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States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.

In this article, I explore the politics of infrastructure in South Africa by focusing on the \"travels\" of a small technical device. Since the end of apartheid, prepaid meters have been widely deployed in South Africa's townships to curb the nonpayment of service charges. Yet many residents have bypassed their meters, enabling them to illicitly access electricity or water. I track the micro-political battle between residents tinkering with the technology and engineers trying to secure it, arguing that infrastructure itself becomes a political terrain for the negotiation of central ethical and political questions concerning civic virtue and the shape of citizenship. To investigate this techno-political terrain, I trace a genealogy of the meter from Victorian Britain, when it was invented as a tool of working-class \"moral improvement,\"to the late-apartheid period, when it was reassembled as a device of counterinsurgency against the anti-apartheid \"rent boycotts.\" In each moment, I suggest, the meter was harnessed to distinct ethical regimes and political projects. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with engineers in contemporary South Africa, I explore the semiotic-material work required to make the device functional in the post-apartheid moment. Tracing the travels of a small technical device across time and space, I argue, opens up conceptual space to rethink the relationship between ethics, politics, and technics.

Research has shown that black patients more frequently undergo surgery at low-quality hospitals than do white patients. We assessed the extent to which living in racially segregated areas and living in geographic proximity to low-quality hospitals contribute to this disparity. Using national Medicare data for all patients who underwent one of three high-risk surgical procedures in 2005-08, we found that black patients actually tended to live closer to higher-quality hospitals than white patients did but were 25-58 percent more likely than whites to receive surgery at low-quality hospitals. Racial segregation was also a factor, with black patients in the most segregrated areas 41-96 percent more likely than white patients to undergo surgery at low-quality hospitals. To address these disparities, care navigators and public reporting of comparative quality could steer patients and their referring physicians to higher-quality hospitals, while quality improvement efforts could focus on improving outcomes for high-risk surgery at hospitals that disproportionately serve black patients. Unfortunately, existing policies such as pay-for-performance, bundled payments, and nonpayment for adverse events may divert resources and exacerbate these disparities. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Health insurance premiums are primarily understood to pose financial barriers to coverage. However, the need to remit monthly premium payments may also create administrative burdens that negatively affect coverage, even in cases where affordability is a negligible concern. Using 2016-17 data from the Massachusetts health insurance Marketplace and a natural experiment, we evaluated how coverage retention was affected by the introduction of nominal (less than $10 for most enrollees) monthly premiums for plans that previously had $0 premiums. Compared with plans that maintained $0 premiums, those that took on nominal premiums saw enrollment fall by 14 percent over the following year. This attrition was attributable to terminations for nonpayment; most terminations occurred at the end of January, implying that a significant number of affected enrollees never initiated premium payments. These findings suggest that even very small premiums act as enrollment barriers, which may sometimes reflect administrative burdens more than financial hardship. Several policy approaches could mitigate adverse coverage outcomes related to nominal premiums.

Objective To elucidate the institutional logic underpinning the child support system's expectations of parents. Background Compelling parental responsibility through punitive enforcement mechanisms is the central focus of child support system enforcement. Although much is known about noncustodial parents' experiences in the system, less is known about how this site of state intervention shapes the definition and expectations of parenthood and family. Method Observations in five courts and child support‐related sites were conducted over 18 months. Interviews were also conducted with child support system workgroup members. Results The racialized, gendered, and classed stereotypes that undergird the system's definition of parental responsibility are grounded in controlling images of parenthood and family, prioritizing financial support above any other contributions of parents. Court officials wielded this expectation of parental responsibility to punish—or threaten to punish—noncustodial parents, resulting in significant material and symbolic consequences. Conclusion The carceral logic of parental responsibility in this site underpins punitive state policies, procedures, and practices around nonpayment of support and other acts of noncompliance, reproducing racialized, gendered, and classed social controls of parenthood and family. As a result of this logic, the child support system plays a significant role in shaping the institutions of parenthood and family, (re)produces the expansion of the carceral state, and contributes to broader family inequality. Implications Addressing family inequality should attend to the pervasiveness of the carceral logic of parental responsibility in the child support system and beyond, which has significantly oppressive consequences for parents and families.

A growing body of research suggests that housing eviction is more common than previously recognized and may play an important role in the reproduction of poverty. The proportion of children affected by housing eviction, however, remains largely unknown. We estimate that one in seven children bom in large U.S. cities in 1998-2000 experienced at least one eviction for nonpayment of rent or mortgage between birth and age 15. Rates of eviction were substantial across all cities and demographic groups studied, but children from disadvantaged backgrounds were most likely to experience eviction. Among those born into deep poverty, we estimate that approximately one in four were evicted by age 15. Given prior evidence that forced moves have negative consequences for children, we conclude that the high prevalence and social stratification of housing eviction are sufficient to play an important role in the reproduction of poverty and warrant greater policy attention.

How do sociolegal scholars who liken monetary sanctions to “bleeding a turnip” or “drawing blood from stones” reconcile these idioms with the fact that fines and fees constitute a growth industry? We take up this puzzle by turning our attention to perhaps the most relatable experience with monetary sanctions among the population: parking tickets. Much of the available law and society literature on fines and fees documents how these sanctions disproportionately impact communities subjugated by race and class. Because parking tickets are adjudicated within a legal domain so fundamentally different from fines and fees that dominate the academic focus, we ask whether these insights extend outside criminal counts to municipal ones. Using Chicago as a case study, our inquiry measures the structural determinants of 11.3 million tickets issued between 2013 and 2017. We use a series of count models to predict the incidence rates of tickets at the tract level as well as how many were subject to reprimands for nonpayment. What we find are disparate patterns of racialization in terms of who is targeted by these sanctions versus who is devastated by them. We synthesize key ideas from empirical critical race theory and developing work on predation theory to make sense of these findings.

Monetary sanctions, also known as legal financial obligations (LFOs), are a highly consequential yet underexplored element of the criminal legal system. LFOs consist of fines, fees, costs, restitution, surcharges, and other financial penalties that are imposed on individuals when they encounter the criminal legal system. This contact can occur via traffic citation, or misdemeanor, juvenile, and felony conviction. Although indistinguishable for the people who are required to pay them, monetary sanctions are variably understood as punishments prescribed by state statutes and local codes, restitution for victims of crime, user fees to recoup system expenses or pay for services rendered, and additional charges for failure to pay. Most monetary sanctions are sentenced on conviction or citation, but some pretrial costs—such as jail booking fees, electronic monitoring, or public defender services in the absence of a conviction—can be passed on to defendants as well.1 These fines and fees are experienced as bills and debts for those on whom they are imposed and as revenue sources for the courts, agencies, jurisdictions, and states that collect them. Although the practice of imposing fines and fees on convicted persons has existed in law since the Magna Carta in 1215, research shows that the prevalence and amounts of monetary sanctions have grown over the last five decades across federal, state, and local governments (Bannon, Nagrecha, and Diller 2010; Fergus 2018; Greenberg, Meredith, and Morse 2016; Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010; Harris 2016; Shapiro 2014; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2017).2The policy, legal, and social science literatures on monetary sanctions document critical features of this punishment schema (for an extensive review, see Martin et al. 2018; Martin 2020). Research shows that individuals struggle to pay their court debts, making it even more difficult to pay for essential expenses such as food, housing, health care, medicine, transportation, and childcare, thereby increasing stress (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010; Harris 2016; Pleggenkuhle 2018). This burden is not borne solely by those convicted of crimes but also by their family members and communities (deVuono-powell et al. 2015; Katzenstein and Waller 2015). Further, because people are not released from criminal legal supervision until their accounts are fully paid, monetary sanctions prolong supervision, make probation violations more likely, escalate sanctions for new criminal convictions, and result in incarceration for nonpayment (ACLU 2010; T. Atkinson 2016; Kohler-Hausmann 2018; Middlemass 2017; Western 2018). The racially disparate impact of monetary sanctions intensifies the aggressive policing of Black and Latinx neighborhoods because these groups typically find it more difficult to pay (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2011; Henrichson et al. 2017; Henricks and Harvey 2017; Piquero and Jennings 2017; Sances and You 2017; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2017). The criminal legal monitoring and collection of fines, fees, and other costs extends and deepens the punishment of nonpayers and individuals reentering society, and warps the very legal institutions that legislate and implement these practices (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010, 2011; Harris 2016; Pattillo and Kirk 2021).

Objectives. To examine indoor sex workers’ strategies in preventing workplace violence and influential socio-structural conditions. Methods. Data included qualitative interviews with 85 sex workers in British Columbia, Canada, from 2014 through 2016. For analyses, we used interpretive thematic techniques informed by World Health Organization position statements on violence. Results. Robbery, nonpayment, financial exploitation, and privacy violations were frequent types of violence perpetrated by clients, landlords, and neighbors. We identified 2 themes that depicted how sex workers prevented violence and mitigated its effects: (1) navigating physical spaces and (2) navigating client relationships. Conclusions. Sex workers’ diverse strategies to prevent violence and mitigate its effects are creative and effective in many circumstances. These are limited, however, by the absence of legal and public health regulations governing occupational health and safety and stigma associated with sex work. Public Health Implications. Occupational health and safety regulatory policies that set conditions for clients’ substance and condom use within commercial sex transactions are required. Revisions to the current legal regulations governing prostitution are critical to support optimal work environments that reduce the likelihood of violence. These revisions must recognize sex work as a form of labor versus victimization.

This Article provides a comprehensive statewide study of a practice by which courts order defendants to pay financial sanctions—fines, costs, and probation fees—by serving terms of incarceration. Though several states authorize these practices, to date, very little is known about the extent to which payment via incarceration occurs and the different ways it is employed. This Article examines the use of the practice in Nebraska, where it is colloquially referred to as “sitting out.” Our study specifically focuses on all misdemeanor cases in Nebraska county courts with judgments (an adjudication of guilt and/or sentencing) during the year 2019. This study examines the ways in which payment via incarceration is consistent with and diverges from the archetypal “modern debtors’ prison,” in which penalties related to the nonpayment of fines are widespread, imposed against people of limited means and particularly people of color, and which carry the risk that the inherent revenuegenerating qualities of financial sanctions will pervert crime policy. We find that Nebraska’s practices are consistent with that archetype in that payment via incarceration is deeply integrated into the jurisdiction’s legal systems as evident through its widespread use. We discover that courts ordered 10,027 defendants to pay financial sanctions via incarceration in over a quarter of all misdemeanor cases in our dataset, an alarmingly high rate. Those defendants also sat out a notably high amount of financial debt—$2,105,462 in the aggregate. At $150 per day (the rate at which Nebraska credits incarceration against financial debt), the defendants in our study spent a minimum of 14,036 days in Nebraska county jails to pay off fines, costs, and probation fees. The results of the study are also consistent with a second archetype—that in modern debtors’ prisons, people of limited means, and particularly people of color, are subjected to financial sanctions they have no meaningful ability to pay and punished for their poverty when payment is not forthcoming. Our findings illustrate that many defendants who were subjected to sitting out were convicted for offenses frequently linked to poverty and many were declared indigent by the court for the purposes of appointing counsel. Further, the cases in our database exhibit troubling racial disparities. Other findings, however, complicate the narrative surrounding modern debtors’ prisons, especially with regard to revenue-generation incentives of government actors. On its face, sitting out appears to undermine the idea that government actors are motivated by revenue generation. Unlike systems in which the debt remains outstanding, when a defendant is ordered to sit out financial sanctions, the debt is paid off by the incarceration. This ensures that revenues are never secured, while leaving the jurisdiction to bear the expense of incarceration. To investigate this issue and track how money moves into and out of government coffers when sitting out is employed, we create an original typology of the various forms of payment via incarceration useful for studying Nebraska’s system and those in other jurisdictions. What we find is geographic diversity in the mechanisms for sitting out that carry different fiscal implications. After presenting the study’s results, we conclude by discussing the key takeaways of our research, its limitations, and several law and policy implications that open potential avenues for future research.