Alexes Harris

University of Washington Seattle | UW · Department of Sociology

Substantial fees and fines now are now routinely imposed by courts and other criminal justice agencies across the United States. This article summarizes research on the imposition of monetary sanctions in the United States and shows how they differ from European day fines. In the contemporary United States, court-imposed legal financial obligations...

Recent research suggests that the use of monetary sanctions as a supplementary penalty in state and federal criminal courts is expanding, and that their imposition creates substantial and deleterious legal debt. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence the discretionary imposition of these penalties. This study offers a comprehens...

This article investigates the discourse individuals use when talking about desisting from criminal offending. I analyze the links between offenders’ accounts of past negative behavior, their construction of their possible “clean” future selves, and the social and structural conditions in which they were raised and continue to be embedded. Applying...

This chapter analyzes data collected from 28 after-school programs funded under the W. K. Kellogg African American Men and Boys Initiative. It examines the inevitability of massive failure and incarceration of African American males in American society, and it presents systemic evidence of alternative outcomes. It examines the role of public policy...

The expansion of the U.S. penal system has important consequences for poverty and inequality, yet little is known about the imposition of monetary sanctions. This study analyzes national and state-level court data to assess their imposition and interview data to identify their social and legal consequences. Findings indicate that monetary sanctions...

This paper investigates institutional decision-making processes and identify mechanisms that link case processing with subsequent outcomes. Using a sample of juvenile court cases containing probation officers’ narratives, this study investigated court actors’ focal concerns and how such priorities shape attributions about youth. This paper adds to...

Shaming is a mechanism theorists have highlighted as an important means of social control. However, this concept and the ways in which officials use shame in the context of formal social control is not easily studied. Interviews with a Southern California juvenile court judge and observations of his interactions with youths on probation are used to...

This study investigates the types of decision-making models that frame people-processing decisions. An analysis of the judicial waiver hearing will be used as an example of such institutional processing. I investigate how decision makers engage in practical reasoning by exploring the methods they use to organize information about youth and accompli...

Although tensions between substantive and formal rationality in the adult criminal justice system have received a great deal of attention, the existence of these tensions in the juvenile justice system has received little scholarly consideration. I seek to remedy this gap by exploring how punitive policies associated with the war on crime impact th...

Youth of color are dramatically under-represented in California institutions of higher education. Conversely in California and nationwide, African American and Latino youth are disproportionately over-represented at every major decision point in the juvenile justice system [Leiber, M. (2002). Disproportionate Minority Confinement (DMC) of youth: An...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2002. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 396-413). Photocopy. s