Matthew Clair, Harvard University
His paper is titled: Resources, Navigation, and Punishment in the Criminal Courts
ABSTRACT:
Researchers have long documented racial and socioeconomic disparities in criminal punishment. Existing explanations focus either on the factors that cause higher rates of arrest among certain groups or on differential treatment by criminal justice officials. This paper presents an underexplored explanation for disparities, namely criminal defendants’ differential abilities to navigate criminal justice institutions. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations among a diverse sample of defendants in Massachusetts, this paper documents how defendants navigate court processing through their differential employment of criminal justice expertise, or knowledge and skills about evading criminal sanctions. A cultural resource, criminal justice expertise takes two forms: lawyers’ expertise, which is accrued in professional settings and employed through legitimated court processes, and defendants’ expertise, which is discredited in court settings and imprecisely cultivated through informal means. Findings reveal how defendants’ (mis)trust in the attorney-client relationship shapes whether defendants delegate authority to their lawyer’s expertise or reject such expertise in favor of their own, often resulting in disparate court outcomes along racial and class lines. These findings have implications for research on criminal justice disparities, legal consciousness, and the role of cultural resources in the reproduction of inequality.
Bio: Matthew Clair is a Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard Department of Sociology and a Quattrone Center Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His research focuses on social inequality, law and society, race and class disparities, and cultural sociology. Matt’s work has been published in Criminology, Law & Social Inquiry, Social Science & Medicine, and Socio-Economic Review and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Society of Criminology, the Center for American Political Studies, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. He has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Law & Society Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.