Criminal justice as racialized organizations: Evidence from ethnographies of police, courts, and jails

Abstract

Criminology has long grappled with the relationship between race/racism and the criminal justice system. In this article, we build on past critiques and demonstrate how scholars of the criminal legal system can use meso-level theories of race/racism to better explain their findings, develop new insights, and pose new research questions. To this end, we introduce the theory of racialized organizations. Drawing examples from recent ethnographic studies of police departments, criminal courts, and jails, we illustrate how criminal legal organizations (CLOs) embody the core tenets of the theory. Specifically, CLOs endow racial schema with power, distribute and extract resources unequally in part by using racialized credentials, legitimize racial harm by decoupling formal commitments to legal rights from actual practice, and reduce the agency of non-White people. We also extend the theory of racialized organizations to describe how legitimacy and racial harm accumulate and deepen across CLOs. The article concludes with actionable research directions that illuminate the complex interactions between race and the criminal legal system.