A central paradox defines the scholarship of criminal justice and race: while racial disparities manifest throughout the criminal justice system, it is often portrayed as race‐neutral. We identify two central paradigm shifts: one in penology (that focuses on risk) and one in racial ideology (that focuses on colorblindness) that create a perfect storm; criminal justice apparatuses produce an illusion of racial neutrality while exacerbating racial disproportionality. We join an expanding list of scholars encouraging discourse that engages critical race theory on an empirical level and import this approach to the consideration of race within the criminal justice system. We identify issues with the conceptualization and operationalization of race as a variable within criminal justice research and recommend that scholars consider the mutual constitution of race and criminal justice. That is, scholarship must examine and empirically measure how race and criminal justice institutions actively form and inform each other.

The appropriation of “welfare stigma” or stereotypes about poor people's overreliance and abuse of public aid in two core criminal justice functions is examined: felony adjudication in a court system and space allocation in a jail. Through a comparative ethnographic study in which an abductive analysis of data (20 months of fieldwork) was used, we show that criminal justice gatekeepers utilize welfare stigma to create stricter eligibility criteria for due process in criminal courts and occupancy in jails. Specifically, the number of court appearances, motions, trials, jail beds, food, showers, and medical services is considered by professionals to be the benefits that individuals seek to access and abuse. Professionals view their role as preventing (rather than granting) access to these resources. The comparative nature of our data reveals that welfare stigma has interorganizational utility by serving two different organizational goals: It streamlines convictions in courts, which pulls defendants through adjudication, and conversely, it expands early release from jails, which pulls inmates out of the custody population. In the context of diminishing social safety nets, our findings have implications for understanding how discretion is exercised in an American criminal justice system increasingly tasked with the distribution of social services to the urban poor.

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This chapter is a call for Du Boisian criminology, an approach to criminal justice scholarship that situates race and racism as central to the social organization of criminal justice policies, practices, and institutions. By centering W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line, this approach interrogates how criminal justice institutions and their frontline stakeholders express racism through legal institutions. A Du Boisian approach reveals how punishment is a construction of the racial order, a physical and cultural performance of the color line, where segregation and stigma are punitively reenacted under the guise of the law and the power of the state. This approach promises to initiate critical analyses in the field of criminology. Essentially, this chapter is a corrective—a demand for Du Bois to take his rightful place as a founding theorist within the subfield of the sociology of punishment and the broader field of criminal justice.

Most theorists assume that the criminal courts are neutral arbiters of justice, protected by the Constitution, the rule of law, and court records. This essay challenges those assumptions and examines the courts as a place of punitive excess and the normalization of racial abuse and punishment. The essay explains the historic origins of these trends and examines how the categories of “hardened” and “marginal” defendants began to assume racialized meanings with the emergence of mass incarceration. This transformed the criminal courts into a type of public theater for racial degradation. These public performances or “racial degradation ceremonies” occur within the discretionary practices and cultural norms of mostly White courtroom professionals as they efficiently manage the disposition of cases in the everyday practice of law. I link these historical findings to a recent study of the largest unified criminal court system in the United States–Cook County, Chicago–and discuss court watching programs as an intervention for accountability and oversight of our courts and its legal professionals.