Ilya Slavinski
M.S., London School of Economics
Contact
- E-mail: ilya.slavinski@utexas.edu
Interests
Crime, Law, and Deviance, Political Sociology, Punishment and Society, Inequality
Biography
Ilya Slavinski is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a graduate trainee in the Population Research Center and an Ethnography Lab Fellow. Ilya received his MS in Non-Government Organizations and Development from the London School of Economics and his BA in Philosophy from Rutgers University.
Slavinski's work examines relationships between the state and its subjects, concentrating on punishment practices in misdemeanor courts. Through ethnography and in-depth interviews his dissertation examines various ways in which the state extracts resources from vulnerable populations while deploying a rhetoric of rehabilitation. This work illuminates the predatory practices that courts use to extract time and money, the ways in which this extraction affects defendants living in poverty, and the rhetoric used by state actors, particularly judges and prosecutors, to understand and justify these practices. These findings have led to the theoretical concept of predatory rehabilitation, a practice that happens in multiple arenas of state-citizen interaction.
He is also working on a multi-state project documenting the scope and unequal distribution of Legal Financial Obligations. Findings include the fact that legal fines and fees, even for misdemeanor citations, have become a defining feature of a contemporary punishment regime where racial injustice is fueled by economic inequality.
Slavinski's work is funded by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award and he has two articles forthcoming in the journals Social Problems and the Contemporary Journal of Criminal Justice.
