Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reform and Innovation in an Urban Criminal Justice System

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This project is an ethnographic study of new modes of reform being tested in the New Orleans criminal justice system. As the city government faces growing challenges -- financial, moral, legal, and infrastructural -- to its current practices of incarceration, this research asks what different understandings of justice and forms of change can be discussed and acted upon locally, and how these are being taken up in the national conversation on criminal justice reform. The research will be based on 12 months of participant-observation, mapping exercises, and interviews with participants in two new collaborative projects. The first is a group of nonprofit and activist organizations advocating for criminal justice reform in the city. The second is a regular meeting of representatives from criminal justice agencies in "working groups" to discuss and evaluate current reforms. These two sites have the potential to provide new insight into the project of criminal justice reform, as they provide a regular space in which organizations and individuals accustomed to operating independently attempt to coordinate efforts, and in so doing articulate their own institutional, political, and ethical stakes. By providing ethnographic insight into the everyday work of criminal justice reform as it is carried out by government officials, reform advocates, and state employees, this project will situate criminal justice reform within local and national political economies of justice, and provide a robust understanding of the challenges and possibilities presented by collaboration between government (local, state, and federal) and civil society around criminal justice reform in the United States. This project aims to contribute to scholarly conversations on crime, law, and governance; the anthropology of race; and Americanist anthropology, as well as to the growing national conversation on criminal justice reform.