Gun Present takes us inside the everyday operations of the law in practice at a courthouse in the Deep South. Illuminating the challenges accompanying the prosecution of criminal cases involving guns, the three coauthors–an anthropologist, a geographer, and a district attorney–present a deeply human portrait of prosecutors’ everyday work. Based on a long-term, immersive, community-based participatory research partnership between researchers and criminal justice professionals, Gun Present chronicles how a justice assemblage—comprised of institutional structures and practices, relationships and roles, and individual moral and emotional worlds—informs the everyday administration of justice. Weaving together in-depth interviews, quantitative analysis of more than a thousand criminal cases involving guns, analysis of trial transcripts, and over a year of ethnographic observations, Gun Present provides a model for academic-practitioner collaborations.
Gun Present Inside a Southern District Attorney's Battle against Gun Violence
About the Book
Reviews
“Gun Present is an innovative, vivid, and thought-provoking ethnography of a southern US District Attorney’s Office, illuminating their work in the disposition of criminal cases involving guns. Beautifully crafted, this text contributes to criminological theory while highlighting the value of community-engaged collaboration between criminologists and criminal justice practitioners. It ought to sit at the top of reading lists for scholars, students, and practitioners with an interest in qualitative research methods and criminal justice."—Fiona Brookman, Professor of Criminology, University of South Wales"This is work to emulate—empirically rich and theoretically intricate, yet clear and engrossing. Based on ethnographic participatory action methods, thriving on enviable team synergy, and seen through the lens of context-bound assemblages of justice, the daily practices of prosecutors in gun-involved criminal cases emerge in lush detail."—Lois Presser, author of Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences
"This innovative ethnography highlights the value of community-engaged collaboration between criminologists and criminal justice practitioners."—Walter S. DeKeseredy, author of Contemporary Critical Criminology
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