LAUSR

gressive criminal courts in a liberal state with relatively low levels of incarceration. Black people and racialized minorities, however, are still significantly overrepresented among those ensnared by Boston’s criminal courts and class is a powerful structuring force. Scholars have shown that mass incarceration is a bi-partisan endeavor, with both tough on crime and liberal policies ballooning criminal legal systems across the country. Clair’s careful exploration shows that despite the best intentions of defense attorneys or justice reformers, there are structural determinants of class and race-based inequality that persist within formal institutions of social control whether they operate in states with relatively low or high rates of incarceration. I argue this occurs because the legal culture of bargained justice that undergirds attorney–client relationships remains nested within the scaffolding of an intentionally racist system. Given the USA’s racial capitalist foundation, racist intentionality structured the logic and operation of the criminal legal system centuries ago. This foundation brought us the linked consequences of Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration in the name of the law. It is from within this institutional predisposition for violence that despite the best intentions, race and class remain intertwined across generations to produce unequal outcomes for disadvantaged defendants. Our criminal legal system has historically demanded deference and violently restricted the freedoms of those perceived as uppity and irrationally dignified, a perception that is raced, classed, and as feminists have clarified, highly gendered. Historical intention leaves an institutional memory—a blueprint that lingers and impacts the routine experiences of those navigating a reformed criminal legal system in the present.