As greater legal and policy attention turns to the intersection of criminal law--in particular, public-order policing--and low-income and communities of color, the need for well-executed empirical work increases. While much of the public attention tends to focus on high-profile federal criminal activity, criminal misdemeanors in state courts represent three-quarters of all criminal activity. Consequently, to gain a more accurate picture of overall criminal law activity the misdemeanor context is an obvious one to examine. To this end, in a recent paper, Misdemeanors by the Numbers, Mayson (Georgia) and Stevenson (GMU) take a deep dive into data from eight specific jurisdictions between 2011 and 2016. The paper's core findings are described in the excerpted abstract:
"The resulting portrait reveals a system that disproportionately impacts poor people and people of color. Between 2011 and 2016, each jurisdiction studied relied on monetary bail, which resulted in high rates of pretrial detention even at relatively low amounts, and imposed court costs upon conviction. There were substantial racial disparities in case-filing rates across locales and offense categories. The data also, however, highlight profound jurisdictional heterogeneity in how misdemeanors are defined and prosecuted. The variation suggests that misdemeanor adjudication systems may have fundamentally different characters, and serve different functions, from place to place. It thus presents a major challenge to efforts to describe and theorize the contemporary landscape of misdemeanor justice. At the most fundamental level, the variation calls into question the coherence of the very concept of a misdemeanor, or of misdemeanor criminal justice. As appreciation for the significance of lowlevel law enforcement builds, we urge scholars and policymakers to attend carefully to the complexity of this sub-felony world."
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