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The United States has an uncomfortable relationship with pleasure. Cultural ambivalence is evident in discourses surrounding pleasure and the labeling and treatment of those who act on their desires. Pleasure seeking, generally understood in moral terms, is often medicalized and criminalized (as in the case of pregnancy prevention and drug use), placing questions of how to manage pleasure under the purview of medical and legal actors. At the macrolevel, institutions police pleasure via rules, patterns of action, and logics, while at the microlevel, frontline workers police pleasure via daily decisions about resource distribution. This chapter develops a sociolegal framework for understanding the social control of pleasure by analyzing how two institutions – medicine and criminal justice – police pleasure institutionally and interactionally. Conceptualizing medicine and criminal justice as paternalistic institutions acting as arbiters of morality, I demonstrate how these institutions address two cases of pleasure seeking – drug use and sex – by drawing examples from contemporary drug and reproductive health policy. Section one highlights shared institutional mechanisms of policing pleasure across medicine and criminal justice such as categorization, allocation of professional power, and the structuring of legitimate consequences for pleasure seeking. Section two demonstrates how frontline workers in each field act as moral gatekeepers as they interpret and construct institutional imperatives while exercising discretion about resource allocation in daily practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understanding institutional and interactional policing of pleasure informs sociolegal scholarship about the relationships between medicine and criminal justice and the mechanisms by which institutions and frontline workers act as agents of social control.

The drive to improve learning and safety in our nation’s public schools has resulted in the widespread adoption of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies. The practice of punishing any school infraction regardless of extenuating circumstances has been particularly detrimental to students of color. Black and Latino students are more likely to be suspended, expelled, and/or referred to law enforcement for nonviolent and/or minor infractions. Students who are removed from school fall behind academically and have an increased risk of being arrested and thrust into the criminal justice system. This reality has moved the Obama administration to urge school officials to abandon overly zealous disciplinary policies. However, the recommendations set forth by the Obama administration are nonbinding and fail to address the root causes of racially discriminatory school discipline practices.

Any meaningful effort to understand and/or disrupt the pattern of pushing students out of schools and funneling them into the criminal justice system must consider the adverse effects of the following three factors: (1) unchecked racial biases among school personnel, (2) inadequately resourced poor performing schools, and (3) the ever-expanding economic inequality in society. Omitting of any of these items from the guidelines and recommendations represents a glaring limitation of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative as a tool for addressing racial disparities in school discipline and the school to prison pipeline.

We aim to show that students of color would benefit from “need-based” educational reforms, a Presidential Administration that directly addresses racial inequality, and economic policies that target the most financially strapped communities.

This chapter harnesses Western conceptions of justice, traditional justifications of social control, and existing social inequalities to frame and fully understand the racial and ethnic disparities which constitute the U.S. juvenile justice system.

Juvenile justice system disparities are framed within the theoretical contexts of Western conceptions of justice, traditional justifications of social control, and social inequality. The chapter’s perspective is based on these concepts of justice, social control justifications, and evidence from scholarly research on juvenile justice system disparities.

Overall, the U.S. juvenile justice system’s racial and ethnic disparities violate fundamental concepts of justice, traditional justifications of social control, and exacerbate existing social inequalities.

Through its utilization of Western conceptions of justice and social control justifications, this chapter offers a relatively unique framework for the examination of the U.S. juvenile justice system’s racial and ethnic disparities. While recognizing the overall quality and significance of disparities research, the chapter asks the reader to take a step back, and look at and think about the broader justice and inequality contexts.

A number of international relations' mid-level theories about violence are inadequate to the task of explaining societal and group violence. Many of these theories, for example, confuse causality with correlation, or breakdown and then cannot explain why they fail. Building upon the theories of criminologist Lonnie Athens, both in their particulars and in their spirit of practical solution rather than entrenched debate, this article considers whether those theories of individual violence are suitable for extrapolation to the societal level. It explores some problems with the current theories in international relations, and reviews the theoretical foundations offered by Athens and some others, who have also laid strong groundwork for scaling Athens' theories to the societal level by considering their applications to communities. A number of those theories, although based upon analyses of individual dangerous violent criminals, lend themselves particularly well to groups and communities, suggesting strong suitability of scaling to these levels, and to the societal one as well. Also considering critiques of Athens' and Rhodes' work, this article ultimately argues that Athens' theories of violence, and those building upon them, constitute a strong foundation for theories of violence in international relations that relate to the societal scale.

Across the Americas, public discussions of crime and penal practices have become increasingly punitive even as political struggles have resulted in a broad shift toward Constitutional democracy. In this chapter, we suggest that the spread of tough anti-crime talk and practice is, paradoxically, a response to efforts to expand and deepen democracy. Punitive crime talk is useful to political actors seeking to limit formal and social citizenship rights for several reasons. First, it ostensibly targets problematic behavior rather than particular social groups, and thus appears to be consistent with democratic norms. At the same time, crime talk often acquires coded meanings that enable those who mobilize it to tap into inter-group hostility, anxieties, and fear. In addition, the emphasis on the threat of crime and disorder offers those seeking to limit democratic expansion a way to legitimate truncated visions of the rights and entitlements of citizenship. Tough anti-crime rhetoric often resonates with those who have experienced or fear the loss of symbolic and/or material benefits as a result of democratic reform. In short, the broad shift toward hyper-penality is, at least in part, a consequence of struggles over political democracy, citizenship and governance across the Americas.

This research examines the direct and interactive effects of defendant race and sex on judicial decisions to utilize mitigating departures in cases involving felony drug convictions in Virginia.

Logistic regression models are used to examine judicial decisions to depart downward in Schedule I & II, and Other (Schedule III, VI, and V), drug cases. The direct and interactive effects of race and sex on departure decisions are modeled separately for Schedule I & II and Other drug offenses.

Defendant race and sex exert both direct and interactive effects on decisions to sentence offenders below the guidelines for both drug categories. Cases involving Black and male defendants, relative to white and female defendants, are significantly less likely to result in mitigating departures for Schedule I & II, and Other drug, violations. The interaction models indicate that cases involving Black male defendants are less likely to result in mitigating departures than other cases, while cases involving white females have higher odds of receiving mitigating departures than other cases.

This chapter adds to the current literature on sentencing disparity by examining unwarranted sentencing disparity in Virginia, where scant research has been conducted. Furthermore, this research models decisions separately by drug category and examines both the direct and interactive effects of race and sex.