Abstract
Beth Bechky’s book is about forensic science, considered as an extreme case of ‘captive occupation’. Like their colleagues in academic research, criminalists undergo extensive specialized training, strongly identify with the scientific profession, spend much of their time doing benchwork, and even wear white coats. Yet, crucially, the goals of their work are defined externally, by the criminal justice system, the sole ‘consumer’ of the crime lab’s outputs. Forensic scientists analyse the possible material links between suspects and crimes, but their findings are judged by a different expert community (lawyers) and members of the public (juries). This heteronomous position at the intersection of multiple social worlds makes criminalists’ boundary work particularly challenging. They must address the double problem of intelligibility and legitimacy, ensuring that their expertise is taken seriously and understood correctly, in an environment where neither is guaranteed. In Bechky’s (p. 10) acute observation, unlike climate scientists, criminalists can’t just walk away from their audiences and ‘have to work in a state of anticipation and translation’. While their status within the criminal justice system is relatively low, their career prospects are tightly coupled with the stakes of the legal game. Bechky’s book explores how criminalists navigate these challenges and the broader lessons of their experience of occupational captivity.
The book is based on an eighteen months-long ethnography in the Metropolitan County Crime Laboratory (MCCL; a pseudonym) in the western United States, a mid-sized laboratory subordinate to the county’s district attorney. About 60 criminalists work there, specializing in DNA, firearms, narcotics and toxicology. Back in the 2000s, forensic science was relatively generalist, but nowadays criminalists receive extensive on-the-job training before starting to work on cases, lasting between 9 months (DNA analysts) to several years (firearms examiners). Work in a crime lab appeals to recent science graduates, offering autonomy, professional growth opportunities, and income and employment security comparable to a ‘good science’ job. Unlike laboratory technicians in universities or hospitals, criminalists enjoy fuller control over their labour process and do not report to senior colleagues with advanced degrees. As in craft work, ‘skilful manual mastery’ (Gandini & Gerosa, 2023, p. 13) matters more than credentials, making criminalists ‘a community of engaged, proactive experts’ (p. 64). Collaboratively attacking challenging problems helps foster specialized expertise as well as a strong sense of professional identity.
The book begins with a rich account of the working practices of MCCL’s different units, following a tripartite sequence of taming, questioning and framing the evidence (chapter 1). At first, criminalists purify and organize the messy artefacts arriving from crime scenes. Firearms examiners test-fire guns to check their functionality; forensic biologists extract samples of biological fluids left on parts of clothes or physical objects, try to attribute them, and amplify the DNA before the analysis starts, all the while meticulously documenting every step. Having tamed the evidence, criminalists question it. DNA profilers compare the DNA from the crime scene with a pool of samples taken from the local population, assessing the probability that the two are linked. Firearms examiners compare striae, the microscopic shooting markings on the bullets and cartridge casings, against an integrated ballistics database. Striae are unique, even for guns of the same model produced by the same manufacturer. During their training, firearms examiners read about gun manufacturing, visit the factories, and study images of striae to accumulate a stock of knowledge of the closest nonmatching ones, building a holistic understanding of gun manufacturing and usage. Narcotics analysts determine whether a given substance is controlled, while toxicologists detect and identify drugs and poisons in body fluids, tissues and organs. Both operate in a mass-production fashion, processing large quantities of similar cases under short turnaround times, and use instrumental techniques borrowed from chemistry and biology: micro crystallography, gas chromatography and enzyme immunoassay identification screening. For toxicologists and narcotics analysts, nurturing an obsessive-compulsive organizational skill is even more important than to their colleagues in other units.
Different units vary in the use of instrumentation and the amount of interpretation required to make sense of the instrumental outputs. For example, DNA profiling is ‘highly technical, but highly interpretive’ (p. 28): forensic biologists attach case notes to the reports, which go through several rounds of revisions. Interpretation is more straightforward in narcotics and toxicology, where reports are more standardized. Every unit has some form of communal peer review and conventions of collective troubleshooting, testifying to forensic science’s affinity to other species of laboratory science. What makes forensic science special is the structural ‘captivity’: criminalists may control their labour process, but not its products once they leave the lab. Their expertise is framed and acted upon by lawyers, who play by the rules of the criminal justice system, in which criminalists enjoy only ‘partial membership’ (p. 129). Science and law organize knowledge production differently. The former seeks broad generalizations through probabilistic reasoning and has no interest in any particular outcome of the trial; the latter generates knowledge about particular cases to win a legal battle, admitting no fuzziness. Moreover, in the lawyers’ hands, forensic science becomes not only applied, but also public. To convince juries, attorneys need to enact the public imageries of credible science, very often at odds with the messy realities of laboratory life.
‘Partial membership’ means not only educational difference or spatial distance (the lab is based in a separate building with restricted access). A ‘captive occupation’, criminalists ‘are near the bottom of the hierarchy’ (p. 101) in the criminal justice system. Their professional prospects, including funding, depend on the assessment of their usefulness by the members of the system pursuing their own agendas. As a result, criminalists develop what Bechky calls a ‘culture of anticipation’ (chapter 3). Criminalists align their work with the expectations of the legal community and the public. They try to reduce the diversity of perspectives around evidence by incorporating others’ perspectives into their work. For example, when preparing reports, criminalists rely on internally developed ‘cheat sheets’ with wording clichés that incorporate expectations of the audience without compromising the findings’ substance (p. 79). The ‘culture of anticipation’ manifests itself most visibly in the allocation of time: forensic scientists spend about 70 percent of their working time preparing careful documentation of the analyses conducted, so as to ensure the accuracy and accessibility of their reports (p. 82).
Crime labs also try to familiarize outsiders with their work by regularly organizing public tours, trainings for attorneys, and encouraging informal meetings with lawyers before the trials. These efforts are often made in vain: attorneys fail to attend training sessions, don’t return calls and emails, make criminalists wait or demand them to appear in court at a short notice, reinforcing marginalization. Feeling ‘side-lined and disrespected’, criminalists resist within limits. While entertaining the ‘perennial hope for educating attorneys, judges, and members of law enforcement about science’ (p. 178), they push back against uninformed or scientifically unacceptable demands. In assigning cases, crime lab supervisors try to strike a balance between what is scientifically meaningful and legally probative. These tensions come to an extreme when criminalists are called to testify in court. Appearing before a jury is, quite literally, a performance, which is again controlled by the lawyers who lead the questioning and frame the testimony. Criminalists are ‘not co-workers, but guests’ in court, and their failure to act convincingly as credible experts may compromise the reputation of the entire lab. Indeed, while lawyers generally depend on the credibility of forensic science, to win a case, they won’t shy away from acting opportunistically and discrediting criminalists on the stand. Testifying in court is a rare event, yet crime labs are haunted by its spirit. In their everyday work and mock trials organized for training purposes, criminalists receive extensive informal training on how to deal with emotional tensions, intimidation and loneliness on the stand, where ‘nobody is your friend’, as well as learn specific boundary-work tactics by discussing each other’s cases. Thus, when on the stand, criminalists use carefully selected analogies to make their expertise intelligible without oversimplifying it; ask for restatements of uninformed questions; purposefully point to the bounds of their expertise, limiting it to one specific subfield of forensic science; and resist unacceptable demands, like making determinations from photographs.
As Bechky makes clear throughout the book, criminalists’ ‘culture of anticipation’ ‘does not necessarily mean coercion or bias’ (pp. 177–178). A testimony to the messiness of empirical research and the difficult trade-offs forensic scientists face, it may compromise some public images of scientific work, but never the work itself. Forensic scientists are committed to be ‘the voice of the evidence’, embracing the need for consideration of probative implications of their research and the necessity of careful language to bridge science and justice. Forensic science’s structural embeddedness in a foreign social world does not make it bad science. Moreover, Bechky suggests that a complete autonomy from the system of criminal justice would be undesirable: criminalists’ ability to anticipate the needs of the system makes it function more smoothly, although the true value of their work is under-appreciated by those who stand to benefit from it. To remedy the grievances of criminalists while making sure their ‘culture anticipation’ remains functional, Bechky proposes more incremental solutions: introducing a legal review in addition to the technical review to get the lawyers more involved in the production of expertise or establishing forensic scientists as independent officers of the court, on par with the attorneys.
In the conclusion, Bechky wonders whether the ‘captive occupation’ of forensic science qualifies as a good job, once again noting how appealing it may be for aspiring scientists with a taste for benchwork. Yet the opportunity of doing valuable, meaningful and interesting work comes at the price of being sidelined and under-appreciated, as well as having to do an outsized amount of paperwork to anticipate the whims of powerful others. The resulting picture is surprisingly similar to David Graeber’s (2015) analysis of contemporary alienation – indeed, this staple of the Marxist vocabulary may offer an alternative description of ‘captivity’. In hierarchical relationships, subordinates spend much of their time ‘trying to decipher . . . motives and perceptions’ (Graeber, 2015, p. 67) of their superiors, whose position allows them to not reciprocate. At the same time, the labour of ‘imaginative identification’ (or, more generally, care) makes an indispensable contribution to the functioning of organizations and their ability to create value. Anticipation can be seen as a form of care, but also as a boundary-work strategy, whereby the ‘captive’ professional group ‘may choose to build relationships with rather than engage in confrontation with higher-status groups’ (Comeau-Vallée & Langley, 2019, p. 21). The case of forensic science is particularly instructive for thinking about the shifting value of expert work, the interplay between intra- and interprofessional boundary work and the social position (Comeau-Vallée & Langley, 2019), and the difficult trade-offs between alienation, status and meaning in contemporary work (Gandini & Gerosa, 2023; Graeber, 2015). Further theoretical and empirical work on ‘occupational captivity’ offers a promising way of connecting these research agendas.
Bechky’s study of criminalists makes a strong case for the continued relevance of expert judgement, embodied skill and tacit knowledge – but also the ability to translate them across and beyond various domains. The latter becomes increasingly central, as more and more substantive ‘expert’ tasks are being taken up by machines. Perhaps at this historical juncture expertise is less about specialized knowing than about care and communication? Beth Bechky’s book offers an excellent opportunity, as well as rich material, to ponder upon this and other thorny issues surrounding expert work today.
