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The Hidden Arm of the Law: Examining Administrative Justice in Gun Carry Licensing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jennifer Carlson
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Abstract

Responding to calls to “decenter” American penality beyond the carceral apparatus, this article ethnographically examines administrative process and dissects how it interlocks with criminal justice. To do so, it draws on an admittedly unusual, but theoretically generative, case: administrative gun boards, charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. While scholars have examined gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice, less attention has been paid to gun licensing as a state practice. Drawing on observations of over 900 cases from gun board meetings in two counties in Michigan, this paper examines how administrative process mimics, supplements, and facilitates criminal justice through three mechanisms: procedural pains, in which administrative process resembles criminal justice; parallel punishment, in which administrative process supplements criminal justice through withholding of benefits, entitlements or licenses; and valve-turning, in which administrative process funnels, or threatens to funnel, claimants into the criminal justice system. Revealing how administrative process and criminal justice become mutually reinforcing, the findings extend and integrate scholarship that shows the material, symbolic, and psychic implications of criminal justice contact, on the one hand, with the increased tendency of administrative contexts to resemble criminal justice institutions, on the other.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 346 - 378
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I am grateful for insights throughout the development of this project that were provided by Jennifer Alexander, Randol Contreras, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Melanie Heath, Valerie Jenness, Paula Maurutto, Sally Merry, Josh Page, Poulami Roychowdhury, and Mariana Valverde. I would like to especially thank Phil Goodman for his generous feedback as I developed this manuscript. Generative questions and comments from colloquium participants at University of Arizona, University of California, Irvine, University of California, Riverside, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Ottawa also sharpened the analysis. All errors are the author's. This study was funded by the University of Toronto Connaught New Researcher Award.

References

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