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

鉴于两党对美国当代监禁水平的担忧，政策制定者和公民再次对社区监督感兴趣，认为这是一条有希望的缩小监狱规模的途径。大多数关于社区监督的研究倾向于关注社区监督能否有效地作为监禁的替代方案。以前的研究很少涉及前线刑事司法工作人员和受监督个人之间互动增加所产生的一个核心挑战：跨越长期的社会文化鸿沟密切合作的挑战。该项目旨在深入了解移情和信任在何种条件下能够跨越这种鸿沟而发展和维持。反过来，这个项目可以帮助设计出更安全、更公平的模式，促进刑事司法工作者和受监督个人之间持续、可持续的互动。这个项目结合了人种学、访谈法和历史学的方法，一方面研究刑事司法中边缘空间和地方社区中社区监督的工作方式。该项目将缓刑工作作为观察刑事司法工作者和受监督社区成员之间正在进行的互动的经验窗口，询问一线刑事司法工作者如何了解这些社区的文化和政治世界，以及他们对国家和法律的态度；以及受监督个人如何理解和管理他们与刑事司法系统正在进行的互动。直接观察刑事司法工作者和受监督人员之间的互动，并辅之以深入采访，将全面了解不同情况下对社会文化差异的理解是如何变化的，并在不同环境的参与者和跨州机构之间进行谈判。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.