ABSTRACT
In the course of everyday work, legal agents categorize places and persons to inform and account for their decision-making. Categories describe locations, actors, and actions. The majority of accounts for which prosecutors constructed discordant locales were given during case filing decisions. There are several possible explanations for this. First, the “normal” cases filing practice, shaped by the convictability standard, was to reject cases. Case filing is the point when prosecutors decide which cases will go on for adjudication by the courts. Categorization is a process of classifying specific places, persons, and events as general types. The descriptions used in this categorization are drawn from a mixture of prosecutors’ experiences with case processing and generic cultural knowledge. Prosecutors presume that people live in a segregated society and that since the occupants of these segregated spaces have distinct cultures, they use different interpretive frames for making sense of and organizing the world.
