Speaker Series: “Penal Power in Action: On the Tracks of County Prosecutors”

To understand the delivery of state punishment as legitimate material and symbolic violence trained on unruly bodies, it is essential to drill deep into the ordinary functioning of the criminal court as the “throughput” agency transforming the “input” of the police into the “output” of probation and incarceration. I draw on a three-year ethnography of the day-to-day operations of two county courts in Northern California guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice to flesh out the dynamic microstructure of penalty. Following a pretrial prosecutor at work negotiating guilty plea agreements in the entrails of the courthouse allows me to disclose the workings of “negotiated justice” as it actually happens. I map out the structure of the local judicial field, trace the strategies of attorneys, catalog the full stakes of plea bargaining and disclose how, far from being absolute, prosecutorial discretion is embedded in, and constrained by, a nested series of social spaces and symbolic structures. I propose to reorient the social studies of criminal punishment from theoretical presupposition to documented practice, output to throughput, frontstage to backstage, and from interacting agents to the dialectic of historical structures and habitus in the judicial field that I disentangle in my forthcoming book Rethinking the Penal State.

Contact Info:

510-642-4038

csls@law.berkeley.edu

Access Coordinator:

Pamela Erickson, Vethea Cole, csls@law.berkeley.edu, 510-642-4038