Research on political repression by state actors is an important area of inquiry for social movement scholars and law and society scholars alike. This paper addresses this broad topic by examining quantitative and qualitative data on arrests made during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC).
Data are used to:
(1) challenge conventional thinking that suggests that police violence is a more severe form of repression when compared to arrests;
(2) test arguments made in recent work that applies Feeley’s The Process is the Punishment to the use of arrests in controlling political protest, such as examining the relative severity of pre-trial “punishment” when compared to conviction rates and sentencing averages upon conviction;
(3) explore the factors that affected defendants’ decisions on whether or not to and/or how to proceed with their defense; and
(4) understand the impact of arrests and pre-trial detention experiences on the willingness of arrested individuals to participate in future protests.
Quantitative data include arrest level data on all arrests made during the 2004 RNC. Qualitative data include interviews with a small, random sample of arrested individuals, published accounts of the RNC and RNC arrest experiences, press coverage, and internal NYPD and NYC documents. This research concludes by demonstrating that during the 2004 RNC, law in action was able to accomplish what constitutionally permissible law on the books could not: criminalizing protesters as a class.
Citation: Earl, Jennifer. "Arrests, Repression, and the 2004 Republican National Convention". Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Law and Society Association, Jul 06, 2006 and the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, TBA, New York, New York City, Aug 11, 2007. Online at http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p183892_index.html
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