Gun Present: Inside a Southern District Attorney’s Battle against Gun Violence

by Susan Dewey, Brittany Vandeberg, Hays Webb

Gun Present takes us inside the everyday operations of the law in practice at a courthouse in the Deep South. Illuminating the challenges accompanying the prosecution of criminal cases involving guns, the three coauthors–an anthropologist, a geographer, and a district attorney–present a deeply human portrait of prosecutors’ everyday work. Based on a long-term, immersive, community-based participatory research partnership between researchers and criminal justice professionals, Gun Present  chronicles how a justice assemblage—comprised of institutional structures and practices, relationships and roles, and individual moral and emotional worlds—informs the everyday administration of justice. Weaving together in-depth interviews, quantitative analysis of more than a thousand criminal cases involving guns, analysis of trial transcripts, and over a year of ethnographic observations, Gun Present provides a model for academic-practitioner collaborations.

251 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2024