Working as Intended: Legislative Intent, Policing, and Racism in the Criminal Legal System

In this book, we make use of a comprehensive database covering every arrest over seven years in a single state, providing a comprehensive look into a state’s criminal legal system from start to finish. How many people are arrested for which types of crimes? Who are those people: rich, poor, young, old, male, female, black, white, Native American, or some other race, residing in urban, rural, small towns, or a big city? What are they charged with? Are there systematic or idiosyncratic disparities in who receives harsher or more lenient treatment, and who escapes law enforcement altogether, though they may violate a law?

By describing from head to toe the internal workings of the North Carolina criminal legal system, we seek to understand how the state constructs social orderings. Did the state legislature intend for this targeting (and protection) to occur, or do any observed disparities represent an unintended consequence, a simple artifact of differential behavior? That is, we seek to understand whether observed disparities are mere coincidences, or whether they represent the result that the state legislature had in mind when it outlawed this or that behavior.

The result of this combination of statistically sophisticated analysis and qualitatively rich historical and archival work is a troubling portrait of a system doing exactly what it was designed to do. We present the racial disparities in the criminal legal system not as a flaw, but as the intent of the system. In the end, we propose reforms that could keep us all safter, provide greater confidence in the justice system, reduce the scope of the law, and promote racial equity. Our assessment of criminal legal system makes clear that that system is embedded in other systems, such as housing segregation, economic and educational disparities, transportation and health-care systems, that all contribute to unequal outcomes.

Our book is under contract and was recently reviewed by the University of Chicago Press, and we expect to see it in print in 2027. We are completing last revisions before production now.

Frank R. Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is known for developing the punctuated equilibrium theory of policy change and developing the Comparative Agendas Project with Bryan Jones and other collaborators. He has published several books on the racial disparities in criminal justice, including traffic stops, the death penalty, and now on legislative intent.

Link to Book Infos: WorkingAsIntended