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Book review: Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorAnthony Grasso
Published date01 August 2019
Date01 August 2019
DOI10.1177/1362480619826202
Subject MatterBook reviews
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Theoretical Criminology 23(3)
Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken
Windows Policing, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2018; 328 pp.: 9780691174303, $29.95
(hbk)
Reviewed by: Anthony Grasso, US Military Academy, USA
In the 1990s, New York City put Kelling and Wilson’s “broken windows” theory into
practice. Premised on the idea that aggressively policing minor offenses would curb seri-
ous crime, broken windows policing made misdemeanors a priority for the New York
Police Department. Scholars have devoted attention to the devastating effects this had on
New York’s poorest citizens, but in Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social
Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing, Issa Kohler-Hausmann asks an impor-
tant question—where did those arrested people go?
Her answer is “misdemeanorland”, which she defines as “a jurisdictional and physical
space where these cases are processed” (p. 3). Her work is a welcome addition to analy-
ses of US criminal justice. It addresses a scholarly blind-spot by studying how New
York’s courts responded to this shift in policing. The book’s central contribution is that
in the broken windows era, New York’s lower courts evolved to serve social control
functions that have little to do with adjudicating guilt or innocence. In place of an “adju-
dicative model”, courts adopted a “managerial model” that empowers court actors to
control accused misdemeanants, typically drawn from the city’s most marginalized pop-
ulations, through procedural and legal tools entailing neither conviction nor incarcera-
tion. Kohler-Hausmann contends that misdemeanorland’s operations raise significant
moral and political questions about criminal justice and democratic society. She writes
that like other sites in the justice system, misdemeanorland “functions to either repro-
duce class and racial inequality or manage the effects of class and racial inequality in a
punitive fashion”...

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