CLSC | Socio-Legal Studies Workshop: Amelia Roskin-Frazee - Carceral Imaginaries and Progressive Dissonance: Race, Culture, and the Prosecution of Sex Crimes in California

Abstract

This paper examines how criminal legal officials in California operationalize carceral imaginaries in sex crime cases, and in particular, how they manage the dissonance between stated commitments to progressive prosecution and the punitive, racialized outcomes that sex crime case processing produces. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 51 prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement officers, victim advocates, and judges across California, I find two interlocking patterns. First, officials use the concept of “culture” as a proxy for race, attributing sex offending in Hispanic and immigrant communities to collective cultural norms rather than to individual pathology or structural conditions. Second, officials’ fluency in the language of progressive prosecution, systemic racism, and trauma-informed practice functions as a shield by providing the appearance of critical awareness while officials continue to operate within cognitive frameworks structured by racial and class-based assumptions that they do not recognize.

The paper extends the empirical literature on prosecutorial decision-making in sex crime cases by examining the ideological frameworks that prosecutors and law enforcement officers bring to their work. It also brings literature on color-blind racism and cultural racism into conversation with sex crime prosecution literature, which has largely treated race as a demographic variable rather than an interpretive framework that structures how officials perceive defendants, victims, and communities. Finally, it complicates the progressive prosecution literature by showing that progressive self-identification and punitive practice can operate as complementary features of a single institutional logic, particularly when the offense category in question carries sufficient moral weight to override reformist commitments.


Hosted by the UCI Center in Law, Society and Culture, the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop is an interdisciplinary seminar that brings together scholars both within and beyond the UCI community working at the intersections of law, social sciences, humanities, and the arts to discuss works-in-progress. The Workshop also features a series of book talks in which authors discuss their recently published work.