Abstract
Scholars have revealed how moral evaluation is woven into formal administrative processes. While research examining these dynamics tends to assume that a person’s naturalized identity (such as race and gender) precedes administrative processing, we argue that social categorization by administrators is the tacit precondition upon which further processing takes place. We make this argument by looking at a set of unusual cases: parole hearings where prisoners fall outside of, conflict with, or move between categories of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. We find that categorization acts as a prerequisite to moral evaluation. When administrators cannot easily categorize a prisoner, they resolve this uncertainty by denying parole. Yet, social categorization can also serve as a pathway to moral approval and administrative allocation. In certain situations, administrators encourage prisoners’ identification with a new social category as proof that they are deserving of parole. In both cases, successful administrative categorization occurs through a combination of what we call narrativization, or crafting a narrative around one’s identity that aligns with administrators’ presumptions, and authorization, or marshalling official evidence from prior classification moments to support identity claims. These insights extend our understanding of classification, moral evaluation, and the administrative reproduction of inequality.
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Notes
Most of this literature has developed in the context of making individuals legible to the state, yet it is worth noting that these dynamics are by no means exclusive to state bureaucracies (e.g. Fourcade and Healy’s (2017) consideration of the data dragnets that make individuals legible to markets).
A long tradition of research and popular conception dating back to the origins of eugenics also attempts to locate criminality in the brain (Rollins, 2021), rendering criminality a naturalized identity according to our definition. However, a fundamental premise of the organization we examine (the parole board) is that criminality is not an innate biological quality of a person, but rather a malleable personality characteristic that can be assessed by bureaucratic actors to determine who remains criminal and who is no longer a threat to public safety. In this setting, criminality thus acts more akin to a normalized identity by our terminology.
We refer to each individual up for parole by a pseudonymous identifying number. This mirrors the prison practice of using unique identifying numbers rather than names for purposes of administratively tracking and controlling incarcerated individuals. We include the basic information about a person’s race and disability that is available to parole board commissioners for each case via the prison classification system and through questioning in the parole board hearing itself. We identified this information from the transcript of the hearing. A significant portion of each hearing is dedicated to reviewing documentation, and the prisoner and his attorney have the opportunity to correct any incorrect information in the record. We note where we could not determine disability or race from the transcripts.We also include a person’s sentence length and primary conviction, given the centrality of these to the hearing. Outside of the hearings where a person’s gender and sexuality came explicitly into question, we follow commissioners’ presumption that the person up for parole is cisgender and heterosexual.
Staff are required to complete a form titled Notice and Request for Assistance at Parole Hearings. A copy of the form is available at the following link: https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/bph/wp-content/uploads/sites/161/2019/08/BPH-Form-1073-R.pdf?label=BPH%20Form%201073,%20Notice%20and%20Request%20for%20Assistance%20at%20Parole%20Proceeding&from=https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/bph/ada-resources/.
Those in the Mad Pride movement might reject this characterization of cognitive, developmental, and psychiatric differences as impairments. Within the Disability Justice movement, some people frame disability as a form of bodily difference that only becomes a problem in the face of ableist built environments (emphasizing social construction), while others points to forms of embodiment that can include ongoing physical pain and difficulty (emphasizing phenomenology). Here we focus not on making an ontological claim about disability, but on the ways cognitive, developmental, and psychiatric difference is interpreted by parole commissioners.
Incarcerated people have challenged the journalistic and scholarly practice of identifying people first by their crime of conviction, pointing out how this dehumanizing orientation reflects the logic and viewpoint of the criminal justice system. While we agree wholeheartedly with this critique, here we are deliberately seeking to trace and analyze the viewpoint of actors in the criminal justice system. We provide this information as an analytic rather than descriptive choice.
Given the small number of transgender men appearing before the California parole board, we have taken additional precautions to protect confidentiality: removing or changing identifying characteristics (in summary and quotes), and using few direct quotes from transcripts.
The second author took part in developing and presenting this training.
This specific nature of the familial relationship in these quotes has been modified to protect confidentiality (see footnote 7).
Scholars in Native Studies have resisted a multicultural tendency to treat Indigeneity as race or ethnicity, given that such an approach can obscure questions of nationhood, colonization, and sovereignty. We appreciate these epistemological critiques and are simply observing that the parole board treats Indigeneity as a racial identity. Furthermore, in this analysis we do not seek to adjudicate whether or not these men are “really” Native American, but rather to highlight the fact that men whom prison authorities understand as white experience relative ease in changing their racial categorization to Native American.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank LeShae Henderson, Michaeljit Sandhu, Tara Gonsalves, and Tim Ittner, as well as participants at the 2022 GEMS Workshop and 2020 Global Meeting on Law and Society, for their helpful feedback on this article.
Funding
This study was funded in part by by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE 1752814. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Dalke, I., Greene, J. Prerequisites and pathways: How social categorization helps administrators determine moral worth. Theor Soc 53, 41–66 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09523-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09523-6