Bad subjects: Epistemic violence at arraignment

Abstract

While arraignment is meant to serve as a check on arbitrary state power, actualizing defendants’ rights to due process, it is also a key site wherein individuals come face to face with the state. This article theorizes the epistemic violence inherent in that encounter and embedded in routine court practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations of misdemeanor arraignments, this article explores how the state produces and marshals knowledge of the accused: interpellating most defendants into a degraded subject position, actively silencing their attempts to know otherwise, and making racialized moral evaluations of their worthiness. Together these practices constitute epistemic violence, inflicting injury through their assault on defendants’ dignity and personhood and through their justification and reproduction of more material harms.