Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-rkxrd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T16:02:59.509Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Hidden Arm of the Law: Examining Administrative Justice in Gun Carry Licensing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jennifer Carlson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Responding to calls to “decenter” American penality beyond the carceral apparatus, this article ethnographically examines administrative process and dissects how it interlocks with criminal justice. To do so, it draws on an admittedly unusual, but theoretically generative, case: administrative gun boards, charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. While scholars have examined gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice, less attention has been paid to gun licensing as a state practice. Drawing on observations of over 900 cases from gun board meetings in two counties in Michigan, this paper examines how administrative process mimics, supplements, and facilitates criminal justice through three mechanisms: procedural pains, in which administrative process resembles criminal justice; parallel punishment, in which administrative process supplements criminal justice through withholding of benefits, entitlements or licenses; and valve-turning, in which administrative process funnels, or threatens to funnel, claimants into the criminal justice system. Revealing how administrative process and criminal justice become mutually reinforcing, the findings extend and integrate scholarship that shows the material, symbolic, and psychic implications of criminal justice contact, on the one hand, with the increased tendency of administrative contexts to resemble criminal justice institutions, on the other.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 346 - 378
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful for insights throughout the development of this project that were provided by Jennifer Alexander, Randol Contreras, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Melanie Heath, Valerie Jenness, Paula Maurutto, Sally Merry, Josh Page, Poulami Roychowdhury, and Mariana Valverde. I would like to especially thank Phil Goodman for his generous feedback as I developed this manuscript. Generative questions and comments from colloquium participants at University of Arizona, University of California, Irvine, University of California, Riverside, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Ottawa also sharpened the analysis. All errors are the author's. This study was funded by the University of Toronto Connaught New Researcher Award.

References

References

Altheide, D. & Schneider, C. J. (2012) Qualitative Media Analysis (Vol. 38). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Beckett, K. (1997) Making Crime Pay. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, K. & Herbert, S. (2010). “Penal Boundaries: Banishment and the Expansion of Punishment,” 35 Law & Social Inquiry 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckett, K. & Murakawa, N. (2012) “Mapping the Shadow Carceral State,” 16 Theoretical Criminology 221–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosworth, M. & Kaufman, E. (2011) “Foreigners in a Carceral Age,” 22 Stanford Law & Policy Rev. 429–54.Google Scholar
Brayne, S. (2014) “Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and Institutional Attachment,” 79 American Sociological Rev. 367–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burbick, J. (2006) Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy. New York, NY: New Press.Google Scholar
Burnett, J. (2016) “Does Carrying a Pistol Make You Safer?,” National Public Radio April 12. Available at: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/12/473391286/does-carrying-a-pistol-make-you-safer (accessed 18 July 2016).Google Scholar
Calavita, K. & Jenness, V. (2014) Appealing to Justice. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, J. (2015) Citizen-Protectors. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrow, M. M. (1974) “Administrative Justice Comes of Age,” 60 American Bar Association J. 1396–99.Google Scholar
Churchill, R. H. (2007) “Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America,” 25 Law and History Rev. 139–76.10.1017/S0738248000001085CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comfort, M. (2009) Doing Time Together. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, D. (1995) “Local Government Legal Consciousness in the Shadow of Juridification,” J. of Law and Society 506–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cornell, S. (2006) “Early American Origins of the Modern Gun Control Debate,” 17 Stanford Law & Policy Rev. 571–96.Google Scholar
Cottrol, R. J. & Diamond, R. T. (1991) “The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration,” 80 Georgetown Law J. 309.Google Scholar
Cowan, D. (2004) “Legal Consciousness,” 67 The Modern Law Rev. 928–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cramer, C. E. (1999) Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.Google Scholar
Dubber, M. D. (2001) “Policing Possession,” 91 J. of Criminal Law and Criminology 829–996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubber, M. D. (2005) The Police Power. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Earl, J. (2008) “The Process is the Punishment: Thirty Years Later,” 33 Law & Social Inquiry 735–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epp, C. R., Maynard-Moody, S., & Haider-Markel, D. P. (2014) Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewald, A. C. (2016) “Rights Restoration and the Entanglement of US Criminal and Civil Law,” 41 Law & Social Inquiry 5–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewick, P. & Silbey, S. (1998) The Common Place of Law. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feeley, M. M. (1979) The Process Is the Punishment. New York, NY: Russell Sage.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. New York, NY: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Fraser, N. & L. Gordon (1994) “A genealogy of dependency: Tracing a keyword of the US welfare state,” 19 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 309–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garland, D. (1981) “The Birth of the Welfare Sanction,” 8 British J. of Law and Society 29–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilboy, J. A. (1988) “Administrative Review in a System of Conflicting Values,” 13 Law & Social Inquiry 515–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilliom, J. (2001) Overseers of the Poor. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Double Day.Google Scholar
Gustafson, K. S. (2011) Cheating Welfare. New York, NY: New York Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Herbert, S. (2001) “‘Hard Charger' or ‘Station Queen’? Policing and the Masculinist State,” 8 Gender, Place and Culture: A J. of Feminist Geography 55–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, J. B. (2015) The Eternal Criminal Record. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, J. & Crepet, T. (2007) “Expanding Scope, Use, and Availability of Criminal Records, The,” 11 NYU J. of Legislative & Public Policy 177.Google Scholar
Johnson, N. (2014) Negroes and the Gun. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.Google Scholar
Kaeble, D. & Glaze, L. (2016) Correctional Populations in the United States, 2015. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available at: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus15.pdf (accessed 31 January 2017).Google Scholar
Kahan, D. M. & Braman, D. (2003) “More statistics, less persuasion: A cultural theory of gun-risk perceptions,” 151 Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Rev. 1291–327.Google Scholar
Katz, M. B. (2013) The Undeserving Poor. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Kohler-Hausmann, I. (2013) “Misdemeanor Justice,” 119 American J. of Sociology 351–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kupchik, A. (2010) Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear. New York, NY: New York Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Lageson, S. E. (2016) “Digital Punishment's Tangled Web,” 15 Contexts 22–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lens, V. (2009) “Confronting Government after Welfare Reform,” 43 Law & Society Rev. 563–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lens, V., et al. (2013) “Choreographing Justice: Administrative Law Judges and the Management of Welfare Disputes,” 40 J. of Law and Society 199–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerman, A. E. & Weaver, V. M. (2014) Arresting Citizenship. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago.Google Scholar
Mashaw, J. L. (1983) Bureaucratic Justice. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Maynard-Moody, S. W. & Musheno, M. C. (2003) Cops, Teachers, Counselors. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melzer, S. (2012) Gun Crusaders: The NRA's Culture War. New York, NY: New York Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Mettler, S. & Soss, J. (2004) “The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship,” 2 Perspectives on Politics 55–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monahan, T. (2010) Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Myrick, A. (2013) “Facing Your Criminal Record,” 47 Law & Society Rev. 73–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novak, W. J. (1996) The People's Welfare. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina.Google Scholar
Page, J. (2011) The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, J. (2012) “Punishment and the Penal Field,” in J. Simon, & R. Sparks (Eds.), 152 The Sage Handbook of Punishment and Society. Thousand Oaks, CA, 152–166.Google Scholar
Pager, D. (2003) “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” 108 American J. of Sociology 937–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phelps, M. S. (2013) “The Paradox of Probation,” 35 Law & Policy 51–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Platt, A. M. (1977) The Child Savers. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago.Google Scholar
Rios, V. M. (2011) Punished. New York, NY: New York Univ. PressGoogle Scholar
Rose, V. (2013) Firearms Boards in Connecticut and Other States. Connecticut Office of Legislative Research. February 20. Available at: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2013/rpt/2013-R-0138.htm (accessed 27 January 2017).Google Scholar
Sarat, A. (1990) “The Law Is All Over: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” 2 Yale JL & Human 343.Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. (1977) “Administrative Law,” 29 Administrative Law Rev. 291–319.Google Scholar
Silbey, S. S. (2005) “After Legal Consciousness,” 1 Annual Rev. of Law Social Science 323–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, J. (2003) “Gun Rights and the Constitutional Significance of Violent Crime,” 12 William & Mary Bill of Rights J. 335.Google Scholar
Simon, J. (2007) Governing through Crime. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Smith, D. A. & Uchida, C. D. (1988) “The Social Organization of Self-Help: A Study of Defensive Weapon Ownership,” 53 American Sociological Rev. 94–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soss, J., Fording, R., & Schram, S. (2011) Disciplining the Poor. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spitzer, R. (2015) Guns across America. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Stivers, C. (2007) “So Poor and So Black” : Hurricane Katrina, Public Administration, and the Issue of Race,” 67 Public Administration Rev. 48–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sykes, G. M. (1958) The Society of Captives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Swift, A. (2013) Personal Safety Top Reason Americans Own Guns Today. Gallup October 28. Available at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/165605/personal-safety-top-reason-americans-own-guns-today.aspx (accessed 25 October 2016).Google Scholar
Tavory, I. & Timmermans, S. (2014) Abductive Analysis. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, A., et al. (2006) “Police Chiefs’ Perceptions of the Regulation of Firearms,” 30 American J. of Preventive Medicine 305–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thompson, A., et al. (2011) “Sheriffs Perceptions of Firearm Control Polices,” 36 J. of Community Health 715–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Uggen, C., et al. (2014) “The Edge of Stigma,” 52 Criminology 627–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valverde, M. (2003) “Police Science, British Style: Pub Licensing and Knowledges of Urban Disorder,” 32 Economy and Society 234–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Cleve, N. (2016) Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Van Maanen, J. (1978) “The Asshole,” Policing: A View from the Street Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear Publishing Co. 221–38.Google Scholar
Velloso, J. G. V. (2013) “Beyond Criminocentric Dogmatism: Mapping Institutional Forms of Punishment in Contemporary Societies,” 15 Punishment & Society 166–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verkuil, P. R. (1978) “The Emerging Concept of Administrative Procedure,” 78 Columbia Law Rev. 258–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wacquant, L. (2001) “Deadly Symbiosis,” 3 Punishment & Society 95–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waddington, P. A. (1999) “Police (Canteen) Sub-Culture. An Appreciation,” 39 British J. of Criminology 287–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, R. L. (1985) “Perceptions of Crime, Racial Attitudes, and Firearms Ownership,” 64 Social Forces 473–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, R. L., McDowall, D., & Loftin, C. (1987) “Collective Security and the Ownership of Firearms for Protection,” 25 Criminology 47–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zedner, L. (2016) “Penal Subversions,” 20 Theoretical Criminology 3–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Cases Cited

Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar