STREETS, SUITES, AND STATES

Two articles in our symposium—“Is White-Collar Crime White? Racialization in the National Press Coverage of White-Collar Crime from 1950 to 2010” by Marina Zaloznaya, Alexandria Yakes, and James Wo (Reference Zaloznaya, Yakes and Wo2023) and “California Civil Asset Forfeiture and the Policing of Minority Residents” by Jared Joseph and Bill McCarthy (Reference Joseph and McCarthy2023)—follow in the tradition of Hagan’s contributions to criminology. Both articles build upon and extend Hagan’s (Reference Hagan2012) arguments from Who Are the Criminals?: The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan. In Who Are the Criminals?, Hagan questions the ways in which politics define criminals and criminality in American society. Hagan argues that American criminal justice policy today is marked by a divergence between our harsh treatment of “street crimes,” or drug, personal, and property crimes, and our lax treatment, even deregulation, of white-collar crime. On the one hand, our society constructs street crimes and street criminals as especially dangerous and associated predominantly with minority perpetrators. On the other hand, as Joseph and McCarthy (Reference Joseph and McCarthy2023) reveal in their article, Hagan argues that the “[c]ollective framing of white-collar offenses as non-threatening to the racial majority of Americans has allowed for the non-contested de-regulation of financial markets and big businesses, within which the most consequential white-collar crimes tend to occur.”

Joseph and McCarthy extend Hagan’s ideas about the racialized framing of crime policies to analyze civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to keep cash, cars, homes, and other property they seize from people who allegedly commit crimes. Joseph and McCarthy use a dataset of almost two decades of data on civil asset forfeiture that they obtained from California law enforcement agencies to examine whether this tool affects racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately. They argue that civil asset forfeiture will occur more often in jurisdictions where minorities are a high proportion of the population because of a racial threat. Their findings support this assertion: there is a statistically significant association between the number of seizures and a jurisdiction’s share of Black residents. Their findings are consistent with the idea that Black communities experience harsher policing than other groups.

Hagan has long insisted, however, that research on crime and policing in the streets cannot be divorced from the crimes that occur in the suites. This parallel inquiry is evident in the fact that Zaloznaya, Yakes, and Wo (Reference Zaloznaya, Yakes and Wo2023) also rely heavily on Who Are the Criminals? in their article. The authors test “Hagan’s argument about the racialized collective framing of white-collar crime as a non-threatening consequence of American-style capitalism” (Zaloznaya, Yakes, and Wo Reference Zaloznaya, Yakes and Wo2023). The analysis of media portrayals of white-collar crime relies on articles collected from five newspapers from different regions of the United States: the Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Constitution, the New York Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Chicago Defender, a prominent African American newspaper. They examine four crimes—bribery, tax evasion, credit card fraud, and voter fraud. The articles provide a complete set of coverage spanning from 1950 to 2010, allowing for over-time analysis. Analyzing these data shows that the racialization of white-collar criminals occurred simultaneously with that of the racialization of street criminals and in opposite directions. It is particularly notable that even African American perpetrators of white-collar crimes are “individualized” and constructed as “non-threatening” or mainstream.

The suites are not only sites of crime and concealment, however. As Hagan shows in his work, the role of law in the suites—and in corporate settings of large law firms—are also sites of constraint. Most notably, Hagan made important contributions to research on the legal profession, including his pioneering collaboration with Fiona Kay and others on gender inequality in the Toronto bar and beyond (Hagan, Huxter, and Parker Reference Hagan, Huxter and Parker1988; Hagan and Kay Reference Hagan and Kay1995, Reference Hagan and Kay2007; Dinovitzer and Hagan Reference Dinovitzer and Hagan2014). In “Revolving Doors: Social Dimensions of Law Firm Culture and Pathways out of Firms,” Fiona Kay (Reference Kay2023) offers an innovative analysis of the movement of women lawyers out of law firms that builds on Hagan’s work. Using longitudinal data from surveys of Canadian lawyers over twenty-seven years, she finds that women lawyers are far more likely to leave law firms than their male counterparts but that the rate at which they leave is shaped by their social capital and firm culture. Women who feel a match with their firms, who enjoy the support of mentors, and who are satisfied with the status rewards they receive are more likely to stay in their firms. Their attachment is further enhanced if their firms have workplace policies such as flexible scheduling that provide support to the lives of working professionals. Thus, while Hagan and Kay (Reference Hagan and Kay1995) theorized that women attorneys were a pool of reserve labor that fueled the growth of large law firms, Kay offers a nuanced understanding of how women attorneys may fit into the contemporary law firm context given sufficient social capital and support from workplace policies.

In “Rethinking Inclusion: Ideal Minorities, Inclusion Cultures and Identity Capitals in the Legal Profession,” Swethaa Ballakrishnen (Reference Ballakrishnen2023) offers an innovative approach to diversity and inequality in the legal profession by suggesting that much can be gained by analyzing systemic inequalities in law from the standpoint of groups traditionally on the periphery of the profession, such as queer, non-binary, and differently abled lawyers. Drawing on data from three related projects, Ballakrishnen suggests that these groups have identity capital that is valued by law firms attempting to promote their image as inclusive environments. Yet Ballakrishnen finds that the identity capital of these groups largely benefits the organizational interests of law firms rather than the marginal groups that provide this capital. Individuals from the marginalized groups face the particular challenge of navigating how to use their unique status, often leaving them with feelings of insecurity and outsider status rather than genuine inclusion. The article is a remarkable tribute and rejoinder to Hagan’s work on the legal profession and inequality, which presents an entirely new perspective on diversity programs and their relationship to the workplace experiences of marginalized groups.

Underlying the legal governance of both the streets and the suites, then, are systems of power, of relations, and of hierarchy. This is an intellectual sensibility that, for Hagan, had its roots within sociological criminology with the approaches of Howard Becker (Reference Becker1963) and others in the 1960s tradition of labelling theory and related symbolic interactionism. Yet it is also surely no surprise that Hagan (Reference Hagan1973a, 1973b) quickly led the way in interrogating and pushing the boundaries of labelling theory within the ambit of an expanding sociological criminology of the 1970s, including his very first two articles entitled “Conceptual Deficiencies of the Interactionist Perspective in Deviance” and “Labelling and Deviance: A Case Study in the ‘Sociology of the Interesting’,” and with a growing focus on behavior, a perspective that has over time put Hagan and his work in conversation with a wide range of research traditions, including the study of the life course (see, for example, Hagan, MacMillan, and Wheaton Reference Hagan, MacMillan and Wheaton1996), of gender stratification (see, for example, Hagan, Simpson, and Gillis Reference Hagan, Simpson and Gillis1987), and developmental criminology (see, for example, Hagan and Foster Reference Hagan and Foster2003).

Upon his election to the National Academy of Sciences, for instance, Hagan’s inaugural collaborative article relies on data from Chicago to explain why residents in disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods persist in calling police for assistance precisely in those neighborhoods with higher rates of skepticism about law and police (Hagan et al. Reference Hagan, McCarthy, Herda and Cann Chandrasekher2018). They attribute this to a “desperate hope” for assistance, which is itself borne from state disinvestment, and the “cumulative structured inequalities that disadvantage African-American inner-city neighborhoods” (7198, 7192). There is resonance here with cultural and political sociologies of the state that move beyond a Weberian monopoly on legitimate violence to grapple with the symbolic work of the state in establishing categories of thought and perceptions of what is just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, and how to approach one’s own possibilities within these constraints (see, for example, Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1994).

Yet, in so doing, Hagan’s approach is also deeply attuned to not only the state’s use of legitimate violence but also to its criminal use of violence. As his most recent book on Chicago policing demonstrates, illegitimate violence by the state, implemented through law and law enforcement, is part and parcel of the exclusion and disadvantage faced in predominantly Black neighborhoods and is deeply entrenched by legal and political elites who deny and exculpate such violence (Hagan, McCarthy, and Herda Reference Hagan, McCarthy and Herda2022). This structural focus on power and domination is equally central to Hagan’s work on genocide. In this case, he has developed a social science that analyzes the behavior of state officials who engage in and excuse brutal violence as well as the role of activists and jurists who work with legal concepts to call out these abuses of state power and the effects that this has for further violence, perceptions of injustice, racial and ethnic victimization, and societal division—in other words, an analysis that is behavioral, political, legal, cognitive, and cultural all at once (see, for example Hagan Reference Hagan2003; Hagan and Levi Reference Hagan and Levi2005; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond Reference Hagan and Rymond-Richmond2008; Ivkovich and Hagan Reference Ivkovich and Hagan2011; Hagan, Kaiser, and Hanson Reference Hagan, Kaiser and Hanson2015).

Three articles in this special issue take up this theoretical thread directly. Aliza Luft’s (Reference Luft2023) article “Genocide: Theories of Participation and Opportunities for Intervention” emphasizes behavioral variation during genocidal situations. Drawing mainly on research from Rwanda, Luft demonstrates the importance of attending to the processes and contexts through which individuals engage in violence as well as when they desist or when they choose to save others. Pointing to similar instances in other genocides, Luft demonstrates that strict categories of perpetrators and victims can obfuscate the processes through which genocidal violence occurs and when it does not. Luft explicitly builds on Hagan’s ideas in developing a sociology of genocide. In pursuing her analysis, she shows how power relations and inequality have effects for how individuals engage in, or refrain from, genocidal violence. In parallel with Hagan’s own structural approach, Luft thereby demonstrates the need to understand political, cognitive, and cultural factors to identify how and when violent behavior occurs. With this, Luft argues that sociological research on highly violent situations can also allow policy makers to learn how and when intervention may be possible during ongoing violence.

Joachim Savelsberg and Brooke Chambers (Reference Savelsberg and Chambers2023) build on Hagan’s prior investigations of the Darfur genocide to enlarge the scope of how sociologists can learn and grapple with genocidal violence. In their article “Darfur Model, Rwanda, and the ICTR: John Hagan’s Sociology of Genocide Continued,” Savelsberg and Chambers integrate social science research on the Rwandan genocide with legal materials from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and, through this combination, outline some core similarities in the causal sequence of state violence that occurred in both Darfur and Rwanda. Drawing from Hagan’s approach, Savelsberg and Chambers point to a context of power, categorization, control, and hierarchy that generates genocidal violence and social divisions, thereby linking macro- and meso-level contexts to individual behavior and violent mobilization. As with Luft’s (Reference Luft2023) article, Savelsberg and Chambers (Reference Savelsberg and Chambers2023) also work to relate sociological research with law through a sociology of legal knowledge. They do this in two ways: first, they demonstrate the value of genocide for sociologists to use legal materials as part of their evidence base for gaining insight into state-level processes of power and control and, second, they show how the limits of legal doctrine in turn highlight the importance of a sociological approach to genocide that is sharply attentive to collective contexts of threat, coercion, and grievances for understanding state violence and mass victimization.

Yet if courts have developed the authority to produce legal and official narratives of genocide, this leads to new reverberations within the legal field. In their article entitled “Judging Genocide: Emotional Labor during Transitional Justice,” Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Evelyn Gertz, and Christopher Uggen (Reference Nyseth Brehm, Gertz and Uggen2023) also take up the Rwandan genocide, but, here, they do so through interviews with local judges who presided over Rwanda’s community-based gacaca courts. In this article, we learn about the emotional costs experienced by these community-based judges in adjudicating such cases of violence, along with the role of state-led views on justice that train judges to appear unemotional during these hearings. Nyseth Brehm, Gertz, and Uggen further find that the emotion management strategies that these judges adopt are conditioned on both expected gender roles in Rwanda and on their own experiences during the violence of the Rwandan genocide. We take note of their interpretation that “the identities that were salient during the genocide shaped interpersonal emotion management in its aftermath”—by studying the implementation of post-genocide justice, their article demonstrates the tight relation between law, the state, and violence that has long been a hallmark of Hagan’s work (Nyseth Brehm, Gertz, and Uggen Reference Nyseth Brehm, Gertz and Uggen2023).

The extent of these life course effects is apparent in Wenona Rymond Richmond’s (Reference Rymond Richmond2023) article “Children of War Resisters: Intergenerational Transmission of Activism and Injustice Frames.” Here, Rymond-Richmond takes up Hagan’s research on an event that linked war, politics, and violence; law; and the life course. Over fifty thousand Americans moved to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War, a group that Hagan (Reference Hagan2001) studied and brought to light in his book Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada. Rymond-Richmond (Reference Rymond Richmond2023) went on to conduct interviews with fifty-one adult children of these war resisters, along with recontacting some parents: her question focused on whether the war resistance of their parents in moving to Canada has led to social movement activism among their children. Rymond-Richmond argues that this indeed is the case, and she further identifies that this fate is tied to their family histories of war resistance and to a political consciousness borne from what they perceive as both the injustices of militarism and the legal consequences of military refusal.

Hagan’s own personal and professional trajectory is central to his study of Vietnam War resisters. And his understanding of justice and injustice is also evident across these articles. This is precisely what Jens Meierhenrich (Reference Meierhenrich2023) reflects upon in his article “Toward a Sociology of International Law: John Hagan and Beyond.” In it, Meierhenrich develops an intellectual history of the crossroads of international law and sociology—a field analysis that he develops through Hagan’s own personal and scholarly trajectory. Meierhenrich highlights Hagan’s contribution to an empirical sociology of international law, its methodological innovations, the debates it has generated across disciplines, and its homologies with the international legal field. In so doing, Meierhenrich connects Hagan’s personal and professional trajectories to distill what he calls a “liberalism of hope.” This brand of liberalism reflects an underlying faith in international law’s claims to offer justice, while it also calls for further scholarly reflection. Liberalism as hope offers a faith in the power of individuals to make a difference—a faith that Meierhenrich identifies with the social and political contexts that mark Hagan’s career across the study of streets, suites, and states.

JUSTICE AND INJUSTICE ACROSS ERAS

This review takes us, then, back to our original question: how to produce a sociology of crime and law that is rooted in the study of power, inequality, and life chances. This symposium on the legacy of John Hagan’s research has relied on the research sites of streets, suites, and states that exhibit the span of his work throughout his career. This has allowed Hagan to harness the insights from some of the sites of the greatest inequality and to embed them in a sociology that extends beyond what Loïc Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2010, 199) describes as the “crime-and-punishment poke.” The power of this model for understanding states, culture, inequality, and justice is evident in these articles, presaged in Hagan’s early reliance on Mead’s view of law decades ago.

Yet as we reflect on these articles, we see something else—namely, that there is, throughout Hagan’s work and the articles in this collection, an emphasis on a sociology that provides insights into social and political eras. These articles speak to these insights. Whether reflected in shifts in US crime policy or growing disinvestment in US cities, the growth of the legal profession and new entrants to the practice of law, war and its aftereffects, immigration, or the globalization of law, Hagan’s work on crime and law provides us with an integrated sociology of power, justice, and inequality as well as a model, through these, for how to study the structure and distribution of life chances.