Race, Gender and the Administration of Justice in a Community Corrections System.

Abstract

In response to the growing diversity among the criminally supervised population, some public agencies have begun targeting treatment interventions and services by offenders’ race, gender and cultural group, in an attempt to better serve all offenders and ultimately reduce recidivism. Such an approach recognizes that institutional practices that fail to challenge existing race and gender hierarchies, or interrogate the ways in which sexism and racism are embedded in everyday routines, interactions and social relations tend to reproduce existing inequalities. And yet, theoretical scholarship has been largely critical of the categorical treatment of difference, arguing that such an approach reifies categories and reinforces stereotype and stigma. Despite this controversy, little empirical work has investigated the practice.

In three chapters, each focused on a different target population supervised within the community correctional context, this study examines the meaning and consequence of this conscious attention to difference. In the first chapter, I show that categorical treatment has distinct material and symbolic implications, with material benefits but symbolic disadvantages for women, and vice-versa for men. The second chapter reveals that categorical treatment may disadvantage those who do not fall neatly within the boundaries of the group to which they appear to belong, even when the group is considered privileged, as I illustrate with fathers. In the third chapter I identify distinct forms of cultural competency that are aligned with particular racial ideologies, and suggest that the meaning of categorical treatment will hinge crucially on officers’ ideological orientations and incorporation of race-positionality into their work.

Ultimately I suggest that the implications of conscious attention to difference will vary by the social context in which “difference” is defined (with distinct implications in the correctional context) and, in the absence of consensus as to the significance of particular categories, the positionality and beliefs held by those charged with responding to this difference. The significance of the practice can thus be understood to be both contextually-contingent and idio-reflexive. Successful targeting, wherein stereotype does not define practice, requires that management clearly define both what aspects of difference are to be addressed and how practice should address this difference.