By Valerie Jenness and Alexis Rowland

A growing body of research reveals that transgender people are disproportionately in contact with the criminal legal system, wherein they experience considerable discrimination, violence, and other harms. To better understand transgender people's involvement in this system, this article synthesizes research from criminology, transgender studies, and related fields as well as empirical findings produced outside of academe, to conceptualize a “transgender criminal legal system nexus.” This article examines historical and contemporary criminalization of transgender people; differential system contact and attendant experiences associated with police contact, judicial decision-making, and incarceration; and pathways to system involvement for transgender people. The analytic focus is on cultural logics related to institutionalized conceptualizations of gender, discriminatory people-processing in various domains of the criminal legal system, and institutionally produced disparities for transgender people involved in the criminal legal system, especially transgender women of color. The article concludes with a discussion of directions for future research, including a focus on administrative violence, organizational sorting, intersectionality, and measurement challenges.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 283 - 309

By Marea Beeman, Kellianne Elliott, Rosalie Joy, Elizabeth Allen, and Michael Mrozinski

  In the United States of America, individuals accused of crime who cannot afford to hire a lawyer have a constitutional right to have one appointed to represent them at government expense. In 2021, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) set out to investigate the national landscape of laws and local practices relating to fees that are assessed upon individuals when they exercise their constitutional right to counsel. Findings from the resulting eighteen-month investigation show that in the overwhelming majority of states, the Sixth Amendment right to counsel does not mean that counsel for those who cannot afford it is provided free of charge. In 42 states, plus the District of Columbia, laws authorize courts to impose public defense system fees – both upfront application or administrative fees, and fees recouping the cost of counsel – on people who are represented by court-appointed attorneys. NLADA’s review finds that these fees do more harm than good. For instance, in no state with available data does collection of public defense recoupment fees amount to more than five percent of assessed recoupment costs. Yet individuals assessed these fees who cannot pay them down are essentially sentenced to years of court entanglement and consequences that can sharply limit efforts to move forward in life. Unpaid court debt, including public defense system fees, can result in years of, among other things, inability to secure reliable housing and employment, tarnished credit, and risk of arrest or incarceration for failure to pay. …

 Washington DC:  National Legal Aid & Defender Association, 2022. 136p.

By Patrick McNeil, et al.

“Persevere: Our Ongoing Fight for an Equal Justice Judiciary” documents the work during the 117th Congress to build an equal justice judiciary by nominating and confirming diverse and highly qualified individuals — including people with civil rights and public defender experience — to serve on the federal bench. The civil rights community has long understood that for there to be equal justice in America, we need fair-minded judges and justices who are committed to protecting the rights of all people and who come from all of our communities. This report details many of the judicial nominees — including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — who were confirmed during the 117th Congress, explains why their confirmations matter, and calls on lawmakers to bolster our democracy by strengthening the judiciary so that it works for all of us.

Washington, DC: The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights , 2023. 56p.

By Brittany Friedman and Mary Pattillo
  Monetary sanctions mandated in state statutes include fines, fees, restitution, and other legal costs imposed on persons convicted of crimes and other legal violations. Drawing on content analysis of current legislative statutes in Illinois pertaining to monetary sanctions, we ask three questions: What are defendants expected to pay for and why? What accommodations exist for defendants’ poverty? What are the consequences for nonpayment? We find that neoliberal logics of personal responsibility and carceral expansion suffuse these laws, establishing a basis for transferring public costs onto criminal defendants, offering little relief for poverty, and supporting severe additional penalties for unpaid debt. Statutory inequality legally authorizes further impoverishment of the poor, thereby increasing inequality. Major related organizing and advocacy work, however, has created an opening for significant changes toward greater fairness.  

  RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(1): 173–96.

By Duke Law School, Wilson Center for Science and Justice

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Durham, NC: Duke Law School, Wilson Center for Science and Justice, 2021. 18p.

Michael Naughton.

This thesis explores the ways in which miscarriages of England and Wales' criminal justice system (CJS) are currently defined, quantified, constructed and deployed. Presented in two parts, the first identifies and argues against the pervasive but problematical tendency to conceive miscarriages of justice as exceptional occurrences, that are small in number, and that result from post-appeal procedures once existing appeal opportunities have been exhausted. In fact, the evidence is that a successful appeal against criminal conviction forms a routine and mundane procedure of criminal justice in England and Wales. This indicates a need both to re-orientate definitions and understandings of miscarriages of justice and to re-calculate the likely scale of the phenomenon, an attempt at which is then offered. The second part of the thesis involves a broader plane of analysis, examining a range of discourses which articulate challenges to, or reforms of, the CJS, with respect to miscarriages. In so doing, a critique is developed to show that counter-discourses against miscarriages of justice are hindered by their problematic definition and the consequential calculation of miscarriages as a small-scale statistical phenomenon. They also labour under a misconception of the relations of power in the sphere of criminal justice. This severely diminishes the potential force of critical counter-discourse in the existing terrain. As a possible way out of this malaise, a Foucauldian-inspired understanding of the inter-relations of power, knowledge and `governmentality' is brought into dialogue with the emerging zemiological perspective, which seeks a more holistic appraisal of the harmful consequences of social and political decisions in the interests of social justice. The critical and reconstructive moves that I recommend enable miscarriages of justice to be thought about in new ways and to help assess what is to count as effective counter-discourse. The thesis, then, represents a determined effort to re-orientate our understanding of miscarriages of justice by moving away from `exceptional ism'. This encourages new ways of defining and quantifying miscarriages of justice and new ways of developing theoretical resources. The ultimate point of the thesis is to contribute towards the production of more effective counter discourses that might achieve lasting practical change in this area of social regulation.

Brighton, UK: University of Bristol, 2003. 313p.