LGST 10

Legal Consciousness

The way people understand, experience, and use/avoid law in everyday life- how law shapes and is shaped by social interactions

• Kathryne Young Hawaiian Cockfight- how cockfighters know the law but engage it selectively based on trust, risk, and community norms.

• Monica Bell Situational Trust- how disadvantaged mothers form nuanced, situation-dependent orientations toward law. neither purely cynical nor trusting.

• Mathew Carr- defendants mistrust and resistance towards their attorneys reflects structural disadvantages and prior negative legal encounters

Legal Cynicism

Cultural view in which the law is seen as illegitimate, unresponsive, and unable to provide justice often in disadvantaged communities

• Monica Bell- mothers' distrust is situational rather than total — they draw on legal resources selectively, producing 'situational trust.'

• Kathryne Young- Cockfighters distrust official legal channels and operate under informal norms — but Young shows it's more nuanced than blanket rejection of law.

Domain Specificity

Legal consciousness or legal cynicism is not uniform but varies depending on legal encounter type (may trust in some domains but not others)

• Monica Bell- “situational trust” is DS; mothers differentiate between legal institutions and contexts when deciding to engage in the law

Therapeutic Consequences

Ways in which legal or carceral processes impose psychological, emotional, or social hard on individuals beyond formal punishment

• Jessica Cooper- Mental Health Courts- How mental health courts, despite therapeutic intentions, still trap individuals in coercive carceral systems that produce harm rather than care

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann Misdemeanor Justice- Procedural hassle and marking of misdemeanor processing produces therapeutic harms even without conviction

Officer Exceptionalism

The belief or institutional norm that law enforcement officers operate under different rules than civilians, shielding them from accountability

• Terry v. Ohio- Granting police the power to stop and frisk based on reasonable suspicion- standard around officer judgement not rights

• Sarah Brayne Digital Traces- predictive policing insulates officers from scrutiny with biased data treated as objective

Institutional Navigation

The skills and strategies marginalized people develop to move through beuqacratic and legal institutions- knowing how to access services, avoid risks, and manage overlapping systems

• Jessica Cooper Mental Health Courts- in mental health courts have to navigate overlapping therapeutic and carceral demands

• Monica Bell- Disadvantaged mothers engage in sophisticated institutional navigation, strategically invoking or avoiding law based on context and anticipated outcomes.

• Matthew Carr- Disadvantaged Defendant- Defendants must navigate the public defense system with limited power, often resisting attorney advice as a form of institutional navigation from a position of distrust.

Code of the Street

Anderson's concept describing an informal set of rules governing interpersonal behavior in inner-city communities, centered on respect and toughness, often arising where legal institutions are seen as ineffective.

• . Monica Bell — Situational Trust

  Bell's mothers navigate between street code and legal codes, showing how legal cynicism is partly produced by the code's dominance in environments where police offer little protection.

• . Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  The code of the street and carceral identity are intertwined — incarceration reinforces street norms while street norms shape how inmates and parolees navigate institutions.

Second-Order Legal Consciousness

An awareness not just of legal rules but of how others perceive one's legal situation — being watched, labeled, or judged by legal institutions, shaping behavior preemptively

• Kathryne Young — Hawaiian Cockfighting Young documents how cockfighters' awareness of surveillance and potential prosecution shapes their community practices — a clear example of second-order legal consciousness affecting behavior.

• Sarah Lageson — Digital Punishment

  Lageson's subjects exhibit second-order legal consciousness: they know their records are visible to others online and adjust their behavior and self-presentation accordingly.

Legal Pluralism

The coexistence of multiple legal/normative orders- official law with informal rules

• Kathryne Young — Hawaiian Cockfighting

  Hawaiian cockfighting communities operate under their own normative order (custom, honor, community governance) alongside and in tension with formal state law — a textbook case of legal pluralism.

Arraignment

Formal court proceeding where a defendant read charges and enters plea (guilty, not guilty, or contest)

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann shows that arraignment in misdemeanor cases is often the key moment where case outcomes are effectively decided — through plea offers, bail conditions, and marking — long before trial.

• Debra Emmelman — Trial by Plea

  Arraignment is the entry point into the recursive plea negotiation process Emmelman documents.

Social Control

Formal (law, police, prisons) and informal (norms, community pressure) mechanisms by which societies regulate behavior and maintain order

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann's central argument: misdemeanor justice is not about adjudication but social control — monitoring, burdening, and managing populations without formal conviction.

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Carceral institutions extend social control beyond prison walls through identity formation — the 'bulldog' identity persists in schools and communities as a form of ongoing social control.

• Jessica Cooper — Mental Health Courts

  Mental health courts function as therapeutic social control — nominally rehabilitative but still coercive and carceral in practice.

Determinate Sentencing

A sentencing model in which fixed, definite prison terms are prescribed by law, removing or limiting judicial and parole board discretion.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Mayeux's entire article traces the shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing in California and the rise of back-end administrative mechanisms to compensate for lost discretion.

Indeterminate sentencing

A sentencing model where the court sets a range (e.g., 5–10 years) and parole boards decide the actual release date based on rehabilitation assessments

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Mayeux contextualizes back-end sentencing as a successor to indeterminate sentencing — when California abolished the latter, it created new discretionary mechanisms at the back end of the carceral process.

Misdemeanor

A criminal offense less serious than a felony, typically punishable by fines or up to one year in jail. Examples include petty theft, simple assault, or disorderly conduct.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann's entire study focuses on misdemeanor processing in New York City, arguing that misdemeanors function as tools of social control through marking, procedural hassle, and performance rather than conviction.

Felony

A serious criminal offense punishable by more than one year in state or federal prison. Examples include murder, rape, robbery, and drug trafficking.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann's analysis of misdemeanors implicitly contrasts with felony processing — misdemeanor courts use different logics of control than the adjudication-focused felony system.

• Khalil Muhammad — White Criminality

  Muhammad traces how felony categorization was racialized — white criminality was decriminalized or rehabilitated while Black criminality was increasingly penalized through felony charges.

Probation

A court-ordered period of community supervision imposed instead of (or in addition to) incarceration, typically with conditions the person must meet to avoid imprisonment.

• . Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Probation-like conditions are imposed in misdemeanor cases as a mechanism of ongoing social control — defendants must comply with rules that extend surveillance well beyond the courthouse.

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Probation is part of the carceral continuum that Lopez-Aguado describes — it tethers individuals to formal supervision and carceral identity even outside prison.

Marking

In Kohler-Hausmann's framework, the process by which case records are created and maintained, creating an official label that can follow a person and shape future legal encounters.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Marking is one of Kohler-Hausmann's three logics of misdemeanor justice: even without conviction, a case record marks individuals in databases accessible to prosecutors and judges in future cases.

• Sarah Lageson — Digital Punishment

  Lageson extends marking into the digital sphere — online criminal records act

Procedural Hassle

In Kohler-Hausmann's framework, the burden imposed on defendants by repeated court appearances, conditions, and compliance requirements — itself a form of punishment even without conviction.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Procedural hassle is one of Kohler-Hausmann's three core logics of misdemeanor control: defendants are burdened through mandatory appearances, drug tests, and waiting — the process is the punishment.

Performance

In Kohler-Hausmann's framework, the requirement that defendants demonstrate compliance, reform, or good behavior over time as a condition for case resolution — staging one's acceptability for the court.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Performance is Kohler-Hausmann's third logic: defendants must perform compliance over months of appearances, demonstrating to the court they can be managed — a managerial rather than adjudicative function.

• Jessica Cooper — Mental Health Courts

  Mental health court participants must similarly perform therapeutic progress — recovery is staged for institutional observers rather than being intrinsically defined.

Broken Windows Policing

A policing strategy (Wilson & Kelling, 1982) premised on the idea that targeting minor disorders and 'quality of life' offenses prevents more serious crime by signaling community order.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Broken windows policing directly generates the misdemeanor caseload Kohler-Hausmann studies — aggressive policing of minor infractions floods courts and enables the managerial model of control.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Predictive policing systems can encode and amplify broken windows logics — surveilling the same neighborhoods based on historically biased arrest data.

Back-end Sentencing

Administrative mechanisms (parole revocation, earned credits, risk assessments) that determine actual time served after a formal sentence is imposed — discretion shifted from judges to administrative actors.

• . Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  how administrative discretion was reconstituted after determinate sentencing removed judicial discretion.

Mass Incerceration

The historically unprecedented and internationally exceptional scale of imprisonment in the United States since the 1970s, characterized by racial disparity and concentrated in poor communities.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Mayeux situates California's sentencing history within the broader rise of mass incarceration — showing how policy choices created the infrastructure for explosive prison growth.

• Khalil Muhammad — White Criminality

  Muhammad's racial history of criminalization is foundational to understanding mass incarceration — the racialized construction of criminality produced the political conditions for mass imprisonment.

• Ocen — Incapacitating Motherhood

  connects mass incarceration to the gendered experience of Black mothers — incarceration disrupts family, and pregnancy in prison illustrates the collateral reach of mass incarceration.

Disciplinary Society

Foucault's concept: a modern form of social organization in which power operates through surveillance, normalization, and discipline of bodies and behavior — moving from punishment of the body to regulation of the soul.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  The managerial logics of misdemeanor justice (marking, performance, hassle) are Foucauldian in structure — regulating behavior through ongoing supervision rather than discrete punishment.

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  The carceral institution disciplines identity formation — the 'bulldog' self is produced through the normalizing practices of juvenile detention and schools.

Panopticism

Foucault's concept derived from Bentham's Panopticon prison design: the idea that the possibility of constant surveillance — without knowing when one is watched — induces self-discipline and conformity.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Brayne's analysis of predictive policing as an 'actuarial panopticon' — digital surveillance creates a condition of potential constant monitoring, inducing behavioral changes in surveilled communities.

• Sarah Lageson — Digital Punishment

  Lageson's subjects experience a form of digital panopticism — not knowing who is searching their records online produces ongoing self-surveillance and behavioral constraint.

Subject/Subjectivity

Foucauldian concept: how individuals are constituted as particular kinds of subjects through discourse, power, and institutional practices — one's sense of self is produced, not given.

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Lopez-Aguado's 'carceral identity' is precisely about subjectivity — how youth become 'bulldogs' through carceral institutions' constitutive power, carrying that identity across social fields.

• Jessica Cooper — Mental Health Courts

  Mental health court participants are constituted as particular subjects (mentally ill, in recovery, compliant or non-compliant) through therapeutic-carceral discourse.

Decarceration

Policies, movements, or processes aimed at reducing the prison population and reliance on incarceration — including early release programs, diversion, and abolition efforts.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  AB 109 (realignment) was California's major decarceration effort after Brown v. Plata — Mayeux traces how back-end sentencing tools were central to managing that population shift.

Penitentiary

A type of prison developed in the early 19th century (associated with Pennsylvania and Auburn systems) premised on penitence, solitary reflection, and labor as paths to reform.

• From Muhammad Where did All the White Criminals Go

Big House Model

The early- to mid-20th century prison model characterized by large, regimented institutions emphasizing custody, industrial labor, and strict hierarchy, without rehabilitative programming.

• From Muhammad Where did All the White Criminals Go

Warehouse Prison

The contemporary prison model characterized by mass storage of inmates with minimal programming or rehabilitation — prioritizing incapacitation over reform.

• From Muhammad Where did All the White Criminals Go (relate to back-end and incapacitating motherhood too)

Rehabilitation

The penal philosophy that imprisonment should reform offenders through education, treatment, and programming so they can successfully reintegrate into society.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Rehabilitation was the stated philosophy of California's indeterminate sentencing era — its collapse in the 1970s (Martinson's 'nothing works') paved the way for determinacy and back-end sentencing.

• Jessica Cooper — Mental Health Courts

  Mental health courts promise rehabilitation as an alternative to traditional punishment, but Cooper shows rehabilitation remains subordinated to carceral control.

Incapacitation

The penal goal of preventing crime by physically removing offenders from society through imprisonment, without necessarily aiming at reform.

• Ocen — Incapacitating Motherhood

  Ocen's title literalizes incapacitation: not only are women imprisoned, but their capacity to mother is incapacitated — pregnancy and caregiving are treated as security threats.

Brown v. Plata

2011 U.S. Supreme Court case ruling that California's prison overcrowding constituted cruel and unusual punishment, requiring the state to reduce its prison population.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Brown v. Plata is the legal forcing mechanism behind AB 109 — the constitutional requirement to decarcerate prompted California to develop back-end administrative tools to manage population reduction.

AB 109

California's 2011 Public Safety Realignment Act, passed in response to Brown v. Plata, which shifted responsibility for lower-level offenders from state prisons to county jails and supervision.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  AB 109 is the policy centerpiece of Mayeux's analysis — he examines how realignment created new back-end mechanisms for managing sentences and release at the county level.

Parole

Conditional early release from prison under supervision, with requirements the person must meet or face re-incarceration.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Parole revocation is a key back-end sentencing mechanism — Mayeux shows how parole boards and administrative actors hold de facto sentencing power independent of the original court judgment.

Carceral Citizenship

living, conforming, identifying with the prison. Carceral Citizenship is when people are not treated like others because of their time in prison. Often forced to create new community w criminals

• . Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Lopez-Aguado shows how young men of color's identity and social life are structured by carceral institutions — carceral identity becomes the primary mode of civic recognition available to them.

• Ocen — Incapacitating Motherhood

  Ocen demonstrates how Black mothers' citizenship is mediated through carceral contact — their reproductive rights and family integrity are conditioned on compliance with penal institutions.

Carceral Continuum

The idea that carceral control is not confined to prisons but extends across a range of institutions. when communities of color begin to resemble the prison in terms of everyday experiences with surveillance and social control

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Lopez-Aguado's core argument: carceral identity 'spills over' from juvenile detention into schools and streets — the carceral continuum links institutions that collectively manage and mark disadvantaged youth.

Collateral Consequences

The secondary legal penalties that follow from a criminal conviction beyond incarceration — including loss of voting rights, public housing eligibility, employment, or immigration status.

• Sarah Lageson — Digital Punishment

  Lageson focuses on the collateral consequences of digital criminal records — even minor or dismissed charges produce lasting harm through online visibility affecting employment and relationships.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann identifies collateral consequences as a core injury of misdemeanor processing — the mark of a case record triggers housing, employment, and immigration consequences independent of conviction.

Speedy Trial

The Sixth Amendment right guaranteeing criminal defendants a trial without unreasonable delay, intended to prevent prolonged pretrial detention.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann shows how the speedy trial right is waived routinely in misdemeanor cases — defendants accept procedural delay as part of the performance/compliance process, undermining this constitutional protection.

Reasonable Suspicion

The legal standard (lower than probable cause) permitting police to briefly stop and detain a person based on specific, articulable facts suggesting criminal activity.

• Terry v. Ohio

  Terry v. Ohio established reasonable suspicion as a Fourth Amendment standard — the Court held that a brief investigatory stop (and frisk) is constitutional on less than probable cause.

• . Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Predictive policing systems are used to generate or rationalize reasonable suspicion — algorithmic outputs provide ostensibly objective grounds for stops that would otherwise be legally vulnerable.

Probable Cause

The Fourth Amendment standard requiring police to have a reasonable belief, based on articulable facts, that a crime has been or is being committed before making an arrest or conducting a search.

• Terry v. Ohio

  Terry distinguished reasonable suspicion from probable cause — the case created a lower constitutional threshold for stops, opening the door to widespread street encounters below the probable cause standard.

Terry v. Ohio

1968 Supreme Court case holding that police may conduct brief investigatory stops ('Terry stops') and limited pat-downs based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, even without probable cause.

Predictive Policing

The use of algorithmic tools and data analysis to forecast where crimes are likely to occur or who is likely to commit them, directing police resources and attention accordingly.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Brayne's central focus: she ethnographically studies the LAPD's adoption of Palantir-based predictive policing, documenting how it expands the surveillance dragnet and entrenches existing biases.

Individualized Suspicion

The constitutional standard requiring that police suspicion be based on specific, particularized facts about an individual — as opposed to membership in a category or group.

• Terry v. Ohio

  Terry nominally requires individualized suspicion — the officer must point to specific facts about this person. Justice Douglas's dissent warned this standard would be eroded in practice.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Brayne shows how predictive policing undermines individualized suspicion by substituting categorical algorithmic risk scores for person-specific facts.

Catagorical suspicion

Suspicion based on membership in a demographic or geographic category — race, neighborhood, age — rather than individual behavior. Contrasted with the constitutional ideal of individualized suspicion.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Predictive policing systems institutionalize categorical suspicion — they flag entire zip codes or demographic profiles, allowing race and place to substitute for individualized evidence.'

• Terry v. Ohio

  The dissenting justices in Terry worried that 'reasonable suspicion' would become de facto categorical — targeting young Black men in urban spaces. This concern proved prescient.

Techwashing

The process by which algorithmic or technological framing makes biased or discriminatory practices appear neutral, objective, and scientifically legitimate.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces

  Brayne documents techwashing explicitly — the LAPD presents predictive policing as data-driven and race-neutral, obscuring how biased historical arrest data encodes racial disparities into the algorithm.

Gideon v. Wainright

1963 Supreme Court case holding that the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel requires states to provide defense attorneys to indigent defendants in criminal cases.

• Matthew Carr — Disadvantaged Defendant

  Gideon is the constitutional backdrop for Carr's study — he examines how the right established in Gideon plays out in practice for disadvantaged defendants, where formal rights don't translate to meaningful representation.

Plea Bargaining

A negotiated agreement between prosecutor and defendant in which the defendant pleads guilty (often to a lesser charge) in exchange for a more lenient sentence, avoiding trial.

• Debra Emmelman — Trial by Plea

  Emmelman's entire study analyzes how plea bargaining works as recursive decision-making — attorneys, defendants, and prosecutors jointly assess case value through repeated, iterative negotiation rather than a single decisive moment.

• Matthew Carr — Disadvantaged Defendant

  Carr examines how disadvantaged defendants experience plea bargaining — often pressured to accept deals they distrust due to resource limitations, time, and attorney relationships built on mistrust.

Value of the Case

In Emmelman's framework, the implicit shared assessment among courtroom actors of what an appropriate outcome for a case is — shaped by offense severity, defendant characteristics, and local legal culture.

• Debra Emmelman — Trial by Plea

  The 'value of the case' is central to Emmelman's analysis — attorneys assess how a case would play at trial to establish a benchmark for acceptable plea offers, driving the recursive negotiation process.

Degredation Ceremony

Harold Garfinkel's concept: a ritual process that publicly strips a person of their existing social identity and reconstitutes them as a morally inferior type of person.

• From incapacitating motherhood (could be kohler misdemeanor justice)

Deniable Degredation

A form of stigmatization or status harm that is structured so that institutional actors can plausibly deny its degrading intent — harm is inflicted without accountability.

• Ocen — Incapacitating Motherhood

  The treatment of pregnant incarcerated women involves deniable degradation — harmful conditions are framed as security necessity rather than punitive intent.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann — Misdemeanor Justice

  Kohler-Hausmann's managerial logics are forms of deniable degradation — marking, hassle, and performance degrade without a formal finding of guilt, allowing the system to deny punitive intent.

Bureaucracy

A formalized system of administration characterized by rules, hierarchy, impersonality, and specialization — Weber's ideal type of rational-legal authority.

New Deal0ization of White Criminality

Muhammad's concept describing how white immigrant crime in the early 20th century was addressed through social welfare programs (housing, employment, social work) rather than criminal punishment.

Victimization, Rehabilitation, Decriminalization of White Criminality

Muhammad's framework describing the three dominant responses to white crime: treating white offenders as victims of environment, as candidates for reform, or simply not categorizing their behavior as criminal.

Baume’s Law

New York's 1926 habitual offender statute mandating life imprisonment for four-time felony offenders — a precursor to modern 'three strikes' laws.

• Khalil Muhammad — White Criminality

Discretion

The authority of legal actors (police, prosecutors, judges, parole boards) to make choices within the bounds of the law — deciding whether and how to apply legal rules in specific cases.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Mayeux's central argument concerns discretion — determinate sentencing claimed to remove it from judges, but Mayeux shows it was reconstituted administratively at the back end of the system.

• Khalil Muhammad — White Criminality

  Discretion enabled racialized outcomes — police, prosecutors, and judges exercised discretion in ways that consistently diverted white offenders and punished Black ones.

Prosecutorial Discretion

The power of prosecutors to decide whether to file charges, what charges to bring, whether to offer plea deals, and how to allocate prosecutorial resources.

• Debra Emmelman — Trial by Plea

  Prosecutorial discretion drives the recursive plea process Emmelman documents — the prosecutor's initial offer and willingness to negotiate define the range of possible case outcomes.

• Khalil Muhammad — White Criminality

  Muhammad's history reveals how prosecutorial discretion was racialized — white offenders were more likely to receive diversion or reduced charges through discretionary decisions.

Gang Sorting

The administrative practice of classifying inmates as gang members or associates, affecting housing, programming, parole decisions, and supervision intensity.

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Gang sorting is part of the carceral identity-formation process — being labeled gang-affiliated shapes one's trajectory through the carceral continuum.

• Sean Mayeux — Back-end Sentencing

  Gang sorting is a key back-end sentencing mechanism Mayeux identifies — administrative classification shapes actual time served and conditions of confinement independent of the original sentence.

Socializing Institutions

Institutions (family, school, church, peer groups) that transmit norms, values, and social roles — and through which social control can be exercised informally.

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado — Carceral Identity

  Lopez-Aguado shows how carceral institutions displace traditional socializing institutions — juvenile detention and corrections become primary sites of identity formation, crowding out family and school.

Expungement

A legal process by which a criminal record is sealed or erased, theoretically relieving the person of collateral consequences associated with that record.

• Sarah Lageson — Digital Punishment

  Lageson directly addresses expungement's limits in the digital era — even after official expungement, records persist in commercial databases, rendering the legal remedy ineffective.

Privacy Inequalities

The unequal distribution of privacy protection and surveillance exposure across social groups — those with less power face greater exposure of personal information through legal and technological systems.

• Sarah Lageson — Digital Punishment — STRONG CONNECTION

  Lageson's framework of 'digital punishment' is rooted in privacy inequalities — criminal record exposure online falls hardest on those with least power to manage or suppress their digital footprint.

• Sarah Brayne — Digital Traces — STRONG CONNECTION

  Brayne documents how predictive policing creates privacy inequalities — communities of color face intensive data harvesting while others are largely exempt from surveillance dragnet.