Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Sociology

Advisor

Van Tran

Committee Members

Leslie Paik

Michael Jacobson

Lucia Trimbur

Michael Yarbrough

Subject Categories

Inequality and Stratification | Race and Ethnicity | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance | Work, Economy and Organizations

Keywords

monetary sanctions, law and political economy, racialized organizations, suburban inequality, court ethnography

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the political development of New York’s court-mandated monetary sanctions and examines their uneven and racialized implementation in suburban courts. Across the United States, courts widely rely on monetary sanctions to punish and to generate revenue. Legal debt traps people—primarily poor people of color—in cycles of debt and punishment, as unpaid fines, fees, and other costs tether people to the carceral state (Harris 2016). While scholars have theorized the use of monetary sanctions as a component of racialized neoliberal state predation, this dissertation identifies the organizational mechanisms through which such predation occurs in local courts and illuminates its consequences for municipalities.

I focus the study on sites where prior research indicates predation may be most acute: racially segregated suburbs and their courts. Drawing on 15 months of participant observation, 28 semi-structured interviews, and extensive archival research, I trace the sociolegal history of New York’s monetary sanctions laws beginning in the 1970s and examine how courts implement these laws today in two neighboring suburbs. One court serves Pleasanton, a low-income, majority-Black and Latino municipality, and the other serves Oakwood, a more affluent, majority-white suburb (both suburbs have pseudonyms to protect participants). I use new methodological advances to bring together historical and contemporary ethnographic data (Lara-Millán 2021) and compare two case studies operating in two different racialized political and economic environments (Abramson and Gong 2020; Gong 2020).

My archival work and interviews with state-level policymakers describe the rise of New York’s penal-fiscal system, which intertwined penal and fiscal policies through court-mandated surcharges and fees. I show how lawmakers justified monetary sanctions as a way to fund general state services and passed them into law via hidden budgeting processes and racialized logics of who should finance the state. Over time, local governments became increasingly responsible for generating revenue through their courts to finance public services. State debt was transferred to entities with less power and fewer resources. Next, through a comparative ethnographic case study of the two courts, I explore how such legally codified, regressive state financing schemes are carried out through local court operations and reify racial inequalities.

Leveraging Victor Ray’s (2019) recent theorizing on racialized organizations, I develop the concept of racialized organizational autonomy to explain how court workgroups exercise discretion to interpret and reshape state laws and reproduce local racial hierarchies. This relative autonomy allows courts to prioritize different organizational goals, depending on the racialized identity of the communities they serve. With more resources and more flexible interpretations of the law, white-led and white-serving organizations can shape the law to reduce the punitive impact of monetary sanctions on people, while directing more money to local coffers. Drawing together my macro- and meso-level analyses, I illuminate one consequence of state predation and varying levels of racialized organizational autonomy. Building on conceptualizations of monetary sanctions as a form of individual financial capture (Friedman 2020), I use the concept of community financial capture to describe the impact of racialized organizational practices when it comes to implementing monetary sanctions. Race-class subjugated municipalities are stuck in cycles of disinvestment, debt, and punishment. My findings contribute to sociolegal research on the racial and spatial context of punishment, especially in segregated suburbs. They challenge colorblind understandings of court operations, showing how court norms and processes are racial structures in and of themselves and reshape existing racial orders built into U.S. laws and budgets.

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