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

Gun Present takes us inside the everyday operations of the law 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’ work. Built on an immersive, community-based participatory partnership between researchers and criminal justice professionals, Gun Present chronicles how a justice assemblage comprising institutional structures and practices, relationships and roles, and individual moral and emotional worlds informs the day-to-day administration of justice. Weaving together in-depth interviews, quantitative analysis of more than a thousand criminal cases, analysis of trial transcripts, and over a year of ethnographic observations, Gun Present provides a model for scholar-practitioner collaborations.

Susan Dewey is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama. She is author or coauthor of thirteen books, including Outlaw Women: Prison, Rural Violence, and Poverty in the New American West and Women of the Street: How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution.

Brittany VandeBerg is Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama. She is author of Women of Piracy and Political Geographies of Piracy: Constructing Threats and Containing Bodies in Somalia.

Hays Webb is District Attorney of the Sixth Judicial Circuit of Alabama.