LAUSR

Criminologists have long been interested in the relationship between crime with race, gender, and class, exploring how the latter set of factors shape or determine differences in offending, victimization, case processing, and outcomes (Daly 1989; Daly and Tonry, 1997; Peterson et al., 2006; Rosich, 2007; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Tonry, 2011). The resulting work addresses disparities in various phases of the judicial process (e.g. arrest, adjudication, sentencing, and parole) and pathways into offending and victimization (Chesney-Lind, 1989; Huebner and Bynum, 2008; Spohn and Sample, 2013). Yet while much conventional criminological research does incorporate race, class, and gender in some ways, very few have theorized about the intersections of those factors and crime in substantive ways. This special section aims to fill that gap in criminological theory by exploring contemporary views of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). These essays seek to inform and provoke criminologists to engage more critically in how the justice system embodies, perpetuates, and transforms existing social inequalities such as race, class, and gender. The call to take an intersectional approach is more than just an intellectual exercise: it is literally a matter of life and death apparent in the police killings of Black men and women in the USA, racial disparities in death penalty outcomes, and deaths resulting from transnational migration into Europe and the USA. Before introducing the essays in this section, I provide a brief overview of intersectionality. Some cite Patricia Hills Collins’ work and the long tradition of Black feminist scholars and social activists’ work around race, class, and gender as the antecedent to it (Collins, 2015; Potter, 2015). Building on that work which took place within and beyond the academy, critical legal scholar Kimberlee Crenshaw (1989, 1991) introduced and