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Mikaela Rabinowitz’s Incarceration without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice (Routledge, 2021) addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the US criminal justice system: namely, the significant impact of pretrial detention on the millions of Americans held in local jails. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are held in pretrial detention in US jails—not because they are a flight risk, but because they cannot pay for bail or a bail bond. Impacting disproportionally Black and poor individuals, Rabinowitz highlights how pretrial detention is at odds with juridical notions of fairness, effectively punishing Americans before guilt or innocence is ever explored in court. Using a mixed-methods approach, Rabinowitz argues that pretrial detention undermines both the presumption and the meaning of innocence in the American criminal justice system.
Incarceration without Conviction is available through Routledge. Mikaela Rabinowitz is Director of Data, Research, and Analytics at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.
Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims on the basis of belief. Their public writing focuses on issues of migration governance, as well as how inaccessibility and transphobia can shape the practice of anthropological research.
Dr. Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow, where they will be studying how anti-gender mobilization shapes migration policy, particularly in regards to asylum determinations. They hold a PhD in Anthropology at McGill University, a MSc in Social Anthropology from the LSE, and a MA in Islamic Law from SOAS.
Their research interests include state governance, human rights, bureaucracy, and religion, with a particular emphasis on how people understand and experience law. When not making their way through a pile of policy documents or coding data, they enjoy gardening on their Montréal balcony.