Criminal Justice

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Session Type: Section Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel

Room: McKinley

Floor: Mezzanine Level

This panel investigates how issues of agency, dignity, and race are mediated by the criminal system. Policing as a system of social control responds to the interests of the demographic majority who wield political and economic power. Currently, the courts fail to engage with the ways in which African American communities perceive and experience policing. That may change racially if African Americans were a demographic majority able to wield political and economic power. Already, grassroots social movements are pushing to reform a bail system that relies heavily on pretrial detention and fears for public safety. Nonetheless, however tantalizing the prospect of criminal justice reform, prosecutorial interests in protecting the nature and sources of factual information have tended to limit criminal justice reform and disempower criminal defendants.