Race and Rurality in the Pretrial Experience

Eife, Erin, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. John Eason at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Sociology and The Justice Lab, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the experience of rural pretrial release. The findings from this project will further knowledge about two understudied phenomena: pretrial release and rural criminology. The long-term implication of this work is to reduce harms associated with being charged with a crime by documenting how punitive surveillance is enacted upon people who are legally presumed to be innocent. When a person is charged with a crime, their first court appearance is in bond court, where a judge assigns a dollar amount and conditions for release. If the accused person can afford their bond, they will pay to await their trial outside of county jail. This increases their chances of a not guilty verdict and more lenient sentencing. Even so, previous research illustrates how pretrial release is rife with carceral surveillance, which prevents people from attending church, obtaining groceries, or holding a stable job, all while they are legally presumed innocent. Criminology studies are largely conducted in urban settings, but scholars have shown that criminal legal contact both occurs in rural settings and functions differently in these settings. In this project, I ask: How does pretrial release differ in rural settings? This project relies on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews in two adjacent rural counties, which are demographically and culturally similar but differ in one important aspect: commercial bail has been prohibited in one but still operates in the other, allowing for a comparative analysis of bond systems. Ethnographic observations of pretrial hearings will provide information about how state actors determine bail amounts and conditions in both counties. In-depth interviews (30 in each county, totaling 60 interviews) with people currently or recently on pretrial release will provide insight into the lived experience of pretrial surveillance, highlighting its impact on everyday interactions and encounters in rural areas. This knowledge will strengthen the understudied area of rural criminology in a body of literature that largely centers urban experiences. Additionally, by drawing a direct comparison between two otherwise similar rural counties, this study will also contribute an analysis of how certain bond systems influence pretrial surveillance, showing how rural citizens experience pretrial release within both for-profit commercial and state-run bond systems. This project will demonstrate the importance of including all criminalized people in bond reform and other efforts to end mass criminalization. Findings will contribute to public advocacy work being conducted at the local and national levels on the abolition of money bond and the harms of pretrial surveillance. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.