Doctoral Dissertation Research: Community Supervision in the Face of Sociocultural Divides

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Given bipartisan concerns about contemporary incarceration levels in the U.S., policymakers and citizens alike are again becoming interested in community supervision as a promising pathway toward prison downsizing. Most research about community supervision tends to focus on whether or not it can effectively serve as an alternative to incarceration. Little prior research addresses a central challenge arising from the increased interaction between frontline criminal justice workers and supervised individuals: the challenge of working closely together across longstanding sociocultural divides. This project aims to provide insight into the conditions under which empathy and trust can develop and be sustained across such divides. In turn, this project could help devise safer and more equitable models for ongoing, sustainable interaction between criminal justice workers and supervised individuals.This project combines ethnographic, interview and historical methods to study the workings of community supervision in the liminal spaces amid criminal justice, on the one hand, and local communities on the other. Focusing on probation work as an empirical window for observing ongoing interactions between criminal justice workers and members of supervised communities, the project interrogates how frontline criminal justice workers understand the cultural and political worlds of such communities and their attitudes toward the state and the law; as well as how supervised individuals understand and come to manage their ongoing interaction with the criminal justice system. Direct observation of interaction among criminal justice workers and supervised persons supplemented by in-depth interviews will yield a comprehensive picture of how situated understandings of sociocultural difference vary and are negotiated between differently-situated actors and across state institutions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.