A Discussion with Matthew Clair & Amanda Woog
October 11, 2023
Popular discussions of abolition focus on policing and imprisonment, but an abolitionist future would require wholesale changes in societal structures and systems. As scholar Matthew Clair and attorney-researcher Amanda Woog have highlighted, “between the police and the prison cell sits the criminal court … the legal pathway from an arrest to a prison sentence[.]” The noble notion of the U.S. criminal court system is an adversarial system where accused people are guaranteed competent representation, presumed innocent, and transgressions are addressed and resolved peaceably. But for many years, scholars and organizers have highlighted the daily indignities and violence of the criminal court setting—including enormous misdemeanor caseloads, pipelines to pretrial detention, burdensome fines and fees, hostile racial climates, dehumanizing treatment of accused people, and disparate charging and sentencing that compound racial inequality and entrench generational harm. What is the role of criminal courts, and each actor within them, in maintaining or compounding the harms of policing and imprisonment, and how could courts be changed in order to reduce or eliminate those harms? We were joined by Matthew Clair and Amanda Woog, co-authors of the February 2022 article “” in the California Law Review. They discussed the injustices perpetrated by and within criminal courts, including how courts foster inequality and racialized criminalization through legal doctrine, social control, and economic exploitation—as well as possible ways to foster institutions that do not rely on coercion and exploitation to redress harm or issues arising out of poverty, substance use, mental illness, or inequality.
Speakers:
Matthew Clair is . His scholarship broadly examines how cultural meanings within organizations and institutions reflect, reproduce, and challenge various dimensions of social inequality, state violence, and injustice. His research to date has focused on inequality and violence in the criminal legal system, legal institutions, and the legal profession. He is the author of the award-winning book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press). Matthew's research has been published in several academic and popular outlets, including Criminology, Social Forces, California Law Review, Law and Society Review, Du Bois Review, The Nation, Boston Review, and Public Books. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Law & Society Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems and has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the RDCJN/Arnold Foundation small grants program. In 2022, Matthew received the American Society of Criminology's Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, Stanford University's highest teaching award. He received his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Amanda Woog lives with her family in Blue Hill, Maine. She is the former Executive Director of the Texas Fair Defense Project, where she participated in campaigns to end the criminalization of poverty in Texas, including work culminating with the defeat of a new jail in Austin, and the founding of Austin's first adult, holistic public defender office. Prior to her work at TFDP, she was a research fellow with the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, where she published a database of 7,000 people who died in Texas' custody, including in jails and prisons, and killings by police. She was also the Policy Director of the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence during the 84th legislative session. Amanda has also worked as an associate attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, where she was on a team representing pro bono a person on death row in Alabama, and as a briefing attorney to the Honorable Cheryl Johnson of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Amanda received her law degree with honors from The University of Texas School of Law and her B.A. with departmental honors in Philosophy from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Moderated by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED DURING THE EVENT
- For more on the work being done on the ground to reduce the size, scope, and power of courts, see
- , which includes information about copwatching, courtwatching, participatory defense, etc.
The Abolitionist Politics, Practices, and Horizons speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; Professor of Sociology; and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.