Shifting the Landscape of Power: Interstitial Strategies in Criminal Court Activism

Abstract Criminal justice activism in the United States has traditionally focused on policing at the front end of the penal system or prisons at the back end. More recently, activists have expanded their efforts to the criminal court, which they see as mediating the path from arrest to incarceration. Bridging punishment and society with law and social movements, I study how activists diagnose and counter the problems of the court. Through an ethnographic and interview study in Oakland, California, I found that activists engage in interstitial power shifting or creating new avenues for collective action in the cracks of the court process and using them to shift power from legal officials to marginalized communities. This power shifting is ideological and material. First, activists challenge the idea that the court is a just institution and problematize how it obscures its activities from the public, dehumanizes defendants, and evades accountability to system-impacted people. Second, activists try to address these problems and reduce the court’s power through strategic interventions: court watch, participatory defense, and district attorney accountability. More broadly, this article offers a framework for analyzing collective action that does not operate fully within or outside of law but, rather, in the margins and cracks of legal institutions and processes.