more likely if inequality means that the wealthy are unaccountable for their harmful actions and if inequality leads the wealthy to have less respect for the poor. The wealthy develop an ideology, a system of beliefs that justifies inequality and their exploitation as natural, inevitable, and ultimately fair. Ultimately, the "propensity to feel powerless and exploited among the poor and the propensity of the rich to see exploiting as legitimate . . . enable crime" (94). Because most of criminology tends to be guided by the criminal law, the focus of crime theory is almost exclusively on the behavior of the poor. But books are titled to say they are about criminological theory, not theories of street crime. Notably, one of the first important mentions for criminology of "crime" in relation to the behaviors of the upper classes was Sutherland, who was interested in the criminality of the rich because of his attempt to develop a general theory of crime. He believed that a major deficiency of criminological theory was that it could not explain crime by the rich, which made for not only class-biased criminological theory but also practice and policy (Platt 1969). In 1939, Sutherland introduced the term white-collar crime in his presidential address to what is now the American Sociological Association. The key elements included that the perpetrator be an upper-class or white-collar person, the crime be committed in the course of one's occupation, and the crime be a violation of trust. Criminology was slow to follow up on Sutherland's research, and its primary focus still remains with street crime, although crimes by the upper class exact a far heavier toll in terms of dollars and lives (Reiman and Leighton 2017). The criminological literature spends little time trying to explain or understand financial fraud. An analysis of 4,878 articles in fifteen criminology journals from 2001 to 2010 showed that only 6.3 percent were about white-collar crime—and only 3.4 percent in the ten journals ranked highest in prestige (McGurrin et al. 2013: 9). Further, "white-collar crime" includes crimes committed by both the powerful and the relatively powerless. For example, embezzlement and improper use of a credit card qualify as types of "white-collar" crime, but they should not be confused with those crimes committed by large corporations, financial institutions, or the federal government. A careful examination of these acts thus requires looking at the relative power of the criminal and victim. The most frequently discussed white-collar crimes are employee pilfering and credit card fraud, in which businesses, corporations, and financial institutions are the victims. The least frequently discussed are corporate and government crime, in which the powerful are the perpetrators who are victimizing employees, consumers, taxpayers, and/or the environment. "Insurance fraud" usually means false claims against the industry, not improper denials of claims by insurance companies; likewise, workplace theft usually means stealing by employees but should also include improper withholding (wage theft) from paychecks. (Indeed, shows like White Collar focus on high-end professional criminals not the serious corporate crime Sutherland highlighted in his work [Buist and Leighton 2015].) Accordingly, studies of white-collar crime should pay attention to crimes of the powerful whose actions and practices violate the rights of groups of people or cause harm to workers, consumers, communities, and/or the environment. Individuals in a corporation who violate the law in the corporation's interests, who also benefit themselves individually through bonuses and promotions, perpetrate corporate crimes. These involve a range of practices that victimize employees, consumers, the environment, stockholders, and/or creditors. Acts also may include fraud against the government, which victimizes taxpayers, and anticompetitive practices that cause higher prices for consumers. Corporate violence refers to acts that inflict physical and emotional suffering rather than simply monetary losses, as in the case of dangerous or defective products, unsafe working conditions, and medical conditions caused by pollution or toxic exposure. These harms, injuries, or violations may be national or transnational in scope. Environmental crimes are typically perpetrated by corporations but may also include public policies and practices that add to environmental degradation. Similarly, crimes of globalization may involve the superexploitation of workers in developing countries as well as the related policies and practices of global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the megabanks of developed nations. Public officials who are trying to perpetuate a specific administration, exercise general government power, or accomplish undue influence on behalf of large campaign contributors perpetrate state crime. The victims can be as widespread as all taxpayers who are forced to pay for corruption, fraud, and sweetheart deals. Victims can also be a specific political group—or even its leaders—who are denied basic political rights through surveillance and harassment (Barak 1991). Finally, state-corporate crimes represent hybrid forms of state- and corporate-organized crimes working together. With all these various forms of crime and white-collar crime, class biases operate in the social construction of "perpetrators" and "victims." Serial killers who commit street crimes are a trendy topic of study for criminologists, but criminology devotes little attention to trafficking in human beings or to mass slaughter, including genocide. Race and Criminology While race is commonly referred to as a constellation of traits that include physical characteristics, it is actually only these physical attributes that racial comparisons embody; the rest of the traits that are used to describe people—like national origin, language, culture, and religion—are what is correctly referred to as "ethnicity" or "culture." In short, racial and ethnic categories are manufactured differences between people that are primarily based on stereotypes, political pressures, and a host of nonobjective reasons. Consider that the racial categories used in the United States have changed over time and that no other country uses them. "Hispanic" is an ethnicity rather than a race because of lobbying by the Mexican government, which did not want Mexicans categorized as nonwhite. These issues are further explored in chapter 4, and this section reviews some of the connections between criminology and the racial hierarchies that privilege some and disadvantage others. Historically, research on crime has consciously and unconsciously reproduced the racism of prevailing social attitudes, while it has also been a site for resistance. For example, Lombroso wrote, "The white races represented the triumph of the human species, its hitherto most perfect advancement" (quoted in Miller 1996: 185). This belief influenced his criminal anthropology and the conclusions that he drew about criminality being related to atavistic or evolutionary throwbacks. In contrast, Willem Bonger's 1943 study, Race and Crime, was written as a critique against the growing fascist movement in Europe and arguments about the superiority of Nordic peoples (Hawkins 1995: 23). Today, many criminology texts do not mention Lombroso's early racism or his repudiation of such ideas as those in Criminal Man (1870) over the course of his career. Most texts without an interest in race and/or ethnicity ignore altogether the critical work of Bonger on race and crime, though they almost always mention his work on economics and crime. American criminology and social science have generally been characterized by a "liberal political tone and assumptions" that document, for example, black disadvantage and attribute it to white prejudice rather than biological notions of inferiority (Hawkins 1995). Hawkins starts his analysis with W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), a prominent black intellectual who is typically omitted from criminology texts. He is an important figure because "many of the most virulently racist, social Darwinist critiques of black life were published during the period he wrote [and] Du Bois was among the first to provide a retort to their argument" (Hawkins 1995: 13). Du Bois seemed to accept the higher rates of black (street) criminality; he ascribed them to the social disruption and urban migration that occurred after the end of slavery as well as to the legacy of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that accompanied the enslavement of Africans. Criminologists such as Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin shared some of Du Bois's analysis of crime; they did not conclude that blacks were naturally more criminal than whites. At the same time, Sellin (1928: 64) recognized that black crime rates might still be higher than whites', but he argued this was not a condemnation of blacks because "it would be extraordinary, indeed if this group were to prove more law-abiding than the white, which enjoys more fully the advantages of a civilization the Negro has helped to create." Sutherland and Sellin did recognize the salience of culture as relevant to criminality but argued that culture is somewhat different from nationality (based on political boundaries) and race. Important data for them included the observation that immigrants from the same culture would have different rates of criminality, depending on the age at which they arrived in the United States and the number of generations their family had been here—data that cannot be explained by reference to biology or genetics. Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay's study of social ecology in Chicago neighborhoods also raised questions about the importance of biology and genetics because "no racial, national or nativity group exhibits a uniform, characteristic rate of delinquents in all parts of Chicago" (Shaw and McKay 1942: 153). The key factor for them in explaining delinquency was social disorganization and community attributes rather than the racial traits of those who lived in certain areas. Marvin Wolfgang and Bernard Cohen (1970) later elaborated on the persistence of high rates of criminality among blacks while other immigrant groups had moved out of socially disorganized communities and zones of transition. In particular, they noted that blacks faced more blocked opportunities because of racism than white immigrants and that the legacy of racial oppression creates pessimism among blacks whereas white immigrants remain optimistic about achieving the American dream. Wolfgang and Cohen's Crime and Race (1970) also critiques biological determinism by noting that there could not be a genetic predetermination to general criminality because neither crime nor the definition of crime is stable in time and place. They note that most criminals obey most of the laws and generally break laws carefully so as to avoid drawing attention from the police. Like Bonger, they argue that criminality is not a specific trait like eye color: According to Mendel's rule of inheritance of specific traits, if criminality were genetically determined, we should inherit specific tendencies for embezzlement, burglary, forgery, etc. And if we inherited specific criminal forms of behavior, and some of us were genetically destined to be burglars or stock embezzlers, rapists or check forgers, we would also have to inherit specific noncriminal occupations, which would mean some of us would be genetically destined to become police officers or truck drivers or school teachers, as to have red hair. (Wolfgang and Cohen 1970: 92, emphasis in the original) The critique in the preceding paragraphs does not mean criminology should exclude the disciplines of biology, physiology, and genetics from a comprehensive and integrated approach (Barak 1998). Indeed, the emphasis here is that there are no genetic bases for race, which makes the link between race and crime problematic. Hawkins concludes his thoughtful overview of literature on race and crime by noting that the liberal tradition tries to balance a recognition that racial bias inflates the officially counted criminality of minorities with an awareness that minorities frequently live in criminogenic conditions where overpolicing also occurs. He is skeptical of efforts to find the "real" rate of crime and of attempts to get more accurate counts of real misconduct. Instead, he argues for the development of a conflict perspective, which examines official records of minority crime as an index of social control that shows "how the criminal justice system is used by the dominant ethnic and racial groups to maintain their status" (Hawkins 1995: 34). This perspective, which is developed in chapter 7, contends that contact with the criminal justice system (which begins with police interactions) has as much to do with social standing as it does with criminal conduct, and perhaps more because overpolicing in some neighborhoods ensures increased surveillance of some of the most common deviant behavior such as jaywalking, loitering, littering, and noise violations that can, in turn, lead to formal arrests. Increased surveillance in certain areas coupled with racial profiling, then, buttresses arrest statistics related to danger and unfairly interlocks race with crime. More recently, criminologists have explored how experiences with "injustice at the hands of criminal justice officials support existing societal inequalities" and the ways in which "ethnoracial inequalities in the United States in education, employment, and health are exacerbated by the disproportionate imprisonment of groups of color" (Krivo and Peterson 2009: 9-10). A Theory of African American Offending tries to recognize that centuries of subordination have created a worldview—one that is "continually being reaffirmed and shaped as African Americans confront everyday racism" (Unnever and Gabbidon 2011: xvii)—that is related to offending. Factors such as unjust treatment at the hands of criminal justice system employees can also weaken respect for the law and are public degradation ceremonies that can incite anger. The theory also recognizes that blacks are disproportionately poor and have higher exposure to environmental toxins such as lead, which can increase criminality. Gender and Criminology Sex generally refers to the biological components that characterize males and females. Gender refers to femininity and masculinity or to the roles and behaviors dominant society encourages for males and females. Gender thus refers to the social expectations for how males should be masculine and how females should be feminine. While sex is a relatively fixed biological anchor, gender involves the social processes through which people learn and are socialized into acting according to the ever-changing notions of what is appropriate for men and women in our society. Women are a majority of the American population, but men are the dominant gender. These issues are further explored in chapter 5, and this section reviews some of the connections among criminology, gender roles, and male domination. A wide variety of people (family, friends, coworkers) and institutions (schools, advertising, mass media) help create expectations about appropriate gender behavior and apply pressure for conformity. Further, "as an official agent of social control, the criminal justice system responds not only to crime but also transgressions against gender norms" (Flavin 2009: 4). One important way the criminal justice system achieves this end is by becoming involved in matters of reproductive choice. As Jeanne Flavin explains in Our Bodies, Our Crimes, By restricting some women's access to abortion and obstetric and gynecological care, by telling some women not to procreate and pressuring them to be sterilized, by prosecuting some women who use drugs and become pregnant, and by failing to support the efforts of incarcerated women and battered women to rear their children, the law and the criminal justice system establish what a "good woman" or "fit mother" should look like and how conception, pregnancy, birth and child care and socialization are regulated. (2009: 4) (Generally, the women prosecuted and subject to this type of control are poor and/or minority women, which highlights the importance of looking at intersections. See chapter 6.) Until recently, gender has not been important to criminology because men have been the vast majority of criminal offenders and have dominated the criminal justice system from lawmaking to parole officer. Women have made up a small percentage of offenders and have tended to commit less serious crimes than men. So, criminology has not explored women's experiences and theorize from that data, which may be different from what is presented as a universal theory but is based on male criminals and patterns of male criminality. It also did not look at the connection between masculinity and the higher rates of crime—and especially violence—that men commit. Until the mid-1970s, these and other factors contributed to a lack of interest in female criminals and their experience within the criminal justice system. However, over the past forty years, interest has increased in the study of women, gender, and crime. During this sustained period of criminological interest, the areas of both gender and women's studies have evolved in their analyses and sophistication. A five-stage framework developed by Peggy McIntosh (1984) and others (Andersen 1988; Daly 1995; Goodstein 1992) provides an overview of the ongoing process by which the fields of criminology and criminal justice have considered, do consider, and could consider women (Daly 2006; Flavin 2001). Stage One: The Intellectual Falklands The Falklands are a series of islands whose total area is smaller than Connecticut located between South America and the Antarctic. Up to the nineteenth century, most researchers ignored women's criminality, and the study of female criminality was considered "an intellectual Falklands"; that is, "remote, unvisited, and embarrassing" (Heidensohn 1995: 124). Theorists who did consider women saw them as being particularly determined by their biology. Lombroso, for example, studied female offenders to support his theory that criminals were physically anomalous. His methodology involved extensive measurements of criminals to isolate the "born criminal." Lombroso concluded that the born female offender was closer to a normal man than a normal woman. However, he also seemed to distinguish between different types of female criminals: "Unlike the 'semi-masculine, tyrannical and selfish' born criminal who wants only to satisfy her own passions, the occasional [female] offender puts trust in her male protectors and regains confidence in men—especially her lawyer, and in some cases that Lombroso is fond of relating, her executioner" (Hart 1994: 23). Other positivist theorists, especially those with a psychological or psychoanalytic approach, perceived women's deviance as peculiarly sexual. For example, Otto Pollak (1950) argued that women's tendency toward deceit stemmed from their physiological ability to hide their true sexual feelings and the social expectation that they will conceal menstruation and menopause. Stage Two: "Add Women and Stir" In the twentieth century, criminologists moved away from viewing deviant behavior as inherently abnormal and pathological and toward seeing deviance as normal. Thus, models that examined external sources of crime, such as poverty, social structure, and racial discrimination, gradually replaced those older models that examined internal sources such as biology and psychology. Once again, before the 1970s, most studies of crime continued to look exclusively at men and boys. In the mid-1970s, however, women insisted they be included in criminological research and analysis about crime and the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the result was simply to "add women and stir" them into existing research rather than reconsider and challenge what was or is "known" about crime. Eileen Leonard's work (1982, 1995) provides perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at using traditional positivist theories of crime such as anomie/strain, differential association, subcultural labeling, and Marxism to explain women's low involvement in crime. Because these theories excluded consideration of women's criminality, Leonard developed hypotheses that the theorists might have constructed had they been so inclined or informed. For example, Robert Merton's anomie theory holds that when people lack legitimate means (e.g., a job, a savings account) to achieve socially accepted goals (e.g., material and monetary success), they are more likely to innovate (e.g., steal, write bad checks) to achieve these cultural ends. Leonard points out that although women are overrepresented among the poor and thus arguably are subjected to more strain than men, they are less likely to deviate. Leonard also challenges whether monetary success is as salient a goal for women as it is for men. She further critiques Merton for assuming that women's goals (and men's, too) are shared across class, race, and ethnicity. Following her systematic review and analysis of traditional theories, Leonard concludes that these theories are unsuited for explaining female patterns of crime. She calls on scholars not to develop a separate "criminology of women" but to reconsider the understanding of women and men's criminal behavior. Stage Three: Enter Feminism The first of the feminist stages reflects some scholars' realization that women have been excluded from crime theories or that when women are discussed their behavior is distorted. This stage focuses more attention on crimes that adversely affect women more than they affect men, such as domestic violence. Also, increasing attention is paid to the ways in which women's experiences differ not just from men's but also from one another's based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, class, age, and sexual orientation. While this stage is a marked improvement over ignoring women altogether or "adding and stirring," it still has its shortcomings. Most notably, this stage reflects a tendency to treat men as normative and women as anomalous. Labeling one sex the "anomaly"—relegating its members to a marginalized status—is incompatible with aims to achieve more equal opportunities for men and women. It reflects male privilege (discussed in chapter 5), and the implications of androcentric or male-centered thinking for the criminal justice apparatus are significant. For example, the historically male-centered legal system meant delays in recognizing acquaintance rape, marital rape, and stalking as crimes, providing vocational programs for women prisoners and addressing sexual harassment in the workplace. The development of feminism has helped raise consciousness about the male biases reflected in criminology, and it has re-created its theoretical understandings and practice. While feminist theories of crime and justice do try to correct the exclusion or silences about women's beliefs, experiences, and achievements, most acknowledge that the understanding of women's lives also requires consideration of masculinity and male sex-role expectation. When neither males nor females are the hidden or invisible norm of criminological analysis, then the discipline is in a better position to understand the fact that men also have a gender, whites also have a race, the wealthy have a class, and straight people have a sexual orientation. These types of feminist insights help move criminology in the direction of describing gendered oppression in all of its forms, of identifying and explaining its causes and consequences, and of prescribing strategies for the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes (Rice 1990; Tong 1989). Stages Four and Five: "An Emerging Whole New Pie" The fourth and fifth stages reflect where the field is at now and where it will be going as women and minority men form more of our basis of knowledge. The current literature does reflect a growing willingness to reconsider what is "known" about women and crime and to examine racial and ethnic differences among women and men. In the fourth stage, scholars have begun not only to locate women with men at the center of research but also to study women on their own terms without reference to male norms. As an established body of feminist theory and research grows, it is becoming possible to build on feminist knowledge itself rather than merely dedicating time and attention to critiquing and evaluating traditionally male-dominated criminological theories and research. During the fourth stage, rather than addressing how the study of crime and criminal justice contributes to our understanding of women's criminality, research has begun to emphasize how feminist insights contribute to our understanding of crime and men's high incidence of criminality. At this point, the research goes beyond a sociology or criminology of women. The work of such scholars as Jody Miller (2001, 2002, 2008) and James Messerschmidt (1993, 1995, 2004), for example, does in fact suggest that we have crossed into the fourth stage, where we are increasingly integrating our knowledge of masculinities and femininities. In the fifth stage, our knowledge base will be fully transformed and feminist, and it will include a theoretical and analytical focus on multiple relations of class, race, and gender (Megan and Brusma 2017). Among these challenges is the fact that our inherited ways of thinking obstruct our ability to imagine alternative ways of viewing crime and punishment. In other words, the existing biases built into our knowledge bases make it difficult to imagine what a fully inclusive and transformed body of knowledge, gendered and otherwise, will be like. Because a fundamental expectation of masculinity and femininity is heterosexuality, the further development of queer criminology is necessary for the fifth stage. Queer criminology is an umbrella term for studying the experiences whose sexual orientation is gay, lesbian, and bisexual; it includes those whose gender identity is not consistent with their biological sex or does not fit neatly into the binary male-female categorizations (Buist and Lemming 2016). Criminology has limited its study to these populations studied in the deviance literature and as victims of hate crimes. Criminology needs to "come out of the closet" to study male gays who are in street gangs, for example: "In a discipline thoroughly interested in peer networks and group dynamics, it is only logical to investigate how primarily-queer, primarily-heterosexual, or mixed peer groups influence delinquency and criminality" (Panfil 2013: 108). Queer criminology also investigates "homosexual panic" legal defenses, where the law acquitted defendants who claimed their violent attack was justified self-defense after claiming someone gay made a pass at them. It analyzes why states want to make it a felony for a transgendered person to use a bathroom that does not correspond to what is listed on their birth certificate. The point is not to "add Queer and stir," but to transform theory and justice by recognizing "sexuality and gender identity as integral to one's experiences in the same manner in which we recognize the significance of race or social class"—as "an inherent part of one's self and something that has bearing on experiences and outcomes in the criminal legal system" (Buist and Lemming 2016: 120). Intersectionality and Criminology Discussions of intersections and intersectionality refer to efforts to combine the analysis of class and race and gender. While each is important in its own right, by themselves they provide an incomplete description of a person's life experiences and "social location." A person may be white, but multibillionaires are different from those considered "white trash"; rich and poor white women will have some different experiences and concerns than their male counterparts. Figure 2.1 illustrates the social location of the intersecting formation of class-race-gender identities, identification, and representation. FIG. 2.1 An Integrated Illustration of Class, Race, and Gender as It Shapes Crime and Experiences with the Criminal Justice System While it may seem obvious to use class and race and gender to get a "fix" on a person's social location, it is easier said than done. One of those dimensions may be more important than the others in a specific situation, but that factor will not always be most important—and theorists have not created good models to understand whether class or race or gender will be most important (and why). Further, the combination of factors does not work in a simple additive way like 1 + 1. Combining devaluation because of gender with devaluation because of race creates gendered racism, which can be far more powerful because of the interacting dynamics. Adding further marginalized statuses—poor, lesbian, immigrant, non-Christian—dramatically increases oppression. Intersectionality is further explored in chapter 6, and this section provides an overview of criminology's limited efforts to explore how class and race and gender all apply at the same time. Too frequently, researchers focus on one of these three social relations to the near exclusion of others. For example, the short-lived radical perspective in criminology that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew heavily from Marx's ideas about capitalism and the social relations of production, so it emphasized how class conflict was at the root of most crime. Eventually, the almost exclusive focus on class would broaden to give greater and increasing importance to race and gender because they are independent structuring forces that affect, shape, and influence areas of criminological concern: how people act, how others respond to and define those actions, how certain actions are viewed as more or less serious or as more or less "criminal" and deviant, and how the law and legal systems are organized to control behavior in highly stratified and unequal societies. By the 1990s, race and gender had surpassed class in being viewed as key concepts of society, prompting Robert Bohm (1998: 18) and others to call for a reemphasis of "class and class struggle in an understanding of crime and social control in market societies." Currently, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (Reiman and Leighton 2017) is one of the few book-length treatments of class and criminal justice. Today, there are a variety of race, gender, and hybrid analyses of crime and justice, such as those involving feminist perspectives, critical race theory, or critical legal studies. For example, building on critical sociology, neo-Marxism, and postmodern approaches, critical race theory assumes that racism is an ingrained aspect of American society that cannot be readily remedied by law. Developed in the late 1970s through the efforts of scholars who were discontent with the slow pace of achieving racial justice (Delgado 1995a), critical race theorists argue that the racism that permeates society is part of a socially constructed reality that exists to promote the interests of men and women in elite groups. Hence, not only do they expose the ways in which existing arrangements support racism, they also pursue alternatively constructed social realities. Similarly, critical race feminism emerged from critical race theory to address the gap between what tended to be white feminism and critical race theories focusing on men (Wing 1997). Specifically, critical race feminists have objected both to feminist approaches that presume white middle-class women's experiences are representative of all women's experiences and to critical race scholarship that presumes minority women's experiences are all the same and can be represented by the experiences of their minority male counterparts. The effect of essentialist perspectives has been to "reduce the lives of people who experience multiple forms of oppression to addition problems: 'racism + sexism = straight black women's experience'" (Harris 1997: 11). In other words, racial and ethnic minority women—as victims, offenders, and workers—are not simply subjected to quantitatively "more" disadvantage than white women; their oppression is of a qualitatively different kind. Critical legal scholarship in the form of narrative or storytelling is used as one means of analyzing, challenging, and resisting the dominant myths, presuppositions, and "truths" that make up the mainstream culture's views of race, gender, and law. Too often, the scholarly accounts of dominant groups have suppressed, devalued, and marginalized the experiences and perspectives of women and minority men. Narratives are used to break the silence and convey complex issues in a readily accessible form designed to promote understanding. For example, law professor and critical race theorist Richard Delgado (1995b) explains the debate surrounding essentialism with his fictional alter ego, Rodrigo Crenshaw. In one of his chronicles, Rodrigo has gotten "caught in the crossfire" at a Women's Law Caucus meeting: The "debate about essentialism has both a political and a theoretical component," Rodrigo began. . . . "In its political guise . . . members of different groups argue about the appropriate unit of analysis—about whether the Black community, for example, is one community or many, whether gays and lesbians have anything in common with straight activists, and so on. At the Law Women's Caucus, they were debating one aspect of this—namely, whether there is one, essential sisterhood, as opposed to many. The women of color were arguing that to think of the women's movement as singular and unitary disempowers them. They said that this view disenfranchises anyone—say, lesbian mothers, disabled women, or working-class women—whose experience and status differ from what they term 'the norm'." "And the others, of course, were saying the opposite?" —Delgado 1995b: 243-46 In a similar fashion, critical white studies (Delgado and Stefancic 1997) is the most recent body of scholarship that considers what it means to be white in the United States. Far from being a safe haven for white supremacists, critical white studies prompt whites and nonwhites alike to consider the legacy of whiteness and to ask such questions as the following: How do whites as members of the dominant race benefit (or not), depending on their place in the social order of stratification? What does white privilege mean to the poorest whites—sometimes called "white trash"—and to the poorest white women especially? How has our culture constructed "whiteness" and "blackness" such that they are not neutral descriptors but laden with meaning, value, and status? Several more specific examples of analysis close out this section on intersections and criminology. As noted in the previous section, privilege may present itself in terms of the preferred masculinities or femininities. The form of femininity most valued and supported in U.S. culture, for example, emphasizes marriage, housework, child care, fragility, and sociability. More generally, this idealized femininity is based on white, middle-class, and heterosexual norms. In this respect, Lynda Hart's work (1994) on depictions of lesbianism and female killers suggests that the category "woman" is reserved for white, upper-class, heterosexual females. This categorization serves a disciplinary function, patrolling the boundaries of "normal" femininity by creating an "othered" (not woman) category onto which women's deviance can be displaced. Thus, "the ultimate violation of the social instinct, murder, and the perversion of the sexual instinct, same-sex desire, was linked as limits that marked the boundaries of femininity" (Hart 1994: 30). Lesbians and killers (and women of color) reside together in the "not woman" category. Three noteworthy studies of crime that have captured various nuances in the interactions of class, race, and gender are Esther Madriz's (1997) examination of women's fear of crime, Mark Totten's (2000) investigation into adolescent girlfriend abuse, and Jody Miller's (2008) detailed excavation of the multiple dimensions of violence experienced by black inner-city girls. In these ethnographies, the authors are able to encapsulate the qualitative differences in the life experiences of men and women, boys and girls, and majorities and minorities, in relation to class, crime, and the administration of justice. They demonstrate that there is no standardized "class" experience, "race" experience, or "gender" experience but rather a repertoire of interacting class, race, and gender identities. Figure 2.1 illustrates the social location of the intersection of these forming identities. In Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls (1997), Madriz explores the fear of crime among young and old, African American, Latina, and white upper-, middle-, and working-class women. In the process, she is able to demonstrate how fear of crime perpetuates gender inequalities and contributes to the differential social control of women by class and race/ethnicity. For example, Madriz was able to capture the differential responses of informal social control that were in play where women of lower socioeconomic class or women of color were more inclined to restrict their movement and activities in the public sector than middle-class white women. In Guys, Gangs, and Girlfriend Abuse (2000), Totten explored the relations between early childhood abuse, family and gender ideologies, and the construction of masculinity on the one hand and the marginal male socialization experiences of straight, gay, white, black, and Asian teenagers on the other hand. In his integrated analysis, Totten is not only able to make sense out of the patterned differences of girlfriend abuse with respect to the physical, sexual, and emotional violence meted out by boyfriends, but he is also able to explain how the reproduction of violence and social control in these young people's lives is related to the abuse of gays and racial minorities. Adolescent males' bashing of girlfriends and gay people is related to feelings of powerlessness, despair, and humiliation regarding their future economic prospects and living up to the masculine ideal of "breadwinner" as well as their anxieties about and fears surrounding their heterosexuality. Finally, in Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (2008), Miller captures the ways in which gender, class, and race inequality expose many disadvantaged African American girls to sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating violence, and even gang rape. Miller points out that "urban violence" is exclusively about African American men, and women's victimization in that context tends to be invisible. She explains how gendered victimization, racial discrimination, and the perpetuation of violence toward these adolescent females, by boys and men alike, are linked to structural inequality. Miller's analysis also significantly demonstrates how young African American women struggle to navigate this dangerous terrain, where those who do not stand up for themselves against the daily "testing" of men can become targets for assault but also where deflecting male attention in the wrong way can get them labeled as a "bitch" deserving of assault. Implications The criminal law furnishes the basis for much of criminology and criminal justice study as though the law were objective or neutral. However, while some laws serve the interests of most people, most laws reflect the special or partisan interests of elected people who have conscious and subconscious desires in maintaining the privileged orders or status quo of which they are obvious benefactors. Reiman asserts that criminology needs philosophical reflection on the nature of crime "to establish its intellectual independence of the state" and thus declare "its status as a social science rather than an agency of social control, as critical rather than servile, as illumination rather than propaganda" (in Reiman and Leighton 2017: 233). Similarly, criminology also needs reflection on and independence from class, race, and gender constructs if it is not to become simply another tool of social control and propaganda for an unequal status quo. This reflection on the nature of crime and crime control—which is related to critical criminology and explored throughout this book—is especially important because the definition of crime drives the resources of policing and the rest of the criminal justice system. It also becomes the basis for theorizing about crime as well as the collection of official data that are used for research about crime and presented in criminology books to explain crime. Without critical reflection, the criminal law appears neutral and above question because its values seem reinforced by police activity that is focused on street crime rather than white-collar crime and by criminological theory, data, and books that also have the same emphasis or focus as the criminal law. Class, race/ethnicity, and gender are each important in understanding the production and social construction of crime and the administration of justice. Understanding that some groups are privileged because of their class, race/ethnicity, and gender is also important because privilege is the unifying concept underlying these three variables. In the United States, each of these variables has been involved in many of the laws that are selectively made (or not made) or that are differentially applied to offenders. These variables are both implicit and explicit in the theories used to explain behavior and provide direction for criminological investigation. In the processes of crime and crime control, however, separating these variables out from one another is as difficult as separating the ingredients out from a person's identity. For example, when minorities are disproportionately poor, separating class from race can be problematic. However, it is relatively easy to identify the class, race, and gender biases at work in the study of crime and crime control. For example, for a brief period in the 1960s, the President's Commission on Crime and Law Enforcement identified the roles of inequality and discrimination as contributing to the "breakdown" in law and order. The commission advocated government taking a lead in crime prevention through social programs and opportunities for disadvantaged citizens. The subsequent rise of the law-and-order mentality and the bipartisan war-on-crime policies led to a "get tough" pro-incarceration role for the government because crime was seen more as the result of individual failings rather than of discrimination and structural inequality and privilege. It is also relatively easy to see how privilege is reflected differently in the two prevailing legal interpretations—the jurisprudential model and the sociological model—of class, race, and gender on "justice" outcomes. The jurisprudential model of criminal justice is an ideal, not a reality per se. It is (supposedly) based on "rationality, equality before the law, and treating of like cases alike" (Agozino 1997: 17). To consider such factors as class, race, and gender, then, is to violate the due process rights of those involved. Because social characteristics are not supposed to influence the handling of a case, the jurisprudential model assumes that they do not; it regards law as constant and universal, with the same facts resulting in the same decisions. Consequently, when class, race, or sex discrimination occurs, it is considered the exception, not the rule. In contrast to the jurisprudential model of justice, the sociological model assumes that political, economic, and social characteristics influence the administration of justice. Far from being constant from one case to another, law is assumed to be variable, changing with the social relations of the parties. Whereas the jurisprudential model is concerned with how the system should work, the sociological model examines how it actually does work. Sociological models, then, are interactive models of the administration of justice as they incorporate both the ideal and real representations of law and order, involving a variety of extralegal characteristics that include class, race, and gender. Review and Discussion Questions What are the key points espoused in the classical, positivist, and critical theories of criminology? How are all three still relevant to contemporary discussions of crime and justice? What are the strengths and weaknesses of classical, positivist, and critical criminologies? Why do the authors believe that reflection and critique of the criminal law is so important for criminology and criminal justice? Briefly explain how the authors define class, race, and gender. What is one example of how each is important to consider in dispensing justice? What is the basic idea of intersectionality? How does criminology benefit from an intersectional perspective

intro

Introduction Crime, Inequality, and Justice The standard view of criminal justice is that criminal law is built on a consensus about harmful acts that reflect social norms, that police investigate crime and arrest wrongdoers, that prosecutors weigh the strength of the evidence and then decide when to press charges, that juries decide on guilt or innocence, that judges sentence according to guidelines that eliminate disparities, and that people objectively study crime and criminals to ultimately reduce the amount of victimization. That view is not wholly incorrect, but the standard view is problematic because in the bigger picture, changing social, political, and economic conditions shape the formation and application of the criminal laws of the United States. Crime and criminal justice are shaped by the political economy, which refers to how politics, law, and economics influence one another. As such, official crime rates do not explain the dynamics of the criminal justice system as much as they explain social stratification, the surplus population—those who are unemployed or unemployable and are thus considered the "dangerous class"—technology, and prevailing ideologies. In this way, the realities of crime and justice reflect, and usually re-create, class, race/ethnic, and gender relations. For example, slavery rather than prison had been the dominant form of social control for African Americans before the Civil War. When the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in 1865) freed the slaves, it removed that system of control and created serious anxiety among the white population. Slaves went from property to economic competition; black men were freed at a time when many Southern white women were widowed or single because of the large number of young white men killed during the war. Southern whites wanted another system for social control, but building prisons at that time was impossible. The war had been fought primarily in the South, and that was where most of the destruction had occurred. The repairs required labor, which was in short supply, again because of the large number of young men killed in the war. Additionally, labor-intensive crops grown on plantations still required attention. Thus, Southern states passed black codes that penalized a number of behaviors by blacks that whites found rude, disrespectful, or threatening. After the blacks were convicted, they would be leased for labor to serve their sentence. Plantation owners could now lease inmates rather than own slaves. Prisons also changed form during the Industrial Revolution, and more recently, boot camps came about because the government was closing military bases but had an increasing criminal—and juvenile—justice population. Because crime and justice are shaped by the political economy, crime and crime control are also inseparable from the changing relations of inequality, hierarchy, and power. Crime and crime control are thus important locations where inequality is re-created or challenged. Domestic violence, rape, and fraud by financial institutions enrich executives while devastating millions—each crime, while committed by different types of offenders for very different reasons, reflects and re-creates an aspect of inequality. Likewise, inequality and hierarchy are re-created or challenged both by the explanations given for these different crimes and the decision of whether the perpetrators are pursued or not by the criminal justice system. This book sees crime and criminal justice as socially created and as having both subjective and objective realities. That is, harms done to people are real, but the law chooses to criminalize only certain ones. Manslaughter is a death because of negligence, but it applies only to individuals; there is no corporate manslaughter law in the United States. Great Britain, Canada, and Australia all have various corporate manslaughter provisions that apply to workplace deaths caused by negligent conduct of supervisors and/or executives. The social reality of crime and crime control is further shaped by the decisions of police about who is arrested, by prosecutors' decision about whether to pursue a case and which charges are most appropriate, by judicial processes that find certain offenders guilty, and by judicial decisions about who goes to prison (Reiman and Leighton 2017). Statistics appear to be objective measurements about crime but are the result of decisions and processes that are influenced by class, race, and gender. Media decisions about what to report and which "frame"—or "spin"—to put on a story add to the ways that the reality of crime and justice is socially created. These structural-legal relations are dynamic, subject to the changing needs of the dominant relations in the prevailing political economy. Over the past millennium, for example, different types of laws have evolved in response to the complexity of political, economic, and social relations. For example, the division between "public" law (acts or omissions that offend or injure the state) and "private" law (acts that offend or injure only persons) has evolved over time in response to changing conditions and political powers. (Public laws include administrative and regulatory law, constitutional law, and criminal law. Private laws, also referred to as civil laws, include the laws of property, contracts, and torts.) Historically, during the ancient regime or before the rise of mercantilism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there were no criminal laws as we know them. There were only civil offenses or torts. A tort was (and still is) a private or civil wrong and/or injury that breaches a legal duty or obligation allegedly independent of the interests of the nation-state. For example, one person sues another for personal injury rather than having the state file assault charges. When a tort occurs, the offense or harm (injury) is subject to a fine, restitution, or some other form of compensation to make the victim whole again. Civil offenses, in other words, are not punishable by loss of liberty or life subject to the intervention of the "nation-state." By contrast, criminal prosecutions and punishments first appear with the simultaneous decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, which ushered in the early developments of the modern state, capital, labor, private property, and mercantilism. Many of these laws, some six hundred years old, are still operating today. Many other criminal laws have come and gone during this same period. For example, the "crime of bankruptcy" was punishable by death in the English courts in the late 1700s because it was defined as an "act of debtor fraud, de facto theft by absconding with property and avoiding judicial process and the paying of just debts" (Pomykala 2000). While it was never treated as a capital offense in the United States, the framers of the Constitution did add bankruptcy to the list of federal powers used to prevent fraud. Until the mid-nineteenth century, plaintiff creditors could accuse defendants of bankruptcy or "debtor-perpetrated crime" in a court of law. Eventually, "bankruptcy was transformed from a branch of law for the relief of creditors against debtor fraud intended to foster the payment of debts into a pseudo-social welfare program for debtor relief. Modern bankruptcy law legalized what antecedent jurisprudence first sought to prevent, the nonpayment of debt" (Pomykala 2000). Now corporations routinely engage in strategic bankruptcy, which is legal and encourages "firms to use bankruptcy to avoid lawsuits; to decrease or eliminate damage awards for marketing injurious products, polluting or other corporate misconduct; [and] to abandon toxic waste sites" (Delaney 1999: 190). Even in bankruptcy that involves reorganization rather than liquidation, "financial risk can be shifted away from more powerful institutional creditors and the corporation itself and onto the backs of more vulnerable" and less organized groups, meaning workers and consumers (Delaney 1999: 190). By contrast, many criminal laws that first emerged to control poverty, street crime, and the disorder of the dangerous classes in mercantile England are still with us today in one form or another. Some laws can be traced back to the British vagrancy statutes of 1349 or the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. In 2018, these and other related crimes of the marginal and powerless classes overwhelmingly consume and preoccupy the activities of the U.S. criminal justice system as a whole. In fact, most histories of crime control acknowledge that the criminal justice policies of the postindustrial United States are the preferred methods for managing rising inequality and the surplus populations of the United States (Michalowski and Carlson 1999; Parenti 1999; Shelden 2000). Surplus populations refer primarily to economically marginal persons and those who are unemployed or unemployable; they are people with little attachment to the conventional labor market and little "stake in conformity" (Anderson 1974). Because of this status, surplus populations are also called "marginal classes" or "dangerous classes." Of course, the war on crime is not publicly discussed as an explicit war on the "down-and-out" or conceptualized as involving the enforcement of inequality and privilege. But the result of the current war on crime has been to fill an ever-expanding prison system with the poor and a disproportionate number of young minorities. These dynamics are not new, and a historical overview of social control reveals that on the frontier as well as in the industrial United States, the administration of justice was about regulating and controlling the "dangerous classes." Freed black slaves were subject to harsh Jim Crow laws, and the Chinese were highly criminalized after they finished work on the transcontinental railroad. Still, over time, the criminalizing of behavior has been subject to periods of legal and constitutional reform that have gradually expanded the meanings of "due process" and "equal protection" for a wider and more diverse group of people. Despite the vaunted democratization of criminal justice during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the effects of crime control have always been to the disadvantage of the nation's most disentitled and marginalized members (Auerbach 1976; Barak 1980; Harring 1983; Walker 1980). When it was a young nation, the political and legal apparatuses of the United States were dominated by the organized power of wealthy, white, and male interests to the detriment of slaves, freedmen, workers, nonworkers, women, people of color, and (ex-)convicts. Since our nation's beginnings, then, the various struggles for justice, inside and outside the administration of criminal law, have included the goal of empowering people and granting all access to the same political and legal bodies of rulemaking and rule enforcing. As the notion of struggle suggests, history is not a linear progression of ever-greater equality. Achievements can result in backlashes, and those who are "more equal" always resist gains of the "less equal." Moreover, new forms of inequality often arise to take the place of old forms, and being granted a right in law does not make it a reality. The next section emphasizes the importance of understanding "intersections" of class, race, and gender, and it also highlights some assumptions that guide our analysis. Because criminal justice is so often referred to as a "system," the final section discusses some additional frames of reference for understanding crime control so that readers can have a fuller sense of the complexities of criminal justice. The Social Relations of Class, Race, Gender, and Crime Examining class, race, and gender in relationship to law, order, and crime control provides an appreciation for the unique histories of the individual social groupings and interrelated axes of privilege and inequality. At any given moment, class, race, or gender may "feel more salient or meaningful in a given person's life, but they are overlapping and cumulative in their effect on people's experience" (Andersen and Collins 1998: 3). Class, race, and gender are all required in order to begin to describe an individual's experience in the world, and they are likewise all required in order to understand crime and criminal justice. For example, rape generally leads to few arrests and convictions, but that statement also needs to acknowledge the hyperenforcement of rape laws against black men when white women were thought to be involved. Dorothy Roberts's (1993) work also draws attention to these intersections by examining black women, who are often rendered invisible because "black" tends to mean "men" and "women" tends to mean "white." Roberts links crime, race, and reproduction to show how racism and patriarchy function as mutually reinforcing systems of domination that help determine "who the criminals are, what constitutes a crime, and which crimes society treats most seriously" (Roberts 1993: 1945). More specifically, in terms of abortion, birth control, and social control, Roberts discusses how this domination is meted out through the control of black women's bodies that discourages procreation, subordinates groups, and regulates fertility. As part of our integrative analysis of class, race, and gender, we also attempt to explore how each of these hierarchies helps sustain the others and how they reinforce the types of crime and justice in our society. Our study of class, race, gender, and crime reveals that while class, race, or gender may feel more important at a specific point, one is not obviously more important than the others over time or situations. Only by studying their combinations and integrating them can one come to fully appreciate how bias undergirds the construction of what will and will not become criminal, as well as the effects of implementation and administration of those biased rules. This bias also shapes the construction of individual experience and identity, including experience of crime and the criminal justice system. More specifically, we bring several assumptions to the study of the social relations of class, race, gender, and crime control: First, these categories of social difference all share similarities in that they convey privilege on some groups and marginalize others, so they relate to power resources in society. Ideology works to naturalize privilege, so those who have privilege do not see themselves as having it and are much more likely to believe there is a "level playing field." Second, systems of privilege and inequality derived from the social statuses of class, race, and gender are overlapping and have interacting effects that can be more than the sum of their parts. Here, 1 + 1 is more than 2, or gendered racism is much more powerful than simply adding gender and race. Third, while class, race, and gender privilege all tend to be similarly invisible because of ideology, the experience of marginalization will vary considerably, depending on the specific nature of the prejudice and stereotypes. Understanding marginalization also requires appreciating the diversity within categories—American Indians represent hundreds of different tribes; Hispanics and Asians represent dozens of different countries and cultures. Fourth, there are connections between these systems of class, race, and gender. Few people are pure oppressors or victims, so it is a complex matrix in which all people are more aware of their victimization than of their privilege. Subsequent chapters use an array of material to unravel the complexities of class, race, and gender as they interact with the cultural and social production of crime, justice, and inequality. Our analysis of crime and justice further assumes that the inequalities in crime control and the administration of criminal justice are an essential element of popular culture, market society, and the social constructions of class, race, and gender differences as these are experienced in relation to one's place, order, conflict, and perception. Perceptions, public and private, of what constitutes unacceptable social injuries and acceptable social controls are shaped by the underlying elements of social organization, including the production and distribution of economic, political, and human services (Michalowski 1985). We are not talking about conspiracies of elites and decision makers here but rather about crime and crime control institutions that both reflect and re-create the changing nature of capitalist social relations. So "serious crime," defined from above or below, from the suite or the street, and from official reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or by the unofficial cultural media, becomes a statistically mediated and socially constructed artifact. In popularly organized numbers, narratives, and images alike, a distorted view and limited perception of harmful behavior emerges. Crime and criminals are restricted primarily to the tabulations and representations of the conventional criminal code violations: murder, rape, burglary, robbery, assault, and face-to-face larceny-theft. Almost all crimes in the suites, if not ignored, are typically downplayed rather than focusing on human decisions and harms done to society. There are no databases or publications for corporate crime like the FBI has for street crime; so many white-collar corporate frauds and offenses against the environment, workplace, and consumer are not captured in FBI press releases about "Crime in America." Reporters and authors, including academics, analyze data that are more readily available, and those findings get reported in textbooks on criminal justice that focus on street crime. Culturally produced images of crime and criminals reinforce one-dimensional notions that criminality and harmful behavior are predominantly the responsibility of the poor and marginal members of society. As mass consumers, we all share mediated facsimiles of lawbreakers and crime fighters. Common stories of crime and criminal justice appear and reappear over and over in the news, in films, on television, and in literature, helping to reproduce or reconstruct in the imagination of the American psyche similar renderings of crime, criminals, law enforcement, adjudication, and punishment. It is no wonder that when most people try to picture the typical American crime, the common image that emerges is one of young male victimizers. There are also the numerous police-action reenactments that can be viewed regularly on such television programs as Top Cops or America's Most Wanted that similarly recycle images of these young men as dangerous drug dealers whose dwellings must be invaded during the early hours of dawn by "storm troopers" and other law enforcement personnel in order to pursue, secure, and repress the dangerous faces in the "war on crime." (USA Network does have a program, White Collar, which focuses on art theft, counterfeiting, and smuggling—not corporate crime or ways in which elites victimize employees, consumers, and the environment [Leighton 2010].) However, Showtime's Billions with two seasons becomes the first mass-consumed series taking place in the high-powered and overlapping worlds of corporate, political, and prosecutorial criminality. Moreover, the images of crime control that are constructed of the criminal justice system as one moves from law enforcement to adjudication and from sentencing to incarceration again serve to reinforce fairly limited and often distorted realities of criminal justice in action. For example, images of a criminal courtroom come to mind from relatively long and involved trials exposed in feature-length films, or from Court TV's gavel-to-gavel coverage of celebrated trials, or from other cable network television outlets on the trials and acquittals of celebrities and unusual cases. The public is also led to believe, based on artist sketches or succinct and curt shots of highly charged courtroom scenes from various television series such as The Practice and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, that attorneys for each side, engaged in vigorous battle, always do their legal best to secure justice for all. However, in these dramatizations, whether fictional or "reality-based television" (with editing), the images that do not come to mind are the overwhelming majority of criminal cases (90 percent) that are plea-bargained every day in courthouses throughout the United States. These negotiated deals in lieu of trials usually take less than a few minutes for judges and courts to process and uphold. The coercion to "go along" is hidden, and the deals virtually eliminate the possibility of appeal (Kipnis 2001). With punishment, popular images of dangerously violent offenders who need to be locked up indefinitely are prevalent in the media. For more than thirty-five years, politicians have appeared before the media talking about a "get tough" platform that criticizes the "leniency" of previous election cycles. Wars on terror and the global economy rather than declining crime rates had dominated the presidential elections of 2004, 2008, and 2012. However, in 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reintroduced concerns about "rising" crime rates and law and order. In any case, the United States still has a legacy of harsh penal policies that continue to make it unimaginable even to consider the possibility of reuniting the offender, the victim, and the community in some of kind of restorative form of justice. As part of the inherited politics of a war on crime, the political economy of incarceration, and the privatization of penal services ("bodies destined for profitable punishment"), the languages and images of dangerousness and retribution continue to contribute to the United States' criminal justice-industrial complex (Dyer 2000; Leighton and Selman 2012). Representations of dangerous offenders convey the images of feuding convicts divided into racial and religious cliques doing "scared time," not of inmates engaged in school or the learning of a vocation or of former offenders reintegrating or fitting back into society. The recently discontinued and award-winning HBO dramatic series of life in a maximum-security prison, Oz, portrayed a based-on-facts fictional account of the complexity of one of those "hell-on-earth" archipelagos. On the one hand, its representation ignored the social realities of some 1,500 other state and federal prisons of lesser pain. On the other hand, Oz did not actually do justice to the continuing apartheid-like conditions of crime and punishment that disproportionately affect marginal black and brown Americans. Criminal Justice Theorizing Among other important assumptions that undergird this work is that the administration of criminal justice may be viewed as both a "system" and a "nonsystem" (Bohm and Haley 2004); it may also be viewed as an "apparatus" involving both public and private or state and nonstate sectors (Duffee 1980; Kraska 2004). Hence, when scholars of crime and justice speculate about "criminal justice" in this or any other country, they do so as a means of orienting themselves to various symbolic and cognitive frameworks for understanding the causation of crime and crime control as well as the underpinning of norms, values, and beliefs surrounding the administration of criminal law. Compared with theories of crime/criminality, theories of crime control/criminal justice are underdeveloped. In Theorizing Criminal Justice (2004), Peter Kraska has identified eight essential orientations or theoretical metaphors that attempt to explain the workings and expansion of the areas of "criminal justice" dating back to the 1950s. He also notes that four of these orientations are primarily concerned with the formal criminal justice system and that four are concerned with criminal justice as a broader apparatus. The first group views criminal justice as formal models of the administration of criminal justice as a system. These include rational/legalism, system, crime control versus due process, and politics. The second group views criminal justice as informal models of a criminal justice apparatus as a nonsystem. These include socially constructed reality, growth complex, oppression, and late modernity. The rational/legal theoretical orientation "does not constitute a well-defined area of scholarship. It exists, instead, as a way of thinking dispersed throughout various literatures in criminology/criminal justice" (Kraska 2004: 19). The intellectual roots of this model may be traced back to the legal formalism of the classical and neoclassical schools of economic thought with their emphases on the social contract, utilitarianism, and the rule of law. These models argue that criminal justice operations are the product of rational, impartial decision-making based on the rule of law, at least in the ideal if not in practice. The systems theoretical orientation has been considered the dominant paradigm in criminal justice studies for more than fifty years. The intellectual roots of the system models come from three other traditions: the biological sciences, sociological functionalism, and the field of organizational studies. As a biological metaphor, criminal justice is viewed as larger than the sum of its parts or subsystems—police, courts, and corrections. As a way of thinking, it was also a social movement in organizational behavior, with various stakeholders within the criminal justice system stepping forward to research and study criminal justice primarily as a means to make it operate more efficiently and effectively (Barak 1980; Walker 1992). Both the rational/legal and systems models view the recent expansion and growth in size and power of the criminal justice system as a "forced reaction" to a worsening, real or imaginary, crime problem rather than a policy choice. The next two orientations, crime control versus due process and politics, require different explanations. These move from a condition of the criminal justice system being forced to act to one where it chooses to act in a particular fashion, based on its own (or the government's) value preferences. By contrast, the crime control versus due process and the politics models view these developments as a matter of human will subject to different ideological values, political preferences, and material conditions. These models contend that crime and crime control are not some kind of inevitability or natural phenomenon. In elaborating on the crime control versus due process orientations, Herbert Packer (1964) discusses how the criminal justice pendulum swings back and forth, conservatively and liberally, favoring crime control at certain times and favoring due process ("rule of law") at other times. He also makes it clear that crime was a sociopolitical artifact, not a natural phenomenon, dependent on what we choose to count as criminal and the ways in which we process (i.e., order vs. liberty, efficiency vs. equity) those whom we define as criminal. The politics orientation to criminal justice is inclusive of Packer's two political models, but it expands the political metaphor by assuming that politics "is at play at all levels of the criminal justice apparatus—from the everyday actions of the corrections or police practitioner, to the political influence of local communities, to agencies involved in criminal justice policy formation and implementation, and to lawmaking at the national and state levels" (Kraska 2004: 206). In short, these two orientations view all criminal justice activity and thinking as interest based, involving inherent conflicts, power struggles, influence building, and hardened ideological positions. They both argue that the strategies of criminal justice are products of a complex mix of political and social interests. The next four models, with their focus on the criminal justice apparatus, broaden the object of criminal justice study to include the activities of numerous state and nonstate responses to the crime problem, including "1) crime control practices carried out by state and non-state entities; 2) the formal creation and administration of criminal law carried out by legislators, the police, courts, corrections, and juvenile subcomponents; and 3) others involved in the criminal justice enterprise, such as the media, academic researchers, and political interest groups" (Kraska 2004: 7-8). The apparatus-oriented models view crime control as involving more than the activities of state agencies and the political negotiation over the appropriate means of carrying out the administration of criminal justice according to the rule of law. These four model types regard criminal justice administration not only as a nonsystem of state bureaucratization but also as part of the larger culture and other nonstate and privatized activities and networks that coalesce to sustain the hierarchy and legitimacy of the prevailing political, economic, and social arrangements. In the context of the larger culture and society, these apparatus-oriented models view the police, courts, and corrections agencies as engaging in ritualistic ceremonies and in promoting various myths of crime and crime control for the purposes of establishing and maintaining their legitimacy in relationship to the prevailing hierarchical order. For example, the socially constructed reality orientations, such as "symbolic interactionism," "dramaturgical analysis," or "moral panic," adopt interpretative approaches to criminal justice that do not assume that reality is predetermined or given (much as the previous four orientations do). In other words, reality, criminal justice or otherwise, is not taken for granted, but rather, it's a human accomplishment. Social realities of criminal justice do not simply exist; they are the result of an intricate process of learning and constructing meanings and definitions of situations through language, symbols, and interactions with other people, crime fighters and non-crime fighters alike. The scholarly roots of the socially constructed models come from interpretive philosophy, symbolic interactionism, and cultural studies. They argue that the products of criminal justice administration are derived from the most believable stories about crime and justice. Similarly, the growth complex orientations to criminal justice are about believable stories of "crime fighting" and the legitimacy of the criminal justice bureaucracy's survival and growth as a social industry. The arguments for the ideals of equal justice for all or of administering justice and controlling crime become subordinate to the divergent and competing interests of the various subsystems of criminal justice, on the one hand, and to the common and mutual interests of the criminal justice system as a whole, on the other hand. The intellectual roots of the growth complex models stem from a hybridization of systems theory, bureaucratic rationalism, critical theory, and the Frankfurt school of thought. The oppression orientations to criminal justice have varied from those that take a more instrumental approach to those that take a more structural approach, the former arguing that the criminal justice apparatus is simply a tool of the economically powerful to control the behavior of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the threatening classes, and the latter arguing that in addition to the instability issues of "class," there are also the instability issues of "race" and "gender." The social roots of these latter oppressive models emerged with the struggles for social justice and the critical theories of class, race, and gender inequality. These models argue one-dimensionally or in some kind of combination that the selective enforcements and differential applications of the law experienced by some (and not other) groups of people are a reification of the dominant economic, ethnic, and patriarchal interests interacting. Finally, the late modernity orientations to criminal justice explain changes in crime and punishment as adaptations to late modern social conditions or risks, such as the rise in economic globalization, telecommunications, privatization, and the decline of state sovereignty. The philosophical roots of these models may be traced back to the traditions of existentialism, postmodernism, and critical materialism. Applied to recent criminal justice trends, these models locate crime and crime control within the macroshifts of a rapidly changing world, and they attempt to explain how the various responses to crime and injustice over time occurred. According to Kraska, these are potentially the most theoretical of the eight essential orientations because they offer a perspective capable of fusing or integrating the other orientations. However, from an integrated approach, none of the eight theoretical metaphors are capable of standing alone or of being more than partial explanations for the developing changes in criminal justice behavior. When holistically brought together, the explanatory powers of these models are enhanced.

ch 1 the crime control enterprise and its workers

The Crime Control Enterprise and Its Workers In his farewell address as president, Eisenhower warned of a military-industrial complex. The World War II general was concerned that defense policy was being driven by businesses, politicians, and military officials, insulated from public view and thus from accountability. He noted (1961) that until World War II, "the United States had no armaments industry"—other businesses converted to manufacture them as necessary—but having a permanent armaments industry of "vast proportions" (millions of employees and substantial military spending) was new and troubling: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Similar to the military-industrial complex is a criminal justice-industrial complex born from the drastic buildup of the criminal justice system starting in the 1970s, most notably with prisons. While prisons and the criminal justice system have had contracts with businesses for supplies and consultants for much of their history, the nature of these relationships and the amount of money involved reached a critical mass because of the war on crime and drugs. It expanded to include private prison companies traded on the stock exchange and regular Las Vegas-style conventions for businesses selling goods and services to criminal justice officials (Selman and Leighton 2010). The increases in spending from the wars on crime and drugs have created a new type of permanent crime control industry with "grave implications" for criminal justice policy: [T]he United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion [$81 billion in 2012] spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. (Schlosser 1998) The criminal justice and military-industrial complexes share more than a common idea. By the mid-1980s, the Cold War against Russia—called the "evil empire" by then-president Reagan—was winding down, and defense firms were looking for new markets to bolster revenue. The Department of Defense had already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Justice for technology development and commercialization, and companies in the defense industry increasingly became suppliers to local law enforcement and criminal justice agencies. The drug war served to fuel the growth of military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams across small and large urban areas. After the tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11, the criminal justice complex developed stronger ties with intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Sweeping changes came to law enforcement, court processes, and government surveillance because of both the 2001 Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA Patriot Act) and the Homeland Security Act of 2002. What has emerged is a security-industrial complex (SIC) linking criminal justice with military and intelligence operations, and expanding criminal justice operations to include greater emphasis on immigration and the war on terror. At the same time, products and technologies for military and intelligence are increasingly used by criminal justice agencies, even when they are not dealing with immigration or terrorism issues. Today, the monies flowing into the military and homeland security infrastructure are at the cutting edge of the digital revolution: computer hacking, mass surveillance, data mining, and risk assessment algorithms. As the American crime control enterprise has attempted to integrate many new criminal justice, intelligence, and security roles, social control has become more systemic compared to the more decentralized patterns of law enforcement and the administration of justice during the previous two centuries. But threats to "our liberties or democratic processes" persist. Consider: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, houses a number of foreign enemy combatants. Although on a military base and thus on American soil, they are in a "legal black hole": subject to indefinite detention without a trial, discovery of evidence, the ability to cross-examine accusers, or any other provisions of the Sixth Amendment. Presidents Bush and Obama have asserted their rights to kill those labeled as enemy combatants, a process that happens without notice to the person being labeled. Even when that person is an American citizen, there is no due process right to notice or to challenge the information that culminates in what may be a death sentence. This power has been used abroad, and neither the current nor previous administrations have claimed or denied the right to kill an American citizen labeled as an enemy combatant who is in the United States. US police departments are increasingly using unarmed drones for surveillance, which can be useful in armed standoffs but becomes a concern when "all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life, a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States" (Rosenwald 2013). Documents leaked by former National Security Administration (NSA) technologist Edward Snowden have revealed widespread and routine surveillance of all Americans through their cell phones and Internet usage. The chief judge of the court supposedly overseeing the NSA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISA Court), "has admitted that the court can't verify what the agency says and thus can't provide full oversight over it" (BloombergView 2013). A secret branch of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using information from the NSA and other intelligence agencies for fighting ordinary drug crimes. Local law enforcement agencies have either been misled about the origins of the information or "coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what's called a 'parallel construction', a fake or misleading trail of evidence" (O'Hehir 2013). This limits defendants' rights to challenge information against them and results in false testimony in court, but it is not clear whether there will be a judicial response or what it will be. "Should we be confident that NSA intercepts and foreign-intelligence wiretaps and 'parallel construction' will never be used to build criminal cases against hackers, leakers, Occupy activists, investigative journalists, unfriendly pundits and any other dissidents on the left or the right whom the government decides to persecute?" (O'Hehir 2013). Police are increasingly using a Stingray, which transmits fraudulent credentials to trick cell phones into connecting to it. When operational, police can, without probable cause or a warrant, identify the phone numbers of all devices in a given area; the device has the capability to record phone and text messages, although such usage should theoretically be approved by a court. Little is known about police usage of stingrays because of non-disclosure agreements with the manufacturer, but available data indicates they are used more heavily in poor and minority communities (Joseph 2016). Does data from one investigation get deleted, or does it furnish a list of "pre-suspects" for all future investigations? "Who's to say police aren't running Stingrays constantly in 'hot spot' areas?" (Joseph 2016). What type of oversight should be required for police to fly Stringrays over peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, as has been done in several cities (Norton 2016)? Is this "first into the black community—and then everywhere else"? (Joseph 2016). The conventional view is that the criminal justice system is composed of police, courts, and corrections. While that is not inaccurate, it is still only a partial understanding of the work, mission, problems, issues, and career opportunities related to criminal justice. In addition to providing opportunities for expanded thinking about employment, study, and reading, this chapter serves as a reminder of the challenges to democracy posed by the criminal justice-security complex. These problems are likely to continue into the foreseeable future because the war on terrorism appears to be open-ended and because a renewal of the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed within days of the September 11 attacks could provide a license to wage a "war on terror" indefinitely. Budgets, legal uncertainties, and unexpected events make it unclear as to what exactly the mission will become for the twenty-first-century criminal justice worker. However, the first sections below highlight four areas that will have an enduring impact on criminal justice work and workers: globalization and immigration, militarization, privatization and revenue enhancement, and cybercrime and security. Another section provides an overview of criminal justice workers that is focused on law enforcement, courts, and corrections. Globalization and Immigration Globalization refers to the growing interdependency among events, people, and governments around the world that are increasingly connected through trade, expanding communications, transportation, and computer networks. With a globalizing political economy, goods, labor, and money move more freely around the world, a situation that leads to some benefits but also leads to intensified inequality of wealth and income. The chief economist of Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley noted, "Billed as the great equalizer between the rich and the poor, globalization has been anything but." Indeed, "the rich are, indeed, getting richer but the rest of the workforce is not" (Roach 2006). Today, globalization emphasizes "free trade" and deregulation as corporations look for locations with the cheapest labor, the least number of laborers, and the fewest environmental and other regulations. Even after the 2009 economic crisis and pressure at the Global Economic Summit from the European Union, China, and India to establish international regulatory agencies, President Obama and many Wall Street banking institutions rejected the idea. Globalization policies can lead not just to inequality between countries but also to inequality within a country because of job losses, stagnating wages, and greater benefits to those at the top (through greater profits because of low wages and fewer regulations) (Faux 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007). In 2015, the richest 1 percent of the global population owned more wealth than the rest of the world combined (Hardoon 2017). At the same time, tens of millions of people succumb annually to famine and preventable diseases. For hundreds of millions of others, life has become a daily preoccupation with obtaining safe water, rudimentary health care, basic education, and sufficient nutrition (Barak 2007). Nations around the world are shrinking their welfare states while governments have been busy deregulating, downsizing, privatizing, contracting out, reducing taxes, and cutting social spending—a constellation of activities often described as neoliberalism. Ultimately, globalization and inequality create expanding opportunities for "legitimate" capitalists as well as criminals because the need for both licit and illicit goods or services grows in tandem (Nordstrom 2007). "Free trade" does not explicitly include the sexual trafficking of women and children, but encouragement of the "free flow" of goods and money also makes it easier to traffic persons, drugs, intellectual property, weapons, and exotic wildlife. It also encourages fraudulent and unfair trade practices in commerce, the laundering of money from illegal activities, the smuggling of illegal immigrants into and out of nations, the dumping of toxic waste and other forms of ecological destruction, the acts of terrorism committed by and against various states, and the behavior of multinationals to move capital and technology to exploit cheap labor (Barak 2001: 66). As crime becomes transnational, crime control must do the same, requiring workers who are fluent in different languages and who have an understanding of other regions of the world where the United States must collaborate with other nations' crime control agencies. When outsourcing and privatization lead to economic restructuring and low-wage work in other countries, some people will legally or illegally immigrate to the United States (Golash-Boza 2016). Research reviews written by the Sentencing Project (Ghandnoosh and Rovner 2017), the American Society of Criminology (n.d.), and conservative Cato institute (Nowrasteh 2015) all agree that the crime rates for immigrant populations are lower than those for people born in the United States. They cite a century worth of research that is quite clear on lower rates of criminality for immigrants. However, processes to criminalize immigrants—"crimmigration"—have been increasing over the last decade: "In the first five and a half years of his presidency, President Obama deported more than two million people—more than the sum total of all people deported before 1997" (Golash-Boza 2016). Immigration accounts for 30 percent of the cases filed by federal prosecutors. Immigrants often are detailed in private prisons that are contracted through ICE rather than the Department of Justice (DOJ). Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows ICE to enter into agreements with state and local police, permitting them to perform immigration law enforcement in addition to the enforcement of state and local laws. Many departments want to resist this process, because they feel it undermines community trust and cooperation, which are essential for policing. In fact, some cities have asserted themselves as "sanctuary cities" that will refuse to turn over illegal immigrants for deportation. Many such immigrants are longtime residents of the United States who have built business and families here. Deportation, often for traffic violations—or even no crime at all—tears families apart and disrupts communities. Criminalizing immigration does little to promote public safety because immigrants overall have a lower crime rate, while it makes immigrants more vulnerable to being victims of a range of crimes and exploitation. If immigrants—both legal and undocumented—are afraid to report crimes against them, others are more likely to commit sexual assaults, thefts, wage theft and labor violations, and other crimes against them. What anti-immigrant policies do not fix are the long backlogs in legal immigration—the single biggest issue related to immigration today. The delays in processing paperwork and cases often extend years or decades, "forcing people who want to follow the rules to make an agonizing choice between intolerable separation from their families or lawbreaking" (New York Times 2009). Nor do these policies protect captured illegal immigrants from the arbitrary cruelties of the detention and deportation system in which due process is limited at best and unacceptable risks of sickness, injury, and death at worst prevail as a condition of imprisonment (Golash-Boza 2016). Far better, critics argue, would be for government to redouble its efforts to enforce the minimum wage, to grant the right of immigrants to organize, and to provide health and safety protections. Such policies would have the effect of reducing the incentive to hire the undocumented while raising conditions for all workers. Militarization Although law enforcement has always been a quasi-military organization, when Sir Robert Peel created what is considered as the first modern police force in 1829 in London, his "principles of policing emphasized crime prevention, public approval, willing cooperation of the public, and a minimal use of physical force" (Bickel 2013). In the United States, the civil unrest of the 1960s led to the modern escalation in the militarization of the American police (Strauss 2007). Militarism is "a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that stress the use of force and threat of violence as the most appropriate means to solve problems. It glorifies the use of military power, hardware, operations, and technology as its primary problem-solving tools" (Kraska 2007: 164-65). Accordingly, the militarization of law enforcement includes the processes of arming, organizing, planning, training for, and sometimes pursuing violent conflict. Peter Kraska argues that assessing the degree to which crime control in general and police behavior in particular have become militarized hinges on the clarity of its concepts. He has also argued that the "similarities between a police paramilitary drug raid [at home in the United States] and the latest Iraq war" represent "the cultural, organizational, operational, and material blurring of the line between war and law enforcement, on the one hand, and between U.S. military and civilian criminal justice, on the other hand" (Kraska 2007: 166). Certainly, police departments across the United States have experienced dramatic growth and use of specialized units such as SWAT teams and Special Response Teams (SRTs) that are based on similar units within the military. In 1983, only 13 percent of towns with populations between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand had a SWAT team, but now almost 90 percent do (Balko 2013; Economist 2014). Further, these units were once thought of primarily as reactive units for handling hostage standoffs and other unique situations, but in an age of zero-tolerance policing, these units have become proactive forces, specifically trained to execute police raids in poor, urban communities as a result of the war on drugs. But SWAT teams are also used to break up poker games and wagering on college football games ("illegal gambling"), underage drinking in bars, suspected cockfighting, and "Tibetan monks who had overstayed their visas while visiting America on a peace mission" (Balko 2013; Economist 2014). In the early 1980s, these police paramilitary raids and "forced investigatory searches using the military special operations model, employed during hostage rescues, was almost unheard of and would have been considered an extreme and unacceptable police tactic. Today, it defines the bulk of activity most police paramilitary teams are engaged in, and this is true of both very small and large police departments" (Kraska 2007: 163). Military personnel train and assist these specialized units, and veterans of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan find they can become consultants to train local SWAT teams. These practices have been an economic boon to suppliers of these paramilitary law enforcement teams (in weaponry, body armor, training, jails, and vehicles, for example), who have been fortified by the increased arrest rates and subsequent incarceration rates of poor minorities who are convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. The militarization of policing has been accompanied by an escalation in violence, lethal, and otherwise. No-knock or quick-knock paramilitary raids—used to collect evidence, such as drugs, guns, or money—naturally surprise citizens and put both citizens and police in potentially volatile situations. Dealing with these potentially dangerous situations justifies further extraordinary measures: These include conducting searches during the predawn hours, usually in black military battle-dress uniforms, full body armor, ninja-style hoods, and an array of enhanced listening and seeing devices—sort of a twenty-first century cyborg style. It also includes a rapid entry into the residence using specialized battering rams or sometimes entry explosives, the use of flash-bang grenades designed to temporarily disorient the occupants, a frantic room-by-room search of the entire residence where all occupants are expected to immediately comply with officers' screamed demands to get into the prone position. If a citizen does not comply immediately because he or she is confused, dazed, obstinate, or doesn't know that the people raiding the house are police, more extreme measures are taken. Finally, the police ransack the entire residence for contraband. (Kraska 2007: 167) The adverse effects from these military-style raids on American citizens include situations such as the deaths of Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993; the killing of children; unintentional (but still lethal) gun discharges; raids on the wrong house; and college students shot for violations of marijuana laws because of quick entry. The commonality of these types of tragedies is not known because data on SWAT teams gone wrong are not officially recorded. When the militarization of the police is dramatized and glamorized in popular culture, community policing that shares the values of Sir Robert Peel is marginalized: if after hiring officers in the spirit of adventure, who have been exposed to action oriented police dramas since their youth, and sending them to an academy patterned after a military boot camp, then dressing them in black battle dress uniforms and turning them loose in a subculture steeped in an "us versus them" outlook toward those they serve and protect, while prosecuting the war on crime, war on drugs, and now a war on terrorism—is there any realistic hope of institutionalizing community policing as an operational philosophy? (Bickel 2013) Privatization and Revenue Collection Privatization refers to the process of government outsourcing certain tasks to for-profit businesses. While prisons have frequently contracted out food service and health care ("nominal privatization"), privatization escalated in the 1980s with the creation of businesses that built, owned, and managed prisons ("operational privatization"). A number of private prison companies later had initial public offerings in which they raised money by selling shares to the public and became traded on the stock exchange (Selman and Leighton 2010). Indeed, in the opening of his book The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, Joel Dyer comments on the sign hanging outside the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center that reads, "Yesterday's closing stock price." The stock price is for the prison's owner, then named the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). To Dyer, what the sign means "is that anyone—anyone with money, that is—can now profit from crime" (2000: 10). As the industry has grown, so too have concerns about the number of (poor, black) "bodies destined for profitable punishment" (Leighton and Selman 2012). The movement to private prisons started as a way to offset the high correctional expenses resulting from the incarceration binge in the United States. With the expansion of prisons, jails, parole, and probation, the number of companies involved in delivering services has expanded, and they have diversified into providing more services (see chapter 10). For example, the privatization of punishment is not solely the construction and management of prisons but also includes housing illegal immigrants (including families), juvenile offenders, and the mentally ill; contracting to provide health care and food services for incarcerated persons; contracting to provide community-based forms of surveillance, including electronic monitoring; and, most recently, contracting for reentry services for the formerly incarcerated (Selman and Leighton 2010). The reality of contemporary corrections is that it includes several multinational prison businesses with billions of dollars' worth of stock and billions more in debt to Wall Street banks. The money from investors and banks allowed private businesses to build many facilities and thus continue the unprecedented expansion of the prison population—an example of understanding the political economy of punishment, or how politics and economics exert influence on punishment more significantly than on arguments about retribution, deterrence, and sentencing guidelines (Rusche and Kirchheimer [1939] 1968). Killingbeck summarizes how at each stage of history, the reliance on imprisonment in its different forms was tied up in a political economy of punishment: When society was manual-labor based and dependent on the production of goods and cheap labor, imprisonment included prison labor. It was not until the use of prison labor was no longer economically viable and politically advantageous that reforms were instituted. . . . With the advent of new technologies that reduced the demand for manual labor, imprisonment served to warehouse the surplus labor supply. As capitalism became more service oriented, imprisonment became a service to be provided. As capitalism becomes a combination of technology, service and information, so too does punishment, in the forms of electronic monitoring and GPS tracking. (2005: 169, emphasis in the original) With outsourcing and globalization, wages of most workers go down while those at the top do much better, leading to an overall situation of greater inequality. In private prisons, guards tend to be paid less and have fewer benefits than government workers, and the antiunion stance of private prisons makes it difficult for workers to substantially improve work conditions. Median earnings in 2010 for all correctional officers and jailers were $42,820, but private prisons paid $37,570 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a). Meanwhile, the chief executive officer (CEO) of a private prison company makes more than the average head of a department of corrections who manages a substantially higher number of inmates. For example, the CEO of CoreCivic (formerly CCA) has a total compensation of several million dollars a year, as does the CEO of GEO Group. The managers of state departments of corrections of a similar size make less than $200,000 (Selman and Leighton 2010). The end result is staff turnover, apathy, and poor judgment—which can combine to precipitate riots, unconstitutional conditions of confinement, or inmate abuse (Bauer 2016; Carceral 2005). As more companies generate revenue from corrections, there is more potential for misplaced power in the multibillion-dollar prison-industrial complex to distort sentencing and criminal justice (and mental health and immigration) policy: the interests of corporate shareholders become increasingly important, causing increased corporate lobbying and campaign donations, while public safety and public accountability become less relevant. Basic free-market principles dictate that companies with shares traded on a stock exchange have a duty to make money for their shareholders. Thus, businesses involved in incarceration have no duty to balance their desire for ever-increasing profits with the larger public good that would come from, say, crime-prevention funding or money for schools. Indeed, sentencing reform and declining crime rates are "risk factors." The expansion of criminal justice fines and fees should lead to a reconsideration of the traditional view of the criminal justice-industrial complex, in which the private sector extracted money from government. But by 2011, the Conference of State Court Administrators issued a policy paper Courts Are Not Revenue Centers, where they state that the use and structure of fees "has recast the role of the court as a collection agency for executive branch services" (2011: 9). The process frequently involves aggressive policing of submisdemeanor infractions and issuing citations that carry a fine plus a court fee. People who cannot afford to pay often do not show up, whereupon the court issues an arrest warrant, which carries another fee (Reiman and Leighton 2017: 123 and 205). In response to the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, a DOJ investigation found that the city finance director and city manager asked the police chief to aggressively issue citations so that revenue from court fees could be increased because of other budget shortfalls. Management carefully monitored police "productivity" (number of citations issued), so DOJ found that "many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson's predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue" (2015: 2). It found further that the "emphasis on revenue . . . has also shaped its municipal court." The court works to "advance the City's financial interests" and "does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct" (2015: 3). These practices especially harm the poorer residents, because "minor offenses can generate crippling debts, [and] result in jail time because of an inability to pay" (2015: 4). Unfortunately, the problem is not confined to Ferguson, and the government also collects revenue in hidden ways from businesses that engage in unfair practices. In one Southern jurisdiction, for example, being released on bail required wearing an electronic monitoring device that cost $300 a month, and while the fee was payable directly to the monitoring company, the company shared part of its revenue with the government. Trial can take a year or more, so fees pile up and strain the budgets of already poor households. The failure to pay means a return to jail, so "people are pleading guilty because it's cheaper to be on probation than it is to be on electronic monitoring" (Markowitz 2015). Thus, government and the criminal justice system itself are part of the problem of distorting policy and public safety in the name of revenue. By engaging in predatory finance and abusive collection practices, the criminal justice system has become a key player in the revenue-generating aspect of the criminal justice-industrial complex. Cybercrime/Security The current world, separated by a defined geographical border, with government agents at border crossings and national laws, does not fit with how cybercrime functions. People in one country use computers in many countries to attack targets all over the world, then launder money through still other countries. This situation makes it challenging for jurisdictions where people are victimized by cybercrime to investigate and prosecute, even if they had the tools to do so. But the scale of losses—money, information, and the ability to disrupt critical infrastructure—makes it too large to ignore. Cybercrime was once "an obscure technical issue" but "cybersecurity has slowly gained prominence in recent years as digital crooks and cyber spies breached major companies like Target and Sony, as well as federal agencies like the Office of Personnel Management, which houses sensitive background check forms" (Geller 2017). The "Stuxnet" computer virus, widely attributed to United States and Israel, ushered in a new era of cybercrime (Arthur 2013). Until that point, cybercrime and terrorism were limited to attacking and potentially damaging other computers, but Stuxnet attacked industrial controls so that Iran's centrifuges to refine uranium would operate in a way that broke the machines. The objective of crippling Iran's nuclear power program was achieved, but it ushered in a model of cyber attacks on any computer-controlled critical (and not so critical) infrastructure, much of which is also connected to the Internet: nuclear and other power plants, the electric grid, traffic lights, emergency response systems, water processing, elevators, cell towers, hospitals, the stock exchange, gas pipelines, cars, billboards, subways, implantable medical devices, voter registration and sensitive political information, and an increasing number of devices upon which people have come to depend. Leveraging a series of hacks can easily result in chaos in a city or across a nation (K. Johnson 2016). President Obama brought some of the functions and responsibilities for the nation's digital security to the White House when he announced in late May 2009 that he would appoint "the nation's first cyber security czar to help protect the nation's telecom infrastructure and information systems that have grown so crucial to industry, the military and individual citizens" (Denver Business Journal 2009). The Pentagon also has a "Cyber-Command" and the Secret Service, which developed high-tech laboratories to investigate counterfeit currency, took on the investigation of credit card breaches and other attacks on financial infrastructure. As cybercrime has become more widespread, it has also become more professional. While hackers living in their parents' basement are still part of the scene, "80 percent of hackers are now working with or as part of an organized crime group" (Goodman 2016: 222). Those who develop malware (malicious software) are specialized in that business and sell or rent their product for others to distribute. The malware developers allow their customers "to file bug reports, propose and vote on new features for upcoming versions of the software, and even submit and track trouble tickets" (Goodman 2016: 233). In many other ways, organized cybercrime mimics the organization and business models of Silicon Valley technology companies. Cybercrime also involves an expanding assortment of "virtual dark markets"—underground sites that auction or sell hard drugs, child pornography, fraudulent passports, counterfeit dollars, military weapons, and stolen identities. Technological developments help both law enforcement and cybercriminals. The Dark Web, a place where the NSA has an especially difficult time surveilling, has made commerce in these illicit goods and services possible. The Deep Web is "the collection of all the websites and databases that search engines like Google don't or can't index, which in terms of the sheer volume of information is many times larger than the Web as we know it." The Dark Web is the place within the Deep Web "that's distinguished by that increasingly rare commodity: complete anonymity." Although most people do not browse the Dark Web, "the software you need to access it is free and takes less than three minutes to download and install" (Grossman and Newton-Small 2013: 28). The Dark Web has thus become a tool for criminals, political dissidents, hackers, intelligence agents, law enforcement, and any who need or want to conduct their online affairs in private. Thus, some prosecutors and government agencies regard the Deep Web as a potential nightmare, an electronic haven for thieves, human traffickers, and peddlers of state secrets. Dark Web markets for criminal goods and services resemble eBay, as shown in the Frequently Asked Questions section of Alpha Bay—see figure 1.1—currently one of the larger online dark markets. The Deep Web also has its own digital payment system and a currency called Bitcoin that may be used for both legitimate and illegitimate dealings. Bitcoin has no physical form, and its worth is "determined by supply and demand and is valuable only insofar as individuals and companies have agreed to trade it" (Grossman and Newton-Small 2013: 29). A government does not back this currency; it is completely decentralized, and users can transfer bitcoins from one digital wallet to another without banks brokering the transactions or imposing fees. In short, bitcoins are basically cash (anonymous transactions) for the Internet. Because of the workings of encryption and cryptography, they are virtually anonymous and extremely difficult to counterfeit. FIG. 1.1 FAQ from Dark Web Marketplace AlphaBay Note: In July 2017, AlphaBay went offline in what seems to be a law-enforcement action that closed the $600,000 to $800,000 a day business. But each time a big dark market gets taken down, something grows back bigger: "There's a demand it's just a question of who's going to fulfill the supply" (A. Greenberg 2017). Criminal Justice Workers This chapter opened by introducing the larger criminal justice-security complex to help readers think about the larger contexts that shape criminal justice. However, there are too many occupations and work possibilities to meaningfully discuss in part of a chapter, so this section focuses on law enforcement, judicial workers, and corrections. For each of those areas, we provide an overview of the occupation and those who do the job. Table 1.1 provides a more expansive list of careers within the more traditional understandings of what the criminal justice system is. Table 1.2 provides a breakdown of criminal justice system expenditures, including the payroll for employees and the number of workers. TABLE 1.1 Careers in Criminal Justice Law Enforcement/ Security Courts/Legal Corrections/Rehabilitation Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agent Arbitrator Activity therapist Border patrol agent Attorney general Business manager Campus police officer Bailiff Case manager Computer security advisor Clerk of court Chaplain Computer crime investigator Court reporter Chemical dependency worker Crime prevention specialist Jury coordinator Child care worker Crime scene processor (evidence collection) Juvenile magistrate Classification officer Criminal investigator Law clerk Clinical social worker Criminal profiler Law librarian Community liaison officer Customs officer Legal researcher Correctional officer Deputy U.S. investigator Mediator Fugitive apprehension officer Drug enforcement officer Paralegal Home detention supervisor Environmental protection agent Public defender Job placement officer FBI special agent Public information officer Juvenile detention officer Fingerprint technician Specialty court (drug, veteran, domestic violence, etc.) worker Juvenile probation officer Forensic scientist Trial court administrator Medical doctor Highway patrol officer Victim advocate Mental health clinician Immigration and customs officer Nurse Inspector general's office investigator Parole/probation officer Insurance fraud investigator Postal inspector Laboratory technician Presentence inspector Loss prevention officer Prison industries supervisor Military police officer Programmer/analyst Park ranger Psychologist Police administrator Rehabilitation counselor Police dispatcher Residence supervisor Police officer Secret service agent Polygraphy examiner Sex offender therapist Private investigator Social worker teacher Private security officer Vocational instructor Researcher Warden/superintendent State trooper Youth service worker The totals in the previous paragraph do not include expenditures or workers in private security, private detection, or other related security occupations not funded by government. Jobs within the criminal justice enterprise are diverse, and different occupations have unique dynamics with respect to class, race, and gender. What follows are the roles and functions of the principal occupations in the three primary areas of criminal justice practice—law enforcement, courts, and corrections—as well as other characteristics, such as the number of workers, working conditions, educational requirements, and professional salaries as available. TABLE 1.2 Criminal Justice Expenditures, Payroll, and Employees, 2012 Total Expenditures (in Billions of US$) Employee Payroll (in Billions of US$) Total Employees Source: BJS. 2015. "Justice Expenditure and Employment Extracts, 2012—Preliminary." NCJ 248628, tables 1 and 2. Note: Detail may not add to total because of rounding. Payroll as of March 2012. Criminal Justice system total 265.2 12.0 2,425,001 Police 126.4 6.3 1,183,614 Judicial and legal 57.9 2.5 491,979 Corrections 80.8 3.2 749,418 Law Enforcement Workers According to the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data, the United States had about fifteen thousand public law enforcement agencies and about one million full-time personnel, including about 725,000 sworn personnel (with the power to arrest) at the local and state levels of government (BJS 2015a: 2). Another 84,500 employees were part-time, including almost forty thousand sworn personnel. An additional 1,700 agencies served a special geographic region—public schools, universities, parks, forests, airports, mass transit, and so on—and employed another ninety thousand people full-time, including fifty-seven thousand sworn officers. While this section does try to paint a general picture, Bohm and Haley (2005: 160) point out that virtually no two police agencies in the United States are structured alike or function in the same way. Police officers themselves are young and old; well trained and ill prepared; rural, urban, and suburban; generalists and specialists; paid and volunteer; and public and private. These differences lead to at least three generalizations about law enforcement in the United States: The quality of police services varies greatly across the nation. There is no consensus on professional standards for police personnel, equipment, and practices. Expenditures for police services vary greatly among communities. Starting salaries and median annual earnings for police and patrol officers in 2016 across local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies ranged from $55,000 to $69,200, although pay for police at colleges and schools was less (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a). Salaries for first-line supervisors averaged $119,540 for the federal government down to $85,830 for local agencies (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016b). Educationally, only 1 percent of municipal police departments required new recruits to have a four-year college degree, and only 9 percent required at least a two-year degree in 2003. A high school diploma or higher educational achievement was required by 81 percent of local police agencies across the nation (BJS 2006a: 9). Local law enforcement activities constitute the bulk of police work and are carried out primarily by municipal (i.e., city, township) police departments that typically (94 percent) employ fewer than fifty sworn officers. The larger the police agency, the more likely it is to employ women and minority officers. While white males are still highly overrepresented, the overrepresentation has been slowly declining. From the early 1900s until 1972, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) began to assist women police officers in obtaining equal employment status with male officers, policewomen were responsible for protection and crime prevention work with women and juveniles, particularly girls. Today, women engage in virtually all of the duties that men do, but account for only 11.6 percent of all officers (UCR 2015: table 74). Women make up almost 10 percent of first-line supervisors and 3 percent of police chiefs (BJS 2015b). Of full-time sworn personnel, 12 percent were Hispanic, 12 percent were African American, 2 percent were Asian American, and 1 percent was Native American (BJS 2015b: 5b) The BJS does not release data broken down by race and sex, so the representation of minority women in policing is not known. Like most municipal police departments, most sheriffs' departments are small. In addition to enforcing the criminal and traffic laws of the state, sworn and not sworn personnel of sheriffs' departments perform functions that range from investigating crimes to supervision of jailed inmates. Unlike municipal police departments, sheriffs are directly elected, so they operate in the context of partisan politics and have the authority to appoint special deputies and to award jobs based on political support. Generally, they have a freer hand in running their agencies than police chiefs, who usually serve as mayoral appointees, but sheriffs are also subject more to local politics than they are to measures of effectiveness and professionalism. In making sense of the statistics and the overall environment, a number of points are important. First, all women and racial minorities interested in working in most areas of criminal justice share the challenge of entering overwhelmingly white male work environments, with women of color being doubly disadvantaged. Second, sexual and racial discrimination acts to preserve some criminal justice professions, especially law enforcement, as disproportionately white male domains. These forms of harassment can be separate and unrelated or combined, for example, in the form of "racialized sexual harassment" that serves to keep some women of color from entering, advancing, or remaining in a predominantly white male occupation. In general, women of any color and minority males are forced to consider the world through the eyes of the white male cop. Both of these groups, by definition, lack access to the "old boy" networks in law enforcement, a situation that can be conducive to a catch-22 state of affairs, especially for women. On the one hand, if men of color or women in general do not socialize (either by choice or exclusion), they risk not learning information related to their job or promotion opportunities and may be labeled as aloof or "cold." On the other hand, if women in particular socialize with male colleagues, they may be perceived to be sexually available, which reflects negatively on women's professionalism (Belknap 2007). Gay and lesbian officers, white or of color, working in this male-dominated field experience a sense of marginalization and harassment at least as severe as other minority groups on the job. And "since officers distrust the public and put an immense amount of trust in their fellow officers, being shunned by your colleagues can have potentially dangerous, even life-threatening results" (Buist and Lemming 2016: 57). Third, women of color have additional barriers even though some people believe that they receive a double benefit because of their underrepresentation as both women and people of color. In reality, minority women are often forced to choose between a race and a sex discrimination claim. They are thus forced to choose—or the court decides for them—whether they will be compared against white women or minority men. But in either case, the double discrimination is not fully accounted for. Fourth, racial and/or ethnic minorities, blacks and Hispanics in particular, not only have to deal with being forced to fit in with and having their work devalued by their white peers, but they also often, especially in impoverished ethnic communities, find that their community identities or loyalties are subject to questioning. On the one hand, they must prove to their communities that they are not "sellouts." On the other hand, they need to demonstrate to white officers that they are strictly enforcing the laws against their community and behaving toward minorities as the white officers are. This is especially pronounced with Hispanic officers, who are not just employed by police departments but also make up a high percentage of immigration agents (Álvarez and Urbina 2015). In cases of police brutality or when excessive force is used by black police officers against those in the black community, some see it as evidence that the incident was about brutality and excessive force, not race. But people should not jump to that conclusion without considering that black officers are capable of holding prejudices about black offenders. Ronald Hampton of the National Black Police Association observed, "Success [in a department] is defined in white male terms. So these guys internalize the racist, oppressive culture of the police department in order to succeed" (Ripley 2000). But instead of viewing black and Latino police officers who engage in police brutality against black and Latino criminal suspects as a symptom of a larger problem, which is overreliance on militarized policing in poor and minority communities, police brutality against the most powerless people in society is sometimes viewed as a normative behavior because both black and Latino officers also participate in it. Finally, undercover work requires the involvement of detectives whose brown skin permits them to blend into certain neighborhoods, but they sometimes fear that a white officer will accidentally shoot them (Winerip 2000). Accidental shootings of minorities by white cops are not uncommon and are attended by numerous studies that suggest that brown faces are more threatening than white faces: "There is overwhelming evidence that young, black men are stereotyped as violent, criminal and dangerous. Indeed research suggests that black men are associated with threat both implicitly as well as explicitly" (Trawalter et al. 2008: 1322). For all the problems, there are some who say that sexism and racism in the workplace is declining. However, affirmative action myths still abound, such as the myth that police or corrections departments must meet quotas in hiring women and minority men, regardless of whether or not they are qualified. For example, scrutiny of the text of the original Affirmative Action Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, specifically prohibits hiring of unqualified people to fill positions in occupations and requires in section 202(2) that "the contractor will, in all solicitations or advertisements for employees placed by or on behalf of the contractor, state that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color or national origin." So, in reality, affirmative action programs were designed to determine the percentage of qualified women and minorities available to an organization (such as a police department) and to set flexible goals to be reached in good faith. The courts, in short, imposed quotas only in the case of blatant discrimination against clearly qualified minorities, and this system disappeared after the Supreme Court decided quotas were unconstitutional when used in college admission in University of California v. Bakke (438 U.S. 265 [1978]). (Subsequent Court decisions have allowed for race to be used in admissions decisions when narrowly tailored to help achieve a diverse student body, but not in a way that automatically grants minorities a certain number of points toward admission.) In conclusion, there are significant limitations on essentializing gender relations or police-race relations in an occupational setting. "Essentializing" is the idea that "all women are oppressed by all men in the same ways or that there is one unified experience of dominance experienced by women" (Buist and Lemming 2016). Statements such as "all white officers engage in racial profiling" or generalizations about the behavior of female officers are too simplistic. The social reality is that people are influenced not only by their personal attitudes and experiences but also by the context in which they live and work. Whites are capable of recognizing the problems of racial profiling and brutality, and racial and ethnic minority officers are charged with the responsibility of not falling victim to them. But the contributions of women and minorities and women who are minorities should be both valued and incorporated into the ways that law enforcement agencies operate today so as to eliminate racism, minimize discrimination, and maximize fairness in the administration of justice. Certainly, it is useless to continue to expect minorities and women to adapt to the white majority without reciprocal efforts being made on the part of the white majority to include them, especially since globalization has ramped up. To suggest otherwise is to diminish everyone by treating people as if their actions are solely dictated by their racial categorization rather than by a variety of individual, occupational, organizational, situational, and other contexts. However, this should not mask some underlying dynamics of privilege, because when it comes to harassment based on gender, sexual orientation, or race/ethnicity in law enforcement, women, gays and lesbians, and people of color each still experience the status of "outsider." They are all subjects of police subordination in an occupation that punishes them for entering male-only or white-male-only domains. Judicial Workers Both the expenditures and the number of judicial workers involved in criminal tribunals, from the charging to the sentencing stages, are considerably smaller than the number of dollars spent on or workers involved in law enforcement. Comparatively, law enforcement workers are essentially made up of professional persons with and without college degrees. Similarly, judicial workers can be divided up into two distinctively educated workers whose professional class also varies from working to upper-middle class. First, there are the members of the legal bar—attorneys and judges—who have overwhelmingly graduated from a four-year college or university as well as a three-year law school, passed a state bar examination, and been certified to practice law. The average annual salary for assistant prosecutors ranged "from $33,460 for entry-level assistant prosecutors in part-time offices to $108,434 for assistant prosecutors with 6 or more years of experience in offices serving jurisdictions of 1 million or more residents" (BJS 2011: 2). Chief prosecutors had an average annual salary of $98,000 and a range from $45,000 for part-time offices to $165,700 for the largest offices. For states, the median salary for judges in 2012 ranged from about $132,500 for a general trial court up to a median of almost $147,000 for the highest court (Sourcebook: table 1.90.2012). However, salaries varied widely by state, so general-level judges in Mississippi made about $104,200 while their counterparts in Illinois made $180,800. The Sourcebook does not provide any data on public defender salaries. It should also be pointed out that the share of the nation's lawyers who are minorities and women, which had been growing slowly but steadily for years, fell in 2010 for the first time since the National Association for Law Placement began keeping statistics in 1993. Not only did the deep economic recession lead businesses to make diversity programs less of a priority, but a growing number of states—including Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma—also moved to ban race-based affirmative action in recent years. These states joined California, Florida, and Washington, which had already banned affirmative action back in the 1990s (Schwartz and Cooper 2013). Table 1.3 reports on the diversity of judges appointed to U.S. district courts and to the U.S. courts of appeals by the past five presidents. An important criterion for appointment to a federal judgeship is having served as a clerk to a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and this issue is explored in box 1.1. TABLE 1.3 Demographic Information of Federal Judicial Confirmations by the Past Five Presidents Obama Bush II Clinton Bush I Reagan Source: Alliance for Justice, Judicial Selection Snapshot (June 5, 2017), http://www.afj.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ Judicial_Selection_Snapshot.pdf. For additional detail, see Stubbs (2016). Note: President Trump has an increasing number of judicial nominations pending, and at the time of publication he had a nigh number confirmed, but these have not been included in this table. Male 58% 78% 71% 81% 92% Female 42% 22% 29% 19% 9% White 64% 82% 75% 89% 94% African American 19% 7% 16% 7% 2% Hispanic 11% 9% 7% 4% 4% Asian Pacific American 6% 1% 1% 0% 0.5% Native American 0.3% 0% 0.2% 0% 0% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0.3% 0% 0% 0% 0% Openly GLBT 11 0 1 0 0 People with disabilities 0 2 3 1 1 TOTAL CONFIRMED JUDGES 329 327 378 193 383 BOX 1.1 The Lack of Diversity among Supreme Court Clerks Federal laws barring workplace discrimination do not cover the U.S. Supreme Court. The lack of diversity among law clerks reflects this omission in the law as it raises the question of "supreme hypocrisy." For example, between his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1972 and the beginning of 1999, former chief justice William Rehnquist had eighty-two law clerks. During that time, he had only one Hispanic clerk and only eleven women clerks. Not once did he hire a black clerk. Overall, only 1.2 percent of his clerks had been members of minority groups. The track record of his colleagues had not been much better. Of the 428 law clerks hired during the respective terms of the current justices, only seven were black, five were Hispanic, eighteen were Asian American, and not a single one was Native American. Despite the fact that over 40 percent of law school graduates in the 1990s were women, they made up only one-quarter of all clerks hired by current justices. These figures prompted Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) to conclude: "If the court were a Fortune 500 company, the statistics alone would demonstrate illegal discrimination." In an article, "Does the Supreme Court Need Affirmative Action for Its Own Staff?," Meeks (1999: 24) criticized the Supreme Court's hiring practices. He reasoned that becoming a clerk is a stepping-stone to other legal positions, including that of a Supreme Court justice. Thus, the hiring practices of the highest court in the land create a structural barrier to obtaining those positions. Moreover, Supreme Court law clerks wield considerable power, playing an extremely influential role in the court's functioning. As Meeks writes, "Clerks have the ear of the justices they serve. They have input on which cases the justices choose to consider. They write the initial drafts of most decisions. The Supreme Court's decisions are the law of the land and thus affect lives, determine how government resources are allocated, [and] force legislatures to reformulate public policy choices." In other words, the influence clerks have on both the cases heard and the opinions the court renders should not be underestimated. For example, recent Supreme Court decisions have narrowed opportunities for people of color as a result of limiting or ruling unconstitutional critical affirmative action programs or by diluting the application of the Voting Rights Act. The fact that clerks preview and review these cases means that they have had an impact on rulings involving civil rights, access to education, workplace discrimination, religious freedom, voting, welfare reform, immigrant rights, school desegregation, sexual harassment, police brutality, and death penalty appeals. Many of these cases have a disproportionate impact on minorities or women, so it is conspicuous that minorities and women did not have any influence over the preview or review of these cases. Diversity in the background (as well as the foreground) would not only provide a more well-rounded approach to dispensing justice in an increasingly diverse nation, but it would also go a long way toward displaying the image of color-blind justice in an era that lays claim to such. Court observers note that virtually all the Supreme Court clerks are chosen from clerks for the U.S. courts of appeals. Thus, the lack of diversity of judges in the courts of appeals influences the pool of clerks for the Supreme Court. While the data do not allow for the analysis of intersections, the clear implication is that judgeships are very much male and white. To the extent that judges seek clerks they are comfortable with because the clerks are "like themselves," judges re-create the pattern set by the white, male presidents who appointed them. In short, without a more balanced or diversified group of clerks, there is an obvious loss of valuable counterweight to the established court's largely majoritarian tendencies (Benson 2007). With the election of Barack Obama, the first biracial president, some of these patterns started to change. His first appointment to the Supreme Court was Sonia Sotomayor, the court's third woman and first Hispanic woman. But as of 2014, whites made up 74 percent and men made up 67 percent of federal district court judges (National Women's Law Center 2016) Having diverse clerks is thus important because clerks help to provide justices with a broader, more rounded, and varied perspective on critical issues. Only by setting a proactive example of inclusion can the Supreme Court fulfill the ideal of justice that it purports to protect. Indeed, the same argument, more or less, can be applied to all careers associated with the administration of justice in the United States. Second, there are the nonlawyers, primarily bailiffs and stenographers but also including the much less frequently occurring occupations of victim-witness or domestic violence advocates. With the exception of bailiffs, the other nonlawyers (especially stenographers) are primarily women and white. The educational backgrounds of these nonlawyers vary greatly, from those with a high school diploma or GED to those with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. These judicial workers' annual incomes place them in the working and middle classes. For example, the average annual 2016 salary for paralegals and legal assistants was $49,500, court reporters earned $51,320, and law clerks earned $51,760 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016b). The rest of this discussion on judicial workers focuses on the three key actors in the criminal court process: the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and the judge. These positions influence some of the direct actions taken by police and correctional personnel in the name of crime control, and they also indirectly influence some behavior of general citizens as they conform to the "rule of law." Despite the relative power of these legal actors, they are still captives of a legal order and rigid judicial processes that are, for the most part, well beyond their control. Prosecutors Violations of federal law are prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department, headed by the U.S. attorney general and staffed by ninety-three U.S. attorneys (one assigned to each of the federal district court jurisdictions), all nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Within states, district attorneys are generally employed by a county to prosecute violations of state laws. Most chief prosecutors for each county are elected, and they select their assistant or deputy prosecutors who carry out the day-to-day work of the prosecutor's office in all but the small and rural offices. Since most crimes violate state law, these offices receive most of the attention in this section. The criminal justice system contains about 2,300 prosecutors' offices, employing more than seventy-eight thousand attorneys, investigators, victim advocates, and support staff (BJS 2011: table 1). In 2007, the last year there was a survey of prosecutors, the budget for state prosecutors was about $6 billion (BJS 2011: 1), with the federal government spending more than an additional $3 billion. In contrast to television crime drama centering on serious criminal cases argued before a jury, the BJS notes that felony cases decided by juries "were rare across state prosecutors' offices, accounting for an average of 3% of all felony case dispositions" (2011: 2). This underscores the preference of judicial players for the plea-bargaining system (DeFrances 2002). The real role of prosecutors and defense attorneys, then, has become that of a private negotiator rather than an advocate in a trial. Disposing of more cases via plea bargains, however, may be unwise since the Bill of Rights authorizes jury trials as a necessary part of due process. In short, the right of citizens to be judged by a jury of their peers is one of the essential components of due process; but overreliance on plea-bargaining may have usurped that right as a matter of convenience and economy. Depending on the state, the prosecutor may be called the district attorney, the county attorney, the state's attorney, or several other variations. Whatever the name, the prosecutor is the most powerful actor in the administration of justice. Not only do prosecutors conduct the final screening of each person arrested for a criminal offense, and therefore decide whether to pursue criminal charges, but in most jurisdictions they also have unreviewable discretion in deciding whether to charge a person with a crime and whether to prosecute the case. In other words, regardless of the amount (or lack) of incriminating evidence, and without having to provide any reason to anyone, prosecutors have the authority to charge or not to charge a person with a crime and to prosecute or not prosecute the case (Bohm and Haley 2005: 278). Importantly, a study of "known wrongful convictions involving African American men that occurred since 1970," which had a sample of 343 individuals, reported that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor in 36.2 percent of the wrongful murder convictions in the study and 15 percent of the rape and sexual assault cases (Free and Ruesink 2012). Overall, they concluded, "the lack of diversity among actors in the criminal justice system makes it easier for nonwhites to be processed through the system without the necessary safeguards to minimize the probability of a wrongful conviction" (2012: 196). Like all attorneys, prosecutors are officers of the court. In addition, although police typically recommend that a suspect be charged with a crime, the final decision rests with the prosecutor. To charge or not to charge and what to charge are all decisions within prosecutorial discretion, which is what gives prosecutors their formidable power. The only check on the power of the prosecutor's arsenal of legal weapons are the "rules of discovery" mandating that a prosecutor provide defense counsel with any exculpatory (favorable) evidence on behalf of his or her client. Once the decision to prosecute has been made, prosecutors are then involved in virtually all stages of criminal adjudication, including whether to plea-bargain a case (and the negotiated punishment to be doled out) or take it to trial, the trial itself, and the sentencing phase as well. Other duties, depending on jurisdiction, that add to the power of prosecutors are recommending whether a person should receive bail and/or the amount, acting as legal advisers to other local governmental agencies, and managing a legal and political bureaucracy. With few exceptions, partisan politics plays a controlling role in the recruitment of prosecutors, both county and federal. For attorneys with any political aspirations or ambitions, choosing to work as a district attorney is a wise decision. As a political office engaged in the "war on crime," the only office to rank higher for those with political desires is the mayor's. In short, it's not the money but the power, status, and political potential that attracts persons to prosecutors' offices, often cementing their allegiances to the political status quo and state-legal apparatuses in the process (Jacob [1973] 1980). Breakdowns of prosecuting attorneys by gender and/or race/ethnicity were not available. Historically, women, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities have been highly underrepresented. Although there are certainly more women prosecutors today compared to three decades ago (when there were virtually none), the presence of persons of color is still statistically marginal. In other words, the cultural gap between the majority of white, middle-class prosecutors and the overwhelmingly indigent majority of defendants, nonwhite or white, remains wide. Also, those who become assistant and chief prosecutors are not traditionally of the same class backgrounds as those members of the bar who take cases against American big businesses and corporations. As Herbert Jacob, the political legal scholar, pointed out in one of his classic works, There are substantial indications that in many cities, most of the assistant prosecutors come from local law schools. In Chicago, for instance, more assistants come from DePaul and Chicago Kent than from the University of Chicago or Northwestern University law schools. They are likely to come from more modest backgrounds than students in elite law schools; they are often graduates of local high schools and colleges and come from families that have lived a long time in the city. The backgrounds of prosecutors suggest that they are particularly sensitive to political implications of their work; they are usually part of the political clique that dominates their locale and, therefore, may be more protective of their fellow officeholders than others would be. (Jacob [1973] 1980) Little has changed about these fundamental political, social, and economic realities of prosecuting criminal defendants in the contemporary United States. Defense Attorneys Backgrounds of defense attorneys are similar to those of prosecutors, working class and middle class. Both groups of attorneys are usually homegrown and typically attended nonelite law schools within their native states. Unlike prosecutors, however, defense attorneys are generally not connected to the local political scene. It is also safe to assume that if prosecutors closed 2.4 million felony cases in 2005, then defense attorneys of some kind were present in each of these cases, although some of the seven million misdemeanors might have been closed without the benefit of a defense counsel. Privately retained lawyers, court-appointed lawyers, public defenders, and contract lawyers do criminal defense work. Regardless of the type of lawyer that one has, the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as several twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions guarantee the right to "effective assistance" of counsel to people charged with a crime (Barak 1980; Loftus and Ketcham 1991). Besides the right to representation at trial, the right extends to several other critical stages in the criminal justice process where the "substantial rights of the accused" or convicted may be affected. These stages may include police lineups, custodial interrogations, preliminary hearings, plea-bargaining sessions, first appeal of a negotiated or postconviction sentence, sentencing hearings, and probation and parole revocation hearings. The Supreme Court has also extended the right to counsel to minors in juvenile court proceedings. Defense attorneys often receive a "bad rap" from the public for defending obviously guilty clients or for getting them off through legal loopholes or technicalities. However, the defense attorney is playing a part as an officer of the court by making sure the prosecutor can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt while playing by the accepted rules of procedure. The constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel and the adversarial nature of the adjudicative process would become meaningless if lawyers refused to defend their clients on the grounds that they knew (or believed, or the community generally believed) that a defendant was guilty. Freedom from arbitrary government power thus depends on defense counsel requiring prosecutors to prove a person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Hence, their jobs are to provide the best possible legal counsel and advocacy within the ethical standards of the profession and the limits of the law in order to compel the state to legally prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. On the whole, defense attorneys differ markedly from both prosecutors and judges. First, defense attorneys come on the stage after prosecutorial discretion has engaged in its gatekeeping functions, deciding which cases to drop, to pursue, to negotiate, or to take to trial. In effect, prosecutors initiate cases, and defenders respond. Some may argue that such discretion, in and of itself, gives the prosecutor a head start in preparing a case. Similarly, although defenders may influence the decisions to plea-bargain or to try a case, they exert no systematic impact over the courtroom flow of criminal cases unless they are members of a large public defender's office (Barak 1980). Moreover, unlike prosecutors and judges, criminal defenders are not elected public officials (whose employment is based on approval ratings). They are all private citizens whether they are self-employed or salaried employees of local government. Second, as a group, criminal defense attorneys are alienated and isolated from local politics; their chief alliances are with the vagaries of the legal marketplace and/or the civil service system to which they belong. In other words, not only are defense attorneys not part of a political patronage system, they are also generally not centrally located in one downtown office building, as prosecutors and judges are. Nor do they wield influence comparable to that of prosecutors with either bar associations or legislators. Third, unlike prosecutors, not all lawyers who represent criminal defendants are adequately trained or prepared to specialize in the practice of criminal law. Most lawyers while in law school have typically taken one or two courses in criminal law and criminal procedure. Like most of the other law courses and like most practicing attorneys, the areas of law they specialize in relate to such lucrative fields as corporate, tax, or tort law or to the less remunerative, yet still financially secure, areas of the law such as probate, divorce, custody, or real estate. Comparatively speaking, the practice of criminal law provides its practitioners, with some notable exceptions, less income and status in the community—although the white-collar and corporate crime defense firms tend to be high income and prestige. This discussion provides some of the reasons why wrongful convictions are a serious concern. Because most research has focused on those facing execution, the full extent of wrongful convictions in other felony and misdemeanor cases is unknown. The wrongful convictions generally involve defendants who had public defenders or assigned counsel, not the few who can afford nationally prominent, highly paid lawyers. Such high-end attorneys, however, are generally retained for one or more of three reasons: (1) the crime is sensational or highly publicized, (2) there are large legal fees involved, or (3) the chance to make new law, usually in the area of criminal procedure, is a distinct possibility. If defendants are upper-middle-class, they may still have access to privately retained competent counsel. In most large cities, there is another small group of criminal lawyers who make a very comfortable living by defending professional criminals, such as gamblers, pornographers, drug dealers, and members of organized crime. Other defendants of the middle classes or working classes, who may or may not be able to afford private counsel, have access to the vast majority of criminal lawyers who practice predominantly in the large cities across this country. By and large, these solo criminal practitioners or small partnerships of two or three attorneys struggle to earn a decent living, often practicing other kinds of law to make ends meet. The majority of criminal defendants who are too poor to retain their own counsel must rely on one of three types of criminal attorneys: a court-appointed lawyer, a public defender, or a contract lawyer. Nearly 70 percent of state prison inmates had attorneys appointed by the courts; blacks (77 percent) and Hispanics (73 percent) had slightly higher rates (Bohm and Haley 2005: 287-88). In sum, most practitioners of criminal defense work can be described as either "those who have failed to establish a successful practice and therefore accept criminal cases as a way of enlarging a legal practice, or those who relish the excitement in criminal work and feel that their practice secures some justice for the accused" (Quinney 1975: 213). However, in terms of the relatively few who fall into the latter category, most practice for many years as career civil servants in the public defender's offices, justifying their roles "as mediators between the poor and the courts, resigned to seeking occasional loopholes in the system, softening its more explicitly repressive features, and attempting to rescue the victims of blatant injustices" (Platt and Pollock 1974: 27). As for most young defense attorneys who are busy learning and developing their litigation skills, they sooner or later become bored, cynical, and burned out fighting for "justice for all," whereupon, if they have become competent in their trade, they leave the field of criminal law altogether for middle-class clients and the greener pastures of civil law. Judges The vast majority of judges at the state level oversee trial courts of general jurisdiction, with substantially fewer sitting on intermediate appellate courts or courts of last resort (state supreme courts). Judges who oversee most felony cases sit on the benches of what are variously called "district," "superior," or "circuit" courts (depending on jurisdiction). These trial courts, of which there are more than three thousand across the nation, have the authority to try both civil and criminal matters and to hear appeals from the "lower courts" or trial courts of limited jurisdiction (i.e., city courts, municipal courts, county courts, justice-of-the-peace courts, magistrate courts) that primarily handle misdemeanors, traffic violations, and ordinance offenses. In several states, judges of the lower courts are not required to be lawyers or have any formal legal training. In other jurisdictions, before being elected or appointed to office, the judges will have been practicing lawyers, but many of them will have no background in criminal law before joining the judiciary. In jurisdictions where judges are elected to office, these may be partisan or nonpartisan elections. Where city councils, mayors, legislatures, or governors appoint judges, they are subject to the politics of local and state bar associations. Like prosecutors, then, whether elected or appointed, judges are also sensitive to the political process that generally serves the interests of the people who elected or appointed them rather than the goals of social change. Like prosecutors and criminal defenders, most judges in the United States are overwhelmingly white and male. Judges tend to come from upper-middle-class families, average more than fifty years of age, attend college and law school in their home states, and are typically born in the communities in which they preside. Better educated than the average citizen, a majority of these judges were previously in private legal practice, making more money than they usually do as judges. In 2016, the median lawyer made $118,160 annually—which includes both criminal and civil attorneys—while the median salary for judges and magistrates was $125,880 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a). In 2014, there were 778,700 lawyers and 44,800 judges in the United States. Compared to prosecutors and defenders, trial judges command more respect, status, and deference from citizens at large. According to imagery, judges are presumed to have enormous power over the adjudication or criminalization process. Actually, though, judicial discretion is far more limited than prosecutorial discretion because judges are subject to appeal and legal review by higher courts. Legislators establish sentencing guidelines, and even when they are technically "advisory," they exert a great deal of control over the outcome. In effect, while trial judges do in fact possess a great deal of power, discretionary and otherwise, they are still less powerful in the administration of criminal justice than prosecutors. Since more than 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains, a judge's principal role becomes that of a "bureaucratic stamp" for negotiated deals worked out between prosecutors and defenders rather than one of an interpreter of complex legal matters. What Herbert Jacob wrote about judges and criminal adjudication more than thirty years ago is just as accurate today as it was back then: The massive flow of cases through their courts precludes anything but a cursory examination of the issues brought to their attention. Judges, like many factory workers, sit on an assembly line. They repeatedly perform routine tasks, with each task consuming only a fraction more than a minute. For such judges, the role is exactly the opposite of the intellectual challenge a judgeship is presumed to pose; it is a mind demeaning, stupefying post. (Jacob [1973] 1980: 67) Corrections Workers When it comes to prisons and imprisonment, correctional officers represent the vast majority of workers. They are generally responsible for the security of the institution and have the most frequent and closest contact with inmates. As Richard Hawkins and Geoffrey Alpert (1989) have observed, correctional officers experience a number of conflicts in their work, often become bored (tower workers) or overstimulated (cell block workers), depending on the nature of their jobs, and are subject to role ambiguity or role strain resulting primarily from the contradictions between custody and treatment objectives. Overall, these "officers generally have considerable discretion in discharging their duties within the constraints of rules, regulations, and policies. Yet, because they lack clear and specific guidelines on how to exercise their discretion, they feel vulnerable to second-guessing by their superiors and the courts" (Bohm and Haley 2005: 405). Gresham Sykes's classic study, The Society of Captives (1958), pointed to some ambiguities in correctional officers' power and discretion because they are outnumbered by prisoners and depend on their compliance to keep the daily routine of prison functional, a situation Sykes referred to as one of the "defects of total power." Hawkins and Alpert (1989) have identified three responses of officers to their working conditions. First, officers may become alienated and cynical and withdraw into some relatively safe niche within the prison. Second, some officers in their efforts to control inmates become overly authoritarian, confrontational, or intimidating. Finally, there are those officers who adopt a human-services orientation, seeking to make prisons a constructive place for themselves and for inmates. This latter orientation is not about waiting on the inmates and "serving" them in that sense but rather about a community-policing type of orientation within the cell block rather than out on the streets (Johnson 2002). While correctional officers are most directly engaged with inmates, there is a larger prison bureaucracy that accounts for many jobs. By 2016, correctional agencies employed about 532,000 people. About half of these jobs were in state correctional facilities, about seventeen thousand in federal institutions, and about twenty-two thousand in privately owned and managed prisons (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). Median earnings in 2016 for correctional officers and jailers were $42,820, with the federal government paying more, local government paying less, and private prisons paying much less ($37,570) (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016b). Salaries at both levels of government were subject to increases after completion of preservice training and/or a probationary period. Although corrections workers for the Federal Bureau of Prisons are required to have a bachelor's degree and some related work experience, paid or volunteer, applicants for state correctional systems need only be eighteen or twenty-one years of age and possess a high school diploma or GED. Slightly more than one-third (35 percent) had at least some college, and about 10 percent of all correctional workers have a bachelor's degree or higher (Sumter 2008). At the same time, there are efforts to upgrade prison work from that of a mere job to that of a professional career. However, low pay, the nature of the work, and the lack of prestige associated with it, coupled with the remote or rural location of many prisons, make recruitment of better-educated officers difficult if the economy presents other opportunities. Conover (2000) sums up the situation from a discussion he had with a fellow guard: "Officer after officer will tell you: there's no way in hell you'd want your kid to be a [correctional officer]." He said that probably ninety percent of the officers he knew would tell a stranger they met on vacation that they worked at something else—carpentry, he liked to say for himself—because the job carried such a stigma. Sure it had its advantages, like the salary, the benefits, the job security, and with seniority, the schedule: starting work at dawn, he had afternoons free to work on his land . . . but mainly, he said, prison work was about waiting. The inmates waited for their sentences to run out and the officers waited for retirement. It was "a life sentence in eight-hour shifts." In terms of gender and race, "77 percent of uniformed staff, including correctional officers, were male (though 35.5 percent of correctional officers hired in 2000 were female), and about 66 percent were white" (Bohm and Haley 2005: 404). When looking more broadly at all employees in state and federal prisons, about 33 percent are female (Sourcebook 2003: table 1.104, 96). And while it is commonplace for women correctional officers to work in federal and state high-security institutions today, the first woman to do so was hired in 1978. Interestingly, women make up a greater percentage of employees in state facilities than they do in federal facilities, and there are a higher percentage of female employees in the South than in other regions. This discussion of corrections workers has focused mainly on workers in prison. However, there are also probation and parole officers working in the field of "community corrections." Indeed, as inmate populations have soared over the past several decades, so have the numbers of persons on probation and parole. For example, between 1980 and 2016, the number of offenders subject to probation rose from 1.1 million to 3.8 million, and parole increased from 250,000 to almost 870,500 (Bohm and Haley 2005; Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016a). Statistics on employment, including race and gender breakdowns, are not available. Implications This chapter has highlighted such factors as globalization, militarism, privatization, and the cybercrime that are affecting the criminal justice enterprise. It has also provided an overview of some of the main categories of workers within the criminal justice system. In examining these workers, the overall conclusion is that criminal justice work is becoming more diverse. Proportional representation of women and people of color working in the administration of justice still seems important for at least two reasons. The first issue is of fairness and confidence in the system: the more closely the criminal justice labor force represents the distribution of diverse groups in society, the more the system appears to represent "we the people." If equality and justice are to happen within the United States, then it is especially important that the justice system and important core of democracy—women and minorities—should be included and in positions of authority (Álvarez and Urbina 2015). The second issue is of incorporating substantively different group backgrounds into the criminal justice process: women and people of color are more likely to bring experiences and insight into the field that generations of white males may not. "Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (i.e., those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups" (Phillips 2014). For example, women have a positive impact on policing by helping to reduce police brutality, increasing the efficacy in police response to domestic violence, and more generally by promoting an emphasis on the use of conflict resolution over the use of force. Similar arguments are made about women correctional officers, emphasizing interpersonal communication and reducing the conflict and violence behind bars. The presence of women prosecutors and judges can challenge the patriarchal and paternalistic attitudes of the judiciary and, in the process, impact the treatment of women lawyers, victims, and defendants. To accomplish change, they cannot be token representation for diversity, a "Society of One"—or even a "Society of Few" (Álvarez and Urbina 2015). Likewise, although the presence of women or people of color may result initially in "affirmative action" tensions and even backlash caused by misguided application of the rules of affirmative action, over time the cognitive dissonance between the "in" and "out" groups dissipates, and mutual identification sets in. Even while the criminal justice system is slowly changing because of the infusion of more women and minorities, forces of globalization, privatization, militarization, and cybercrime are also changing it. One aspect of globalization and privatization is outsourcing to the lowest bidder and moving where costs are cheapest. The result in both cases is the "increasingly brutal wage compression" as mentioned by Morgan Stanley's economist Stephen Roach (2006). In other words, just as the United States is likely to continue to lose jobs because of globalization, it is also likely that more services of the criminal justice system will be privatized. The result will be low-wage, contingent, and no-benefit employment for those at the bottom and greater wealth for those at the top. Additionally, the large increases in criminal justice expenditures have attracted the interest of many businesses, which want to find ways to tap into an expanding source of potential revenue brought about by the new securitization. As they do so, many of these penal-surveillance entrepreneurs also become advocates for "tough on crime" policies that lead to more expenditure and potentially more business and which do very little to solve the crime problem. Ironically, as more of criminal justice is directed by private-public enterprise for profits, concern for public safety, prevention, and rehabilitation becomes secondary. Globalization creates issues related to immigration, terrorism, and cybersecurity (as anyone in the world with a computer can attack the United States). Robert Johnson offers a poignant reminder that "we forgot that our Global Village was a stepchild of technology, not the flowering of community" (2001). People around the world did not consciously decide they all wanted to be closer and set out to invent telecommunications technology and systems to easily move money around. Rather, "technology happened," and people are still catching up with its effects, good and bad. Likewise, the criminal justice system is playing catch-up with homeland security and cybersecurity czars. As with the military, it is not clear whether the criminal justice system is still fighting the last war or preparing for future ones. But it is clear that the war on terror and emphasis on homeland security can lead to further militarization of the criminal justice system, even though the militarization accompanying the war on drugs has not led to increased justice. Indeed, it may very well aggravate many existing concerns about racial profiling and other forms of discrimination such as disproportionate minority contact throughout the apparatus of criminal justice. Review and Discussion Questions What are some of the perceived benefits to increasing the number of minorities and women in law enforcement and criminal justice? What are the similarities and differences between prosecutors, defenders, and judges? Which one has the most power? Why? Define globalization, privatization, and militarization. What is one way that each is having an impact on the criminal justice system? How does the escalation of criminal justice fines and fees affect policing, courts and justice? Why is cybercrime such a challenge for the criminal justice system? To what extent do immigrants contribute to the crime problem, and what is the effect of anti-immigrant policies?

ch 3 understanding class and economic privilledge

Understanding Class and Economic Privilege The novel Snow Crash (Stephenson 1992) is set in an alternative United States when the four things we do best are music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery. Hiro lives in a 20-foot-by-30-foot U-Store-It, formerly intended for people with too many material goods. The storage room has its own door and doesn't share walls with other units, so he tells himself there are worse places to live. Hiro is a freelance computer hacker; he also belongs to the elite order of Deliverators, entrusted with the task of thirty-minute pizza delivery for the Mafia-owned businesses (specifically, CosaNostra Pizza franchise #3569). In contrast with his own residence, deliveries are to the "burbclaves"—suburban enclaves, gated communities. All burbclaves have the same layout because the "Development Corporation will chop down any mountain ranges and divert the course of mighty rivers that threaten to interrupt this street plan." Some of them are Apartheid Burbclaves such as White Columns: "WHITE PEOPLE ONLY: NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED." As he approaches the gate, a laser scans his bar codes and he rolls through the immigration gate and past "customs agents ready to frisk all comers—cavity search them if they are the wrong kind of people." Hiro's partner, a skateboard courier named Y.T., gets arrested in the burbclave by MetaCops Unlimited ("DIAL 1-800-THE COPS All Major Credit Cards"), who also enforces traffic regulations for one of the major companies that operate private roads. Many of the franchise-organized quasi-national entities prefer to have their own security force rather than engage a general contractor. Security is a big deal because they're "so small, so insecure, that just about anything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue." The burbclave doesn't have a jail, but "any half-decent franchise strip" has one, either the cowboy-themed Hoosegow or The Clink, Inc. The MetaCops quickly see the sign: "THE HOOSEGOW: Premium incarceration and restraint services. We welcome busloads!" While Snow Crash is frequently considered science fiction, its author considers it an "alternative present." Indeed, the world he paints in the first pages of the novel satirizes many features of the present day, including the shift from manufacturing to a service-based economy, rising income inequality, residential segregation, the popularity of gated communities, the privatization of justice functions, the predictable, franchise-based world George Ritzer describes in The McDonaldization of Society (2004), and the growth in corporate power to rival the resources of states and many nations in the global village. While Americans like to think of themselves as a "classless" society, the United States has both a highly stratified workforce and extreme inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. This class-based society is also spatially separated, divided into urban and suburban spaces, a "geography of inequalities" (Body-Gendrot 2000). The white flight by upper and middle classes from the 1960s to 1990s that facilitated the development of "gated" and "walled" communities separated socially, mentally, and spatially from the poor has probably now peaked in many urban areas. These social realities of the urban and suburban worlds of class difference also yield very different rates of arrest. These very real class differences in experiencing crime and the administration of juvenile/adult criminal justice have lasting consequences not only for these youth but also for the ways in which the larger society and its institutions come to view crime, criminals, and crime control. In those places where reurbanism and supergentrification are "reversing" wealthy white flight, it will be interesting to see whether or not the actual practices of law enforcement and the administration of justice and/or the mediated views of public safety change. It should also be of interest to discern the ways in which crime and its control as well as new technology and securitization adapt to the age of reurbanism. As for life inside the gated communities of suburbia, living has been redefined along with the meaning of community, engendering a sense that individuals must protect themselves and their families from the "Other." This preference for living in the suburbs and for the levy of separate taxes has caused drastic shortfalls in the fiscal budgets of urban American cities. In addition to the tens of millions of residents, mostly white, living in such autonomous, unincorporated communities, there are also nearly eleven million households located in gated communities as of 2009 (Mohn 2012), about 10 percent of all occupied homes (Benjamin 2012). By the turn of the twenty-first century, Americans were spending about $65 billion for their private security, and the number of private police officers had exceeded the number of public. Much of the cost was not in the suburbs but inside such cities as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere because there is no access to the "defensible" spaces that are protected by new technologies of surveillance. Consequently, these urban areas claim to have private police on duty twenty-four hours a day because of the rising property values of such spaces and the needs of the affluents who live there. The Constitution of the United States claims that everyone is entitled to equal protection under the law. The statues of Lady Justice show her blindfolded so that she can impartially weigh the claims on the scales she carries. But most Americans know that being rich has its advantages, including in the areas of crime and law. Death-row inmates joke that people who have capital do not get capital punishment, and the data support their observation. Being wealthy makes it more likely that someone can literally or figuratively get away with murder. "It's not as simple as saying everyone is the same under the law anymore. We all know there's another layer to it now," writes Matt Taibbi in The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014: xvii). Although "layer" can describe a number of categories, he is examining economic inequality and class, which are less discussed than race or gender. And because people generally underestimate the amount of economic inequality that exists, the extent of class bias in criminal justice is not fully appreciated. Indeed, Taibbi says, "If you grew up well-off, you probably don't know how easy it is for poor people to end up in jail, often for the same dumb things you yourself did as a kid. And if you're broke and have limited experience in the world, you probably have no idea of the sheer scale of the awesome criminal capers that the powerful and politically connected can get away with" (2014: xxiii). Some observers see this pattern as so pervasive that they argue the criminal justice system is about controlling the poor and keeping them in their place (Chambliss and Seidman 1982; Quinney 1977; Shelden 2000). Further, "crime" refers to "crime in the streets" rather than "crime in the suites," or white-collar crime, which is more prevalent and more costly to society. Inequality and roadblocks in achieving the "American dream" are key concepts in strain theory, although few texts note that the wealthy also desire more money and may turn to (white-collar) crime because they have a limited number of legitimate ways to achieve their aspirations. Thus, understanding class is important for gaining insight into many facets of criminology and criminal justice. Fundamentally, class revolves around questions of the distribution of income, wealth, and status. (These questions clearly are related to racial and gender identity since many women and minority men tend to occupy the lower levels of income distribution, as we will explore.) Yet despite its importance, class is less frequently discussed than race and gender. Gerry Mooney, for example, notes that while "class remains a primary determinant of social life," most public "discourses about modern society have been largely de-classed" (2008: 68). The neglect of class occurs in a context where "the scale of this inequality is almost beyond comprehension, perhaps not surprisingly as much of it remains hidden from view" (2008: 64). With the economic collapse of 2008 and recovery, people were briefly willing to speak about class and the transfer of wealth from all taxpayers to the very rich through bonus payments to companies bailed out by the government (Barak 2012; Ritholtz 2009a). However, very few were willing to talk about "capitalism's dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite" (Funnell 2009). Outside of times when a financial crisis happens, conversation about class is more muted because getting vital information about class is still more difficult than with race or gender as basic government sources do not contain a table with key information such as how much wealth the top 1 percent of the country controls. But despite increasing inequality, the issue was never raised in the most recent presidential election. The presidential debates contained no substantive discussions of wealth inequality or proposals to help achieve a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The national media also failed miserably to bring this critical issue to the attention of the voters and to question the candidates about it. Discussions of class are not easy because information about the distribution of income and wealth can potentially disrupt deeply held beliefs about a United States where everyone is middle class and anyone can get ahead if they try hard enough. It is easier to talk about "working families," which include people of all classes, rather than talking about the hardships faced by many while acknowledging the class privilege of those with higher incomes, even if they still feel like they live paycheck to paycheck. For example, if a family has no money at the end of the month because of having an expensive mortgage for a big house or residence in a desirable part of town, credit card bills from travel and eating out, and funding college savings and retirement accounts, they still have class privilege. Box 3.1 has some statements that help further identify class privilege. BOX 3.1 You Know You're Privileged When . . . (Part 1) In 1988, Peggy McIntosh's frustration with men who would not recognize their male privilege prompted her to examine her own life and identify ordinary ways in which she experienced white privilege. "I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege" ([1988] 1997: 292). Since then the idea of privilege checklists has gained widespread acceptance, and people have applied the idea to many different types of privilege. This box covers the issue of class privilege, and each of the next three chapters will have a similar box to cover white privilege (chapter 4), male privilege (chapter 5), and intersections (chapter 6). I know I have class privilege when I can buy things for my comfort and because they are fashionable. I do not fear being hungry or homeless. I have the time and money to take care of my body (if I choose). I do not worry about my access to medical care. I can advocate for my class without being seen as looking for a handout. Whenever I've moved out of my home it has been voluntary, and I had another home to move into. I hunted for sport, not because of food insecurity. I can employ people to help with household tasks and child care. Source: Adapted from Pease, Bob. 2010. Undoing Privilege. London: Zed, 77-78. Describing the distribution of economic resources in the United States is straightforward: the clear pattern is that since the mid-1970s, the distribution of wealth has become more unequal, and the top 1 percent has disproportionately benefited from the recent weak economic recovery (Cronin 2013). But saying that "the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are getting taken" is seen as inciting "class warfare" (Hightower 1998: 105), even though that term is not applied to policies that empower businesses at the expense of workers, many of whom are experiencing downward mobility. It is also not applied to policies that further empower large financial institutions over customers and borrowers—or relaxing regulations on student loan servicers even after a report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that people with student loans "encounter widespread problems" (Cowley and Silver-Greenberg 2017). This chapter starts an investigation into class to explain important concepts and introduce facts about inequality. What follows is an overview of what class means, how people would like to see wealth distributed, how income and wealth are distributed, and what studies say about the ease of mobility between classes. It finishes with a brief review of how class has historically played a role in the administration of justice. Although these issues often receive less attention than race and gender, a three-week special series on class in the New York Times began by noting, "Class is still a powerful force in American life." It concluded that over the past thirty years or so, class "has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways" (Scott and Leonhardt 2005: A1). That continues to be true today. Social Class and Stratification in Society In a broad sense, class may be defined as "any division of society according to status," or social ranking (New Webster's Dictionary of the English Language 1984: 186). The New York Times series conceptualized class as a hand of cards, with the suits representing education, income, occupation, and wealth (Scott and Leonhardt 2005). But we believe primary attention should be placed on the stark inequality in the distribution of economic power and resources. Further, income and wealth are more important than other aspects of class for understanding the nature of crime control and the functioning of the criminal justice system. Money is ultimately the primary factor involved in motivations and opportunities to commit crime as well as in the responses of the criminal justice apparatus. For example, wealth means political influence to lobby for more favorable laws and less oversight; and, except for isolated cases related to widespread financial scandals, it is generally the case throughout history that poor defendants are the ones seen as "noncredible and/or disreputable persons regardless of their actual moral proclivities" (Emmelman 2004: 50, 63). Thus, the focus of our discussion of class is economic because it is convenient shorthand for understanding the larger issues, especially as these relate to crime, power, law, and justice. Many social thinkers have tried to devise meaningful ways to divide up the spectrum of income and wealth. Karl Marx identified the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production (factories, banks, and businesses); the petty bourgeoisie, who do not have ownership but occupy management or professional positions; and the proletariat, or workers, who need to sell their labor to make a wage. Marx also identified the surplus population, or lumpenproletariat, who have no formal ties to the system of economic relations because they are unemployed or unemployable (see Lynch, Michalowski, and Groves 2000). In developing his theory, Marx contributed a useful critique of capitalism, involving his belief that history could be described as an ongoing war of the rich against the poor for control of wealth. One interesting effort to take Marx's framework and apply it to the contemporary labor situation is The Precariat (Standing 2014), which combines the notion of the proletariat with the sense of precariousness many workers experience with ongoing low-wage contract work, no benefits, and no career path. While the precariat reject stable long-term work associated with unionization, the image of "a romantic free spirit" (2014: 15) belies how they are in this situation because globalization, outsourcing, and business demand for "flexible" labor have reduced wages, security, and job training. The precariat have no "bargain of trust or security in exchange for subordination" (2014: 14) that helps define the proletariat. Over the precariat are a salatariat of those with long-term jobs with decent salaries—a shrinking group—and an elite on top. Many other attempts to describe the class system have been less useful because they are not tied to a theory of power relations or offer less useful insights for understanding law, crime, and justice. They tie class to sources of money (rent, wages) and the amount of it to separate people into different groupings. Other attempts to describe the distribution of wealth tend to be variations on upper, middle, and lower classes, although there is some discomfort in describing others as "low class." To avoid possible value judgments, the lower segment of the income distribution has been described by such terms as working class and working poor, while underclass refers to the poorest of the poor, who seem to lack class mobility and are locked into poverty. Also, a growing literature in the field of "white-trash studies" examines the poorest whites who have none of the power and prestige of most whites. They have resources equal to or even less than minorities but have white skin, so studying them can potentially shed theoretical light on issues of race and class (Wray and Newitz 1996). White skin, for example, has not protected poor whites from forced sterilization that also aimed to prevent poor black and Native American women from having children (Isenberg 2016). Many schemes for understanding class have difficulty placing women who work in the home and are not wage earners. Indeed, radical feminists often argue that women represent a social class. More generally, feminists argue that women's relationship to class structure is mediated by "the configuration of the family, dependence on men, and domestic labour" (quoted in Gamble 1999: 206). Chapters 5 and 6 examine these issues in more detail. The important point is that underlying all these ideas about how to create meaningful divisions are some basic concepts related to income, wealth, and financial assets—"the kind of ownership that gives a person distinct advantages in a capitalist society" (Brouwer 1998: 13). The study of class is also part of a larger question about what sociologists call stratification, which is concerned with the stability of the distribution of social goods such as income, wealth, and prestige. Because most of these goods have an unequal distribution, part of stratification attempts to explain how small minorities maintain control over a disproportionate share of the social resources—an explanation that involves the role of the criminal justice system and the phenomenon of how The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (Reiman and Leighton 2017). Economic Distributions—Ideals and Reality With race and gender, the goal is equality, but with wealth and income most people do not want everyone to have the same amount. But how much inequality is fair, and what would a just distribution of economic resources look like? Before this chapter reviews the economic facts, it creates context by asking readers if they were going to be placed into a society and had an equal chance of being the poorest, the richest, or anyone in between, what would they want the distribution of wealth and income to look like? The first section below has some questions to help the readers think about their own preferences before sharing the results of a wide-scale survey. The second section examines the distribution of income, as in how much people earn over a year—and how that compares to corporate persons. The third section examines wealth, which is the assets or debt that people accrue over their lifetimes. The concluding section contains a short discussion of mobility and the ease with which people can or cannot be upwardly mobile in the class system. Income and Wealth Distributions—Ideals One important answer to the question of economic justice is from John Rawls (1971), whose writings argue that justice is the result of decisions that people would make about society from behind a "veil of ignorance." That is, people would design a fair society if they had to make choices not knowing their position in that society, so they could appear as rich or poor, white or minority, male or female, and so on. So, a starting point for examining economic inequality would be to ask: If you were going to be randomly placed in a society, what would you want the distribution of income and wealth to look like? One way researchers have tried to apply the philosophical question is to ask people which of three countries would they want to be placed into and showed them information about the distribution of wealth in each country (Norton and Ariely 2011). Examine the three countries listed in table 3.1 and note the amount of wealth held by the poorest 20 percent of the population and the richest 20 percent. For example, imagine there were one hundred people in the country and the total wealth was $100. In country A, the poorest twenty people would split $20, as would the richest 20 percent. In country B, the poorest twenty people would split $11, while the richest would share $36. In country C, the poorest twenty people would share ten cents, while the richest twenty would share $84. TABLE 3.1 Shares of Wealth Held by Richest and Poorest 20 Percent of the Population in Three Countries Country Wealth Held by Poorest 20 Percent (Percentage) Wealth Held by Richest 20 Percent (Percentage) Source: Calculated from Norton and Ariely 2011. A 20 20 B 11 36 C 0.1 84 Knowing that you were going to be randomly placed in the wealth distribution—bottom, top, or one of the groups in between—which would you choose? Within the confines of this forced choice, most people (47 percent) choose country B, which is actually the distribution of wealth in Sweden. Very few (10 percent) chose the level of inequality in country C, which is the United States. Researchers who put this question to a sample of five thousand people found a high degree of consensus across the political spectrum for distributions of wealth that are far more equal than what currently exists in the United States (Norton and Ariely 2011). This result tracks closely with Rawls' analysis, in which he outlined a strategy of maximizing the minimum levels of wealth. Even though some level of inequality helps reward people for their talent and efforts, high levels of inequality make many people worse off to enhance the wealth of the top few percent. Because those with little wealth are more numerous than the very wealthy, someone randomly placed in society will more likely have little wealth, so the strategy for most people is to allow some inequality but maximize the prospects of the least well-off. Because of limitations in the three choice model, researchers also asked respondents to create a just distribution of wealth by dividing up wealth between five groups, each representing 20 percent of the population. In addition to asking about this "ideal" distribution of wealth, they also asked people what they believed the distribution of wealth to be. The researchers conclude that Americans also construct ideal distributions that are far more equal than they estimated the United States to be—estimates which themselves were far more equal than the actual level of inequality. Second, there was much more consensus than disagreement across groups from different sides of the political spectrum about this desire for a more equal distribution of wealth, suggesting that Americans may possess a commonly held "normative" standard for the distribution of wealth despite the many disagreements about policies that affect that distribution, such as taxation and welfare. (Norton and Ariely 2011: 12) The full results are available in table 3.2, which indicates that Americans believed the top 20 percent should own 32 percent of the wealth, when in fact they own 84 percent. On the other side of the distribution, Americans believed the bottom 60 percent should own 45 percent of the wealth, when in reality they own less than 5 percent. TABLE 3.2 Actual, Perceived, and Ideal Distributions of Wealth in the United States Wealth of Poorest 60 Percent (Percentage) Wealth of Richest 20 Percent (Percentage) Source: Calculated from Norton and Ariely 2011, based on 2007 wealth data. Actual amount of wealth 5 84 Perceived amount of wealth 20 59 Ideal amount of wealth 45 32 The other striking aspect of this research is that Americans' beliefs about the amount of inequality in the country really underestimate inequality by a substantial amount. People believe the top 20 percent own 59 percent of the wealth when they really own 84 percent; people believe the bottom 60 percent own 20 percent of the wealth when they really own less than 5 percent. These mistakes about economic facts hide the true amount of inequality and thus support the unequal status quo. When ideas—whether intentionally or not—"distort reality in a way that justifies the prevailing distribution of power and wealth, hides society's injustices, and thus secures uncritical allegiance to the existing social order, we have what Marx called ideology" (Reiman and Leighton 2017: 183). Income Distribution—Real Income, wealth, and financial assets are all distributed more unequally in the United States than in other developed nations we consider to be our peers. The facts about economic distributions are important for furnishing a concrete picture of inequality and concepts such as relative deprivation, which focuses on people's evaluations of their place relative to what others have and/or what they believe they are entitled to. As discussed in chapter 2, Braithwaite argues that "inequality worsens both crimes of poverty motivated by need for goods for use and crimes of wealth motivated by greed" (1992: 81, emphasis in the original). Crime can be related to the powerlessness and exploitation of those at the bottom of the class system as well as by the unaccountability and manipulation by those at the top. Class mobility and crime are related to the notion of blocked opportunities and poverty in strain theory, yet crime is seldom discussed in terms of class mobility, stratification, and greed. But it should, and this section starts by reviewing the economic facts about income. Income consists of people's salary and other sources of money paid to them in a year. For most people, income takes the form of paychecks, although it can also include interest, dividends, rents from property, royalties from books or intellectual property, and capital gains when someone sells assets like property or stocks for more than they paid for it. Table 3.3 illustrates the distribution of income as reported by the Census Bureau. TABLE 3.3 Percentage of Income Earned and Income Limits in the United States, for 2015 as Presented by Census Bureau Population Share Share of Total Income (Percentage) Highest Income in Group ($) Source: Proctor, Semega, and Kollar. 2016. "U.S. Census Bureau," Current Population Reports, P60-256(RV), Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office). Table 2. Lowest (poorest) 20 percent 3.1 22,800 Second 8.2 43,511 Third 14.3 72,001 Fourth 23.2 117,002 Top (richest) 20 percent 51.1 The first column of table 3.3 illustrates that the richest 20 percent of the population control more than half the income earned in the United States, while the poorest 20 percent share about 3 percent. When looking at the highest income in each fifth of the population, there does not seem to be much inequality—80 percent of the population is making less than $117,000 a year. But how would the situation look if the table contained data for the blank cell, which is the highest income in the United States? This section will return to this question after a brief discussion of the rest of the income distribution. Women, minorities, and children are overrepresented in the lowest segments of the income distribution. Only 9.1 percent of white, non-Hispanic families were in poverty in 2015, compared with 24.1 percent of black families and 21.4 percent of Hispanic families (Proctor, Semega, and Kollar 2016: 13). As of July 2009, the federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour, so those who work forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks out of the year earn $15,080. Some states do have higher minimum wages, although no state has endorsed the idea of a "living wage" (Glasmeier 2017) or supported a $15 an hour wage for urban fast food workers. Further, the minimum wage is not indexed to inflation, so it increases irregularly, whenever Congress decides to raise it—or whenever businesses allow Congress to raise it. The poverty level for a single person in 2016 was $11,880 a year (Department of Health and Human Services 2016), so it does not take many weeks at less than a full-time schedule before a minimum wage worker falls below the poverty level. The poverty level for a family of three was $20,160, meaning that a single woman needs to earn substantially more than minimum wage to keep herself and two children above the poverty level. The median income of all households was $56,516 in 2015, but that overall median conceals wide variation by race: Black $36,898, Hispanic $45,148, white non-Hispanic $62,950, and Asian $77,166 (Proctor, Semega, and Kollar 2016: table 1). While there is a great deal of debate about who is included in the middle class, the median should be the midpoint of it. However, many households with incomes well over $117,000 see themselves as middle class even though they are in the top 20 percent of income earners. There is a huge range of income in the top 20 percent, as shown in table 3.4, which adds the top income in the United States to the Census Department data reported in table 3.3. Men in finance tend to command the highest salaries, and in 2015 the highest-paid person was a hedge-fund manager who took home $1.7 billion in salary (Stevenson 2016). That would be the equivalent of a $66 million paycheck every two weeks. The $1.7 billion is on the low side for hedge-fund managers in recent years, with a 2010 top income of almost $5 billion. That distinction went to John Paulson, who worked with Goldman Sachs to create bundles of mortgages he believed were likely to fail, then took out insurance on them that paid him when they failed, so he made a great deal of money from the economic collapse of 2008-2009. TABLE 3.4 Percentage of Income Earned and All Income Limits in the United States, by Fifths, 2015 Population Share Share of Total Income (Percentage) Highest Income in Group ($) Source: Nathan Vardi. 2016. "The Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers and Traders." Forbes, February 24. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2016/02/24/the-25-highest-earning-hedge-fund-managers-and-traders-2/. Bernadette Proctor, Jessica Semega, and Melissa Kollar. 2016. "U.S. Census Bureau," Current Population Reports, P60-256(RV), Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office). Table 2. Lowest (poorest) 20 percent 3.1 22,800 Second 8.2 43,511 Third 14.3 72,001 Fourth 23.2 117,002 Top (richest) 20 percent 51.1 1,700,000,000 Having the top salary filled in changes the conclusions people might draw about the extent of income inequality in the United States. Most presentations of income distributions in news reports and books use the census data, which is one reason why Americans generally underestimate the amount of inequality. People are likely to believe that professional athletes, celebrities, and CEOs are the most highly paid, but that is not the case. For example, in 2016, the average Standard & Poor's 500 CEO made $11.5 million (Equilar 2017), and the highest-paid CEO, Thomas Rutledge of Charter Communications, made $98 million (Huang and Russell 2017). (For CEOs, salary tends to be a small part of the overall pay or "compensation package," which includes stock options, spending allowances, and generous pensions that are frequently protected even during bankruptcy proceedings.) Historically, this top group has managed impressive gains, and CEO pay grows faster than profits and other company performance measures. If the minimum wage increased at the same rate as the earnings of the top 1 percent, it would be $28.79 an hour in 2013 instead of $7.25 (Light 2013). Another important comparison to show how well CEOs have done relative to others is a ratio of the CEO pay to that of an average worker in the company. This metric was first proposed by James Cotton, a lawyer who helped companies gather information like CEO pay that had to be presented to shareholders (Cotton 1997). Simply presenting CEO pay, without other points to contextualize it, and putting it in the context of an average worker could allow for a better judgment about whether executive pay was excessive. This was an issue that affected the corporation, as it would be inefficient for the shareholders when the company paid more than was necessary to get the best performance from the CEO and can become "tantamount to the looting of the corporation" (Cotton 1997: 182). He also thought it was hypocritical for well-paid executives to speak out against increases in the minimum wage: "Fifty cents an hour poses threats to employment while several billion dollars spread over a small class of executive is never discussed in terms of threats to employment even though workers are frequently laid off" (1997, 162). In 1980, CEOs of the largest companies were paid forty times as much as the hourly wage earners at their companies (Smith and Kuntz 2013). When Cotton wrote, it was eighty-five times the pay of the average worker (1997: 182), but in 2013 the average S&P 500 CEO made 204 times the average wages of the rank-and-file workers (Smith and Kuntz 2013). According to the most recent Forbes celebrity list (Greenburg 2017), musician Katy Perry made $33 million, realty TV star and model Kylie Jenner made $41 million, and athlete LeBron James made $86 million. The top earners on the list include musician Drake at $94 million, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling at $95 million, musician Beyoncé at $105 million, and the top earner on the celebrity list was musician Diddy at $130 million. While the celebrities are visible and somewhat diverse in terms of gender and race, the top earners in any given year are hedge-fund managers, who tend to be white, male, and out-of-sight rich. Women are only 16 percent of wage earners in the top 1 percent (which starts around $400,000) and 11 percent of those in the 0.1 percent (which starts around $1.3 million) (Frank 2016). The highest-paid female chief executive in the country in 2013, with compensation of $38 million, was Martine Rothblatt. But she was born a man and had gender reassignment surgery in 1994: "I've only been a woman for half of my life, and there's no doubt that I've benefited hugely from being a guy," she says (Frank 2016). (See chapter 5.) Inequality gets considerably worse if corporations are factored in, which should be done because American law treats corporations as "persons." The intense concentration of economic resources in corporations generates considerable political power, makes accountability increasingly difficult, and increases inequality in a way that is invisible to criminological theory. Corporations now grow to unlimited size so that their money power now dwarfs that of (most) individuals. For example, toy maker Mattel (which produces Barbie) is number 474 on the 2016 list of Fortune magazine's five hundred largest companies (Fortune 2016), with revenue (income) of almost $5.5 billion. Wal-Mart is the largest of the Fortune 500 companies, with revenue of $486 billion, compared with the median household income of $56,516. Such an income makes it gargantuan in relation to not only individuals but also cities, states, and even the federal regulatory agencies that are supposed to police and control corporations. Indeed, rather than comparing modern corporations with individuals, they can instead be compared with countries. Specifically, the revenue of a corporation can be compared with the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country, which is the total value of all the goods and services that it produces (Leighton 2013). For example, Wal-Mart would be the twenty-fourth largest economy in the world, right behind Saudi Arabia and larger than Iran and South Africa (World Bank 2017). Wealth Distribution—Real Income is one way of examining the finances of households, but in many ways measures of wealth are more important. Wealth looks at the accumulated assets and debt over a lifetime. It includes bank accounts, ownership of stocks and bonds, retirement accounts, houses, cars, and ownership of businesses; it also includes debts such as car loans, student loans, mortgages, and credit card balances. Wealth thus provides security for setbacks in life, such as job loss, employment transition, and/or medical hardship. It can provide money to start a business to build even more wealth. Wealth can allow parents to buy a home in a neighborhood with better schools, thus conferring benefits to their children. Wealthier families can invest in their children's health and braces to ensure straight teeth that help secure many higher-paying jobs later in life. Half the population has no dental coverage, so the full costs need to be paid out of pocket, leading many to skip visits and suffer "the psychological hell of having poor teeth in a rich, capitalist country" (Smarsh 2014). Also, intergenerational transfers through inheritance play a substantial role in perpetuating a family's class status. Finally, because wealth also includes the ownership of financial assets such as businesses and stock—especially large blocks not held through a mutual fund or retirement account—it is also important for understanding economic and political power. To help see the difference between income and wealth, compare former boxer Michael Tyson and businessman Michael Dell. During his boxing career, Tyson earned about $400 million in income but managed to spend it in ways that left him declaring bankruptcy after hitting $34 million in debt (Schlabach 2005: E1). In contrast, Dell makes a lower salary per year than Tyson received for many individual fights, but as founder of Dell computers he has substantial business and stock ownership. As with others, his wealth will rise and fall along with the value of his company's stock, but his ownership of the business will continue to provide economic and political power. Likewise, lists of people with high salaries tend to include minorities and women who are athletes and entertainers, but the lists of those with the largest wealth are record label owners, movie producers, and those who own media companies rather than actors, entertainers, or celebrities. (And, much of the lists is populated by white men in finance, technology, and who own large, established businesses.) Indeed, the only minority on both the Forbes Celebrity 100 and Forbes Richest 400 was Oprah Winfrey at $2.8 billion in wealth, which put her at number 239. Table 3.5 provides a summary of wealth and the distribution of business ownership for 2013, the latest available data. Almost all of it is held by the wealthiest 20 percent, while the poorest 40 percent—a group twice as large—holds less than 1 percent. Ownership of businesses is even more concentrated. General measures of net wealth indicate that the combined worth of the poorest 50 percent of the population (about 150 million people) is only slightly higher than that held by the richest four hundred families (Kennickell 2009; see also Sum and Forsell 2009). Other data sources estimate that the top 0.1 percent holds about the same wealth as the bottom 90 percent (Ritholtz 2016). TABLE 3.5 Shares of Net Worth and Business Ownership, 2013 Wealth Percentile Groups 0-40 (Poorest 40 Percent) 80-100 (Richest 20 Percent) 99-100 (Top 1 Percent) Source: Kuhn and Rios-Rull 2016: table 8. Percentage of all net worth owned −0.1 87 36 Percentage of all business owned 0.5 94 52 Inequality has generally been worsening over the last several decades, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Stiglitz notes that "the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below." He further notes that much of the wealth distribution is about laws and policies as much as individual effort, and that "incentives [are] directed not at creating new wealth but at taking it from others" (2012: 6). About 10 percent of people have negative net worth (more debt than assets), which erases the small amounts of wealth held by the next 30 percent of the population. For these families, credit card debt tends to be high, along with auto loans that exceed the value of the car. Student loans contribute to the negative segment of the parade, and the total amount of student loan debt has grown substantially to $1.1 trillion. For many individuals, that debt is larger and paid off later in life, but the education provides an increase in human capital, which can possibly lead over time to better income and jobs. (The next section on mobility provides more detail.) Below the median wealth, assets tend to be in the form of checking and saving accounts plus vehicles. People own a home, although large mortgage balances mean the house does not contribute greatly to wealth. Ownership of business is negligible, reflecting both low levels of ownership and relatively small businesses. The "typical" family, which would be at the median, has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it to the bank. The breadwinners make more than $43,000 a year but can't manage to pay off a $2,200 credit card balance. (Irwin 2006: F01) Since that was written, a number of families in the lead-up to the financial crisis took on increasing housing-related debt and lowered home values for many people, so the households have lower net worth. Unemployment also erodes wealth as families dip into any savings and then sell stocks, bonds, and retirement account holdings. Above the median, families have not just bigger checking and savings accounts, they are more likely to own stocks, bonds, and mutual funds; they are more likely to have retirement accounts that are better funded. They have larger houses, less debt, and a greater likelihood of owning rental property or second homes. At $50 million in net worth, common around Silicon Valley, The $50 million crowd typically owns a $5 million house—that's only 4,000 square feet on one acre in Atherton or Los Altos Hills—and a $2 million vacation place near, but not on, Lake Tahoe. They might own a golf membership or two at fancy clubs, costing $300,000 each, or perhaps sail around the world in their Hunter 50 cruising yacht or fly around the world in their Pilatus PC-12 turboprop. (Karlgaard 2011) And, that's still a long way from the Forbes 400 list, which for 2016 required $1.7 billion in wealth—and did not include a record number of billionaires. The Forbes 400 collectively has $2.4 trillion in wealth—an average of $6 billion per person—but even within these four hundred households, there is a substantial distance between those at the bottom and top of the list (Bill Gates at $81 billion). Many people are crowded together at the bottom, where several hundred million dollars in additional wealth can catapult a person many ranks up the list. Breaking into the top one hundred wealthiest requires $5.2 billion. Breaking into the top ten requires $37.5 billion and is a place held by Google's Sergey Brin. As with income, the median wealth conceals wide differences by race as detailed in table 3.6. The concept of relative wealth means that for every dollar of wealth a white household has, a black one has six cents. Because wealth is transmitted generationally through inheritances and investments in children, historical circumstances affect current wealth distributions. Specifically, the U.S. has maintained racialized policies that have stood in the way of people of color earning wealth and passing it on to the next generation. Historical policies codified in U.S. laws have included: the appropriation of Native American lands and the use of termination and assimilation policies to keep them oppressed; the sanctioning of uncompensated slave labor for people of African origin and the use of housing, educational, and economic segregation to perpetuate their isolation; the use of occupational and educational segregation and the denial of citizenship status to marginalize Latinos; and the adoption of exclusionary laws in the 20th century to keep people of Asian origin from purchasing land, owning businesses, or obtaining citizenship. (Tippett et al. 2014: 2) TABLE 3.6 Median and Relative Wealth by Race Median wealth, 2011 ($) Relative wealth ($) Source: Tippett et al. 2014: 14. White 111,740 1.00 Black 7,113 0.06 Asian 92,259 0.83 Hispanic 8,113 0.07 Another factor currently slowing wealth accumulation is that "many communities of color have a greater array of family members in poverty, which, through an altruistic motive, reduces their resources to save" (Tippett et al. 2014: 8). Because women are disproportionately in poverty and suffer wage discrimination, their wealth is also low. Table 3.7 examines wealth of single females, whose wealth does not need to be distinguished from others in the household. Married women in this sample overall had higher levels of wealth, with white women gaining more than black women (married white women with a bachelor's degree had $260,000 in wealth, compared to $45,000 for a married black woman with a bachelor's degree.) The table shows that completing a bachelor's degree increases the wealth for white and black women, but has a greater payoff for white women. The median wealth of single black women with children was zero, meaning half of that population had negative wealth (more debt than assets), which underscores the lack of resources to "draw upon in times of crisis or job loss—further dimming prospects for the next generation" (Zaw et al. 2017: 1). TABLE 3.7 Median Wealth of Women by College Education, Presence of Children under 18, and Race Single Females Black ($) White ($) Source: Zaw et al. 2017: tables 1 and 2. No bachelor's degree 500 8,000 With bachelor's degree 5,000 35,000 With children (all education levels) 0 3,000 Economic Mobility—Real Inequality seems to be less of a concern where there is a high degree of mobility, so widespread poverty or concentrated disadvantage is less of a concern if the people living in those situations could easily improve their position. The United States has some opportunity for changing one's class, with anecdotal stories of self-made millionaires and billionaires being popular because they confirm the idea of mobility and the American dream. But systematic research examining larger populations finds less reason to be optimistic. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), high levels of inequality "can stifle upward social mobility, making it harder for talented and hard-working people to get the rewards they deserve" (quoted in Corak 2013: 79). An economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago notes that "income mobility has declined in the last 20 years" (Francis 2005) as inequality has increased. A number of researchers have approached this topic and looked at the earnings of parents and adult children to measure upward and downward mobility across generations. They find that inequality produces an "inequality of opportunity": Socioeconomic status influences a child's health and aptitudes in early years—indeed even in utero—which in turn influences early cognitive and social development, and readiness to learn. These outcomes and the family circumstances of children, as well as the quality of neighborhoods and schools, influence success in primary school, which feeds into success in high school and college. Family resources and connections affect access to good schools and jobs, and the degree of inequality in labor markets determines both the resources parents have and ultimately the return to the education the children receive. This entire process then shapes earnings in adulthood. (Corak 2013: 85) We would add that with law enforcement and criminal justice focused on those at the bottom, criminal records are also more likely, which adds to social exclusion and limits a person's earning potential. This explanation is not meant to be deterministic and recognizes that mobility happens, just less frequently than people think. Specifically, in "Finland, Norway, and Denmark, the tie between parental economic status and the adult earnings of children is weakest: less than one-fifth of any economic advantage or disadvantage that a father may have had in his time are passed on to a son in adulthood." Where the income of parent and child are loosely tied, economic mobility (both upward and downward) is more likely. In contrast, "in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, roughly 50 percent of any advantage or disadvantage is passed on" (Corak 2013: 81). Notice that the underlying research is based on studies of men's mobility. Drawing conclusions about everyone based on studies of men is a common problem in social science, medical, criminological, and other research (see chapter 6). While women have claimed a permanent role in the workforce, their struggle to enter the workforce and break glass ceilings (that limit upward mobility) is erased; most research implies that they have the same mobility patterns as men when they do not, or it implies that their mobility does not matter. Further, many key issues about the labor force are then not discussed, such as the male models of successful leadership that women are expected to emulate even while they are criticized for acting assertively. Male standards of success require women to work long hours away from their families, which by itself is unproblematic when gender expectations are widened to include dual caretaking responsibilities for men. But many women still face social ridicule for spending more time at work than at home when they have families and even more ridicule when women choose to remain unmarried and child-free. A brief examination of college degrees and student loans helps illustrate the challenges with economic mobility without the limitations of the surveys discussed above. Several decades ago, college was easier to pay for through part-time and summer jobs, along with financial aid in the form of grants. But college costs have increased, and more financial aid is in the form of loans, currently $1.1 trillion—and paychecks are from an increasingly insecure, low-wage environment. So, college became less affordable just as it was becoming increasingly important for maintaining or improving one's economic prospects. Further, the federal financial aid website reports an expected family contribution that is much less than the bills students actually face (Goldrick-Rab 2016). This means that those without family wealth to support their education must work more and/or take out more loans, which has many important effects on a student's GPA, the likelihood of completing the degree, and the future effects of their indebtedness on their life's choices. For example, community colleges are a relatively affordable way for a diversity of people to get, or start, a college degree. But a survey of thirty-three thousand community college students across twenty-four states found that about half of community college students were housing insecure, meaning that they had an inability to pay rent or needed to move frequently ("couch surfing") (Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, and Hernandez 2017: 11). Fourteen percent were homeless, with 4 percent saying they had slept in an abandoned building or car. In addition, the survey found about one-third of community college students had food insecurity, with 36 percent answering yes to the question, "Were you ever hungry but didn't eat because there wasn't enough money for food?" (2017: 12). Students who are hungry are less likely to be engaging fully with class material, and many are working long hours at low-wage jobs, which makes them too tired to study and attend classes. Work and school schedules often conflict. All these factors make successful completion of the degree, or transfer to a four-year college, less likely. A study of three thousand undergraduates found that even when students successfully completed a four-year degree, they often had to go to great lengths to find money, which meant "a lower likelihood of participating in extracurricular activities, visiting professors during office hours, and spending time on campus." Such students have "fewer opportunities to build relationships that could pave the way for social networks yielding greater returns to the college degree" (Goldrick-Rab 2016: 33). In contrast, families with some wealth can make contributions that can confer a number of advantages. Family wealth can expand the options for students, to wider geographical areas with more economic opportunities, and opening the possibility of attending more expensive, elite educational institutions. Having food and secure housing does not make college easy, but it does remove several formidable barriers. It stands to reason that students who enjoy reduced pressure to work long hours at a low-wage job, and without having to confront the decision about whether to drop out because of mounting debt, would perform better in college. (Having several years worth of debt but no degree is worse for many students than if they had not attended college [Goldrick-Rab 2016].) Finally, "low-income families hold student debt amounting to about 70 percent of their income, while wealthier families have student debt amounting to around 10 percent of their income (Goldrick-Rab 2016: 94). The lower levels of debt put fewer constraints on life after a bachelor's degree—there can be more options for graduate school or additional training, moving away from parents and in with a partner, or starting to save for a house and build their own wealth. None of this is to say that students from wealthy families do not have struggles in college. Rather, the point is that family wealth reduces some serious barriers to completing a college degree and has the potential to set up conditions for them to build social networks that can help in the future, like with information about jobs. This wealth privilege combines with advantages from better schools, money for SAT preparation, lower debt-to-income ratios after graduation, and inheritances. The combination of these factors allows children of the wealthy to more easily accumulate wealth than those with less class privilege. Class Justice Throughout most of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, a blatant kind of class justice prevailed in the selective enforcement and differential application of the criminal and civil laws to the "haves" and the "have-nots" (Auerbach 1976; Barak 1980). The law was heavily influenced by a reverence for private property and laissez-faire social relations ("let them do as they will," meaning few regulations beyond the protection of private property). In terms of commercial transactions, the philosophy of the day was caveat emptor, "buyer beware"; businesses sometimes used their freedom to produce dangerous goods or to misrepresent their product. In the area of business, farmers and merchants alike were subject to few regulatory laws of any kind. In other words, both groups were allowed the freedom to expand their particular domains and to compete and acquire both property and capital with little legal interference. By contrast, labor was highly regulated. Unions were an illegal interference with "freedom of contract" and an unlawful conspiracy that limited an employer's property rights. Railroads were crucial to the expansion of the economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, and companies amassed large fortunes from this industry. However, they fought attempts at minimum wages for employees and often required employees to live in a company town, rent dwellings from the company, and shop at company stores. The prices charged by the company were usually more than the wage, so the debt bound families to the company as indentured servants. For industry as a whole, the average workweek was sixty hours. Fatigue, combined with the employers' indifference to workplace safety, created "an appalling record of industrial accidents. An incomplete survey showed that at least half a million workers were killed, crippled, or seriously injured on the job in 1907" (Gilbert 1998: 57). In other areas, exposés of the meatpacking industry shocked the public and motivated legislators to enact the first food and drug acts. Certain journalists, called muckrakers, believed that "big business was 'bad business' insofar as it was more concerned with profit than human life" (Lynch and Frank 1992: 13). Congress passed the Sherman Act in 1890, with Senator John Sherman emphasizing, If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. (Khan 2017) Lawyers such as Louis Brandeis, who would soon become a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, shared their concerns. Brandeis wrote about the "curse of business" and the problems of companies becoming large in the interests of being a monopoly—one that violated public trust rather than worked in its interest. "No country," he wrote, "can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class" (Douglas 1954: 187). Justice Douglas (1954) explained, "Brandeis did not want America to become a nation of clerks, all working for some overlord." Further, the concentrated economic power of large corporations yields concentrated political power. Thus, antitrust law was intended to prevent the "enabling a small minority to amass outsized wealth, which they could then use to influence government" (Khan 2017). That influence can come at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. The administration of criminal (and civil) justice was chaotic, often corrupt, and subject to the buying of law enforcement and juries (Barak 1980). An independent and decentralized criminal justice system designed for a more homogenized, pioneer, and primarily agricultural society was ill adapted for the needs of an increasingly complex, urban, and industrialized society. A social and cultural environment experienced increasing numbers of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, a changing means of rapid communication and transportation, and an expanding presence of wage-earning working classes—and it all called for a coordinated system of criminal justice. By the turn of the twentieth century, the buying of justice that had prevailed earlier (available to those who could afford representation in the legislatures, in the courts, and in the streets) was threatening the very legitimacy of criminal justice in the United States (Cantor 1932). The initial laissez-faire emphasis on the right to acquire private property had blossomed into a full-fledged national preoccupation with wealth and power. Political corruption became widespread, and political machines dominated urban areas: "The machines controlled city governments, including the police and the courts. Payrolls were padded and payoffs were collected from contractors" (Edelstein and Wicks 1977: 7). Graft and other forms of bribery contributed not only to the buying of justice by those who could afford it but also to a changing national morality. "Rackets," "pull," and "protection" were common antidotes for stubborn legal nuisances. Prevailing values of wealth and success predominated as guiding principles of right and wrong. "The ability to 'make good' and 'get away with it' offsets the questionable means employed in the business as well as professional world. Disrespect for the law and order is the accompanying product of this scheme of success" (Cantor 1932: 145). Those who were marginalized, especially the poor, unemployed, women, and people of color, were rarely, if ever, in a position to buy justice. As the marginalized groups of immigrants and others grew in urban cities across the United States and the miscarriages of justice flourished, the need to reform the institutions of criminal justice grew because the country was beginning to experience bitter class wars. The working classes aggressively resisted exploitation through on-the-job actions and wide social movements. To combat challenges to the emerging monopoly or corporate order of industrial capitalism, the wealthy and ruling classes initially employed illegal violence, such as the hiring of thugs and private armies. Later, they retained the services of private security companies, such as the Pinkertons, to infiltrate and break up worker organizations. However, as the number of violent incidents increased, as the contradictions of American democracy became more apparent, other methods for regulating and controlling the masses were needed—methods reflective of a modern, rational system of crime control and a criminal justice system based on a more equal-appearing application of the rule of law (Barak 1980). During the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, the plight of the poor gained the attention of some industrialists and political leaders. The discontent of those who were not benefiting from the expanding economy threatened the growing prosperity of those who were. As a response to the growing resentment of the lower and working classes and to the middle-class Progressives who believed in the "perfectible society," the ruling strata sought to stabilize the social order in general and to reform the administration of criminal justice in particular. There emerged a number of reforms, some "hard" and some "soft" (Center for Research on Criminal Justice 1975). Examples of the harder, more technical, reforms included the formation of systems of state policing, the initiation of truancy laws, and the forced sterilization of some "mentally defective" persons, poor people, and sex offenders. Examples of the softer, or humane, reforms included the development of the juvenile justice system, the public defender system, and a bit later, systems of treatment and rehabilitation. Each of these soft reforms aimed at a fairer, more objective, scientific, and humane administration of criminal justice. In combination, these reforms helped secure and legitimate the needs of an emerging corporate capitalism as they contributed to more rational, bureaucratic, and efficient systems of criminal justice. At the same time, these legalistic reforms not only improved the practices and the images of due process and equal protection under the law, they also legitimated greater state intervention into the lives of those marginally defined and segregated on the basis of their class, race, and gender. The practice of forced sterilization, for example, continued until as recently as the 1970s and provided the foundation for chemical castration as well as policies aimed at getting women who receive welfare to agree to be implanted with the contraceptive Norplant. Meanwhile, the large concentrations of wealth held by megacorporations translated into political power that is also exercised through corporate lobbyists and political action committees (PACs). PACs that donate thousands—or even millions—of dollars can achieve considerable clout, especially because only 0.08 percent of the adult population gave more than $200 to a political party or candidate during the 2012 election cycle (OpenSecrets.org n.d.). Many corporate interests donate heavily to both political parties to ensure access to legislators and favorable action on their legislation, regardless of which party wins the election. Further influence and consideration comes from the corporate use of "the slush fund, the kickback, the stock award, the high-paying job offer from industry, the lavish parties and prostitutes, the meals, transportation, housing, and vacation accommodations, and the many other hustling enticements of money" (Simon 1999: 24). The result of this influence can be tax breaks, less regulation and/or policing, and/or limits on the extent of punishment (harms are misdemeanors rather than felonies, are civil matters rather than criminal, or have limits on the size of damages juries are allowed to award against businesses). After the half-trillion-dollar savings and loan scandals of the late 1980s, Congress did increase penalties for some financial crimes and added some financial regulations. But according to the authors of Big Money Crime, soon after the savings and loan crisis Congress went on a spree of "cavalier" financial deregulation, spurred on by lobbying and political donations and creating the "paradox of increasing financial deregulation coming on the heels of the most catastrophic experiment with deregulation in history" (Calavita, Pontell, and Tillman 1997). In turn, this deregulation created the conditions for the string of corporate corruption in 2001-2002 that included Enron, WorldCom, and many others (Leighton and Reiman 2002). Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to correct some of the systemic causes of widespread fraud. But with the passage of time, businesses felt increasingly comfortable lobbying against many of the safeguards put in place to protect shareholders (Leighton and Reiman 2004). Further, the financial services industry lobbied to deregulate many aspects of their business, which resulted in the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and now they have been lobbying quietly behind the scenes to block much-needed reform after the $700 million bailout (Barak 2012). Indeed, Barry Ritholtz—the CEO of an investment research firm and author of Bailout Nation (2009a)—argues that the financial crisis has been "wasted": there was "smoldering resentment" among people because of the "massive taxpayer wealth transfer to inept, corrupt, incompetent bankers." This provided the "best chance to clean up Wall Street in five generations," but "what we got instead, was the usual lobbying efforts by the finance industry. They own Congress, lock stock and barrel, and they throttled Financial Reform" (2009b). Congressman Barney Frank, cosponsor of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, says the bill is "facing a death through a thousand cuts" because of lobbying (Rivlin 2011). The idea of requiring corporations to disclose a CEO to median worker pay ratio proposed by Cotton (1997) was included in Dodd-Frank and the SEC adopted a final rule on it in 2015 to take effect in 2017. But the SEC Chair "took the unusual step of requesting additional comments on the cost and burden of complying with the already approved CEO pay ratio rule" (Weinstein and Blaine Martin 2017), so its future is uncertain more than seven years after it became a legal requirement. Outside of the pay ratio rule, financial institutions aim their sights both at putting loopholes in new rules and at reducing the budgets of enforcement agencies. Although real people convicted of felonies lose their voting rights, corporations convicted of multiple felonies lose none of their political rights—and in some cases try to lobby Congress to weaken the law under which they were convicted. Further, corporate charters themselves act as a shield from the public and give corporations permission to act in the best interests of shareholders rather than the larger public good. Thus, the corporation is now a superhuman creature of the law, superior to you and me, since it has civil rights but no civil responsibilities; it is legally obligated to be selfish; it cannot be thrown in jail; it can deduct from its tax bill any fines it gets for wrongdoings; and it can live forever. (Hightower 1998: 34) While many of the individual men and women who work in the corporation make good neighbors, the corporation itself can be a problem because "the corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others" (Bakan 2004: 2). Indeed, Joel Bakan asked Robert Hare, a noted expert on psychopathologies, to apply his diagnostic checklist to corporations and found a close match: they are irresponsible by putting others at risk; manipulative of everything, including public opinion; lacking in empathy for others and unable to feel remorse; unwilling to accept responsibility; and superficial in relating to others (2004: 56-57). Just as psychopaths are known for their superficial charm, corporations may "act in ways to promote the public good when it is to their advantage to do so, but they will just as quickly sacrifice it—it is their legal obligation to do so—when necessary to serve their own ends" (118). Thus, protecting people—citizens, workers, consumers, communities, and the environment—from the excesses of corporate behavior is an important function of law. But this social control is brought into question by donations and strategic lobbying on the part of corporations. When the size of corporate actors is combined with their institutional personality, the dark side of big business becomes visible. Obviously, not all businesses are bad, and the point is that there is a problematic antisocial tendency that must be kept in check, but the control mechanisms to regulate and hold corporations accountable have become less powerful relative to the corporations themselves (Barak 2015, 2017). Generally, with the crimes of the powerless, the governmental legal agents wage "wars" like the ones on illicit drugs or undocumented families and have "zero tolerance" for a range of petty crimes. Such acts receive a disproportionate priority with investigations, surveillance, arrest, and prosecutions and during what is likely to be a negotiated settlement (plea bargain). When convicted, perpetrators are typically sentenced to prison or placed on probation. Either way, the poor and powerless are disproportionately represented as "common criminals" or the "dangerous class," and they are treated accordingly. By contrast, many crimes of the very powerful are "beyond incrimination" or not subject to the criminal law in the first place because of lobbying and donations to politicians. Thus, the possibility of criminal liability and prison does not even exist. Police do not investigate, and it is a regulatory matter to be dealt with by a fine and a consent decree. Even when there is an actual crime, offenders can receive a "deferred prosecutorial agreement," which means charges will be dropped if there is no additional wrongdoing. Through these various means, the powerful Wall Street securities fraudsters responsible for the recession of 2009 to 2012, for example, were not investigated, prosecuted, or held accountable for their actions (Barak 2012). The sentiment is concisely, if crudely, expressed by a quote appearing in "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" by Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi (2011): "Everything's f**ked up, and nobody goes to jail." The white men who overextended their speculative risks, engaged in multiple misrepresentations, and caused a financial implosion felt around the world are still in charge today because the financial institutions that they run were—and are—"too big to fail" or jail (Barak 2012). Implications This chapter began by noting the reluctance in our society to discuss issues of economic class. In spite of real differences in class, in popular media "people dwell in a classless homogenized American Never-Never Land" where "the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money" (McGrath 2005). Class thus becomes less visible and less subject to honest conversation. This chapter has made class more visible by reviewing the economic facts and setting a foundation for how this impacts criminology and criminal justice. Criminology and criminal justice have a role in creating ideology because income and wealth are not part of the "official knowledge" about crime and crime control, even though they are important factors to understand. Indeed, a twenty-five-year retrospective on the 1967 President's Crime Commission stated, "While evidence shows that criminal justice procedures are more evenhanded than in the past, it is also painfully obvious that the growing gap between rich and poor, and white and black, continues to make criminal justice a social battleground rather than a mechanism to increase social peace" (Conley 1994: 66). Because of the long history of racism, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are disproportionately poor, so issues of class and race are tied together in ways that will be explored in other chapters. The current and evolving problem is that criminal justice is contributing to the differences between rich and poor and the separation of whites from minorities. Current domestic policies of crime control operate as if "Americans have concluded that the problems of the urban poor are intractable and therefore they [apparently agreed to have their money] spent on a vast network of prisons, rather than on solutions" (quoted in Welch 1996: 101) and basic social and educational services for the poor. Some of these programs are cheaper than prisons and have the potential to reduce crime by preventing child abuse, enhancing the intellectual and social development of children, providing support and mentoring to vulnerable adolescents, and doing intensive work with juvenile offenders (Currie 1998: 81). John Irwin and James Austin captured the essence of this problem two decades ago, and the "enormous policy dilemma" they articulated ultimately as a problem of inequality and economic class has only intensified since then: On the one hand, we are expending a greater portion of our public dollars on incarcerating, punishing, treating and controlling persons who are primarily from the lower economic classes in an effort to reduce crime. On the other hand, we have set in motion economic policies that serve to widen the gap between the rich and poor, producing yet another generation of impoverished youths who will probably end up under control of the correctional system. By escalating the size of the correctional system, we are also increasing the tax burden and diverting billions of dollars from those very public services (education, health, transportation, and economic development) that would reduce poverty, unemployment, crime, drug abuse and mental illness. (1997: 10-11) While the levels of inequality and economic mobility have important implications for the American dream and for criminological theories such as strain or conflict theory, criminology does not pursue these ideas in a way that would increase consciousness of class, inequality, and stratification. Sadly, the criminal justice system reflects the class biases in society—and helps to reinforce them. The United States has enlarged its apparatuses of criminal justice and crime control against the poorest members in society while the rich, especially corporations, continue to gather more wealth and feel unaccountable for the adverse consequences of their privileged behavior on the "teeming masses." Review and Discussion Questions Why don't Americans know the actual levels of inequality between classes? Discuss the differences and overlaps among income, wealth, and financial assets. If you were going to be randomly placed in a society, how would you distribute wealth in that society? Would it look like the current strata in the United States today? Why or why not? What are some of the problems caused by class inequality? What are some of the problems caused by unaccountable corporations

Part I crime control and criminology

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part II inequality and privilege

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