Book Talk: Misdemeanorland Monday, March 19 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor For more information: https://ipk.nyu.edu/events/book-talk-misdemeanorland/ NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join for the launch of Issa Kohler-Hausmann’s Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing.The author will be present in conversation with Gabriel Sayegh and Paul Butler. Felony conviction and mass incarceration attract considerable media attention these days, yet the most common criminal-justice encounters are for misdemeanors, not felonies, and the most common outcome is not prison. In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing experiment. Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model–and the implications are troubling. Kohler-Hausmann shows how significant volumes of people are marked, tested, and subjected to surveillance and control even though about half the cases result in some form of legal dismissal. She describes in harrowing detail how the reach of America’s penal state extends well beyond the shocking numbers of people incarcerated in prisons or stigmatized by a felony conviction. Revealing and innovative, Misdemeanorland shows how the lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal punishment. Issa Kohler-Hausmann<https://law.yale.edu/issa-kohler-hausmann> is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale. She joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2014. Her primary research interests are in criminal law, criminal procedure, empirical legal studies, tort law, sociology of law, and legal theory. Before coming to Yale, she was a Law Research Fellow at Georgetown University. Admitted to the New York Bar in 2009, she previously worked in solo practice and has been an associate with Ilissa Brownstein & Associates. In her practice work, she practiced in felony and misdemeanor criminal defense, New York State freedom of information litigation, and parole matters. Kohler-Hausmann has been most recently published in the Stanford Law Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and has work represented in many other journals and books. Her most recent publications focus on misdemeanor arrests in New York City and their use as a form of social control, and she has won awards for her writing from the American Sociological Association and the Law and Society Association. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and New York University. Paul Butler<https://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/butler-paul.cfm#> is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University. He researches and teaches in the areas of criminal law, race relations law, and critical theory. His scholarship has been published in many leading scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review and the UCLA Law Review. He is the author of two books, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice (New Press, 2009) and Chokehold: Policing Black Men (New Press, 2017). Professor Butler has also written a column for The Legal Times and published numerous op-ed articles and book reviews, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Daily Beast. His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and The ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News, among other places. Prior to joining the academy, Professor Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. His prosecutions included a United States Senator, three FBI agents, and several other law enforcement officials. While at the Department of Justice, Professor Butler also worked as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, prosecuting drug and gun cases. Gabriel Sayegh<http://www.katalcenter.org/gabriel_sayegh> is co-founder and co-executive director of the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. For nearly 20 years, Sayegh has worked on campaigns to end mass incarceration the war on drugs, promote fair economies and racial equity, and more. He is a core leader and strategist in the campaign to close Rikers Island Jail Complex (#CLOSErikers). Prior to co-founding Katal, Sayegh worked for 12 years at the Drug Policy Alliance, serving many roles, including as Managing Director of Policy and Campaigns. At DPA, he led and worked on numerous policy reform campaigns in cities and states around the country, including the coalition effort to roll back the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York; the campaign to end New York City’s marijuana arrest crusade; developing municipal drug strategy planning efforts in select cities; advancing overdose prevention interventions in Connecticut and New York; and more. Sayegh has appeared in a wide range of media, including The New York Times, NY1, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, Fusion, NPR, Washington Post, Newsweek, Vice, NY Daily News, NY Post, Associated Press, Huffington Post, The Village Voice, Gawker, BBC, and more. He is the author of numerous articles and several reports, including Blueprint for a Public Health and Safety Approach to Drug Policy (the subject of a New York Times editorial) and From Handcuffs to Healthcare: Putting the Affordable Care Act to Work for Criminal Justice and Drug Law Reform.