State criminal-justice violence functions to maintain group-based hierarchy.

Evidence

Keeping in mind that the state is, in all known societies, disproportionately controlled by members of dominant arbitrary-sets, we can then regard the violence exercised by the state as partially functioning to maintain the extant system of group-based social hierarchy and inequality. This violence expresses itself in the form of inordinately long prison sentences, humiliation and brutality at the hands of prison guards, torture, and execution, all of which are disproportionately directed at members of subordinate groups. In other words, from an SDT perspective, state-sponsored violence, as enacted by the CJS, can be regarded as a form of intergroup conflict in which dominants usually win and subordinates usually lose. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 57

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s solidarity-and-enemy project: hierarchy maintenance is a functional cause of state violence, parallel to manufactured-threat theories.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 57