by Daniel Gauss
Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony helps explain how the power structure of modern liberal-democratic societies maintains authority without relying on overt force. Many definitions of hegemony point out that it creates “common sense,” the assumptions a society accepts as natural and right.
It works by getting inside our heads and convincing us of concepts that would not hold up under rigorous investigation. Our criminal justice system is built on such taken-for-granted principles, many of which go unchallenged despite producing deeply inhumane consequences.
Crime, for example, is assumed to be a personal “moral failing” rather than a systemic problem. Why some people (mostly poor and marginalized) fail morally is not understood or explained. Instead of understanding crime as a product of poverty, racial segregation, inequality and limited opportunity, our system treats it as evidence of bad individual character or individual moral flaws, basically recycling old theological ideas while ignoring more than a century of psychology and sociology.
The judicial system still draws from an outdated worldview, uninformed by social science, that assumes the validity of an unquestioned social hierarchy, based on inequality of opportunity, and shifts responsibility onto individuals who are often living in trying and corrosive conditions. This amounts to a form of blaming the victim instead of accepting social and economic responsibility for others.
Modern social science even questions whether punishment and deterrence can work in a context where people are compelled to survive in and can be molded by dehumanizing circumstances. Deterrence is embraced as part of the justification for the system, but the success of deterrence on reducing crime has been dubious.
John Rawls examined how luck and circumstances beyond our control affect the distribution of rights and opportunities, arguing that just societies must account for these contingencies when designing principles of justice. Thus, we often see the socially and economically “lucky” passing judgment on the unlucky; the privileged assessing those who endure poverty, discrimination, and denied opportunities.
This system, rooted in an era when theological doctrine served as a social explanation, has long been shaped by affluent White communities condemning economically marginalized people of color. It persists today as a remnant of a dominant White social order, functioning less as a living institution than as a vestigial structure preserving inherited advantage.
A Courtroom Scene
A few years ago, I witnessed something I have never been able to forget, and which took me a considerable amount of time to fully understand and write about. I was working at a community center in a racially segregated neighborhood in Chicago, when I accompanied a young Black man to court to get his expungement papers. Expungement is a way to clear minor offenses from one’s record after a period of time, offenses that, in many cases, had been handed out with an almost casual ease by police to young Black men.
Among the teens, especially the young men at our center, the pattern was almost predictable: young Black men were given criminal records for small, sometimes shockingly petty infractions. The expungement system was an attempt to address the consequences of a system that had already labeled them as criminals, setting this as a social expectation for them and inviting a self-fulling prophecy, even before adulthood.
We arrived early and we witnessed the morning hearings in which defendants were brought before the judge to schedule future court dates. What struck me was not simply the racial composition of the room, it was the racial “structure” that stood out to me.
An elderly White male judge presided with a kind of paternal authority. Calm, jovial, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose as he looked at the court papers. A sharply dressed young White woman represented the prosecution to his right. A somewhat frazzled and overwhelmed young White man served as public defender to his left. Before this tableau, several young Black men were paraded out in succession.
Their cases differed in detail but not in the tone of the prosecutor. For each person, the prosecutor argued vigorously, passionately, in emotional terms, that the defendant was dangerous, untrustworthy and unfit to be released. The public defender offered what counterpoints he could, but was possibly resigned to the logic already accepted by the court. He always tried something, but it never worked.
Watching the interaction, I felt a disheartening analogy emerging: the prosecutor as a White woman appealing to the protective instincts of an older White patriarch, and the judge responding with the quiet, dispassionate authority of someone whose worldview had never been shaped by the experiences and life challenges of the accused.
It resembled, disturbingly, a genteel, institutionalized version of the racialized dynamics that once underwrote lynching, an accusation framed within the sensibilities of affluent Whiteness, validated by White authority, and legitimized, unquestioningly, as the protection of the current social order.
The Absence of Sociology
What became overwhelmingly clear was that sociology, the fundamental understanding that human beings can be shaped by structural conditions, was entirely absent from the courtroom’s reasoning. No one spoke of segregated housing, underfunded schools, generational poverty, aggressive and sometimes abusive policing or the lack of economic and educational opportunity in a long-standing racially segregated city.
The framework for our court system is individual moral blame: these young men were just “bad,” irresponsible, dangerous, risky (although it is never explained satisfactorily why this might have become the case).
They made bad “choices,” but the factors involved in these choices are not addressed and it is just assumed some flawed decision-making mechanism arose out of the blue for each of them, and they must now be punished. Their circumstances were irrelevant; their character was on trial but their character was not properly assessed within the context of the challenges they had faced and the lives many had been guided into.
This is not simply the omission of social science, it is the enforcement of a biased, fanciful and empirically unsupported worldview where some people make good choices (the well-heeled), and some make bad choices (the poor). The system allows only one kind of explanation for the young men’s actions: personal failure as judged by individuals with privileged lives.
The structural, historical or sociological explanations that pervade academic discussions of race, poverty and crime are filtered out entirely so that everyone can embrace a severely outdated moral and theological concept which has no empirical buttress and no contemporary relevance.
The absence of sociology was not accidental, it was ideological. Despite what we have learned over the past 100 years about criminology, in our criminal justice system we only want to know whether the defendant committed the crime. This is a deliberate and inhumane choice showing no sympathy, compassion or hope for social change.
The structural factors that may have influenced a defendant’s development are not allowed in a trial. This invites a demonization of the “criminal,” an unthinking knee-jerk reaction leading to hatred and punishment and not toward understanding and social reformation. It also, in our society, often reinforces pernicious racial and class stereotypes.
Gramsci’s Hegemony in Action
Gramsci argued that dominant groups shape what society considers “reasonable,” “natural” and “common sense.” The courtroom is one of the predominant spaces where this hegemonic common sense is performed and reproduced, contrary to social scientific evidence.
The courtroom scene I described reflects Gramsci’s theory as: 1) the personnel embody the dominant class; 2) the legal narrative determines the moral narrative and 3) explanations outside of the dominant ideology are silenced.
First, the judge and attorneys in this case were all White and seemingly from relatively affluent and comfortable backgrounds. They were representatives of a worldview formed by institutions, law schools, professional networks and privileged upbringings, that rarely, if ever, brought them into contact with the realities of poor Black neighborhoods. Their education and training socialized them into a particular legal common sense: crime results from individual pathology, not structural inequality.
Even as courts have increasingly recruited Black and Latino prosecutors, the underlying ideology remains intact. New personnel may share the racial identity of communities they work in, but they are still trained, socialized, promoted and rewarded within the traditional legal institutions. Their choices are limited, their actions constrained. They inherit the same professional norms, professional incentives and assumptions that define acceptable discourse in the courtroom.
Representation matters, but it does not automatically transform the hegemonic logic of the justice system. The system’s dominant values, favoring the absurd and outdated concept of individual moral failure over structural analysis, can persist even with more racially diverse faces in the courtroom.
Secondly, hegemony depends on making class- and race-specific assumptions appear neutral and universal. The court’s language, about danger, responsibility, risk, was framed as objective assessment. But these assessments fit in perfectly with broader dominant culture stereotypes that cast young Black men as morally suspect. The legal process thus legitimizes a racialized moral judgment while denying that race played any role at all.
Finally, hegemonic power limits the range of acceptable discourse. Anything that confronts structural inequality is branded irrelevant or inadmissible. In the courtroom, sociological explanations are not simply absent, they are unthinkable. You are not allowed to discuss possible structural influences on behavior. To invoke them would violate the courtroom’s rules, its sense of what counts as “the facts.”
The court refuses to consider background factors as to why a person committed a crime, leaving the vague concept of individual moral blame as the default answer. The system does not need to fight these sociological ideas, it excludes them before they can appear.
The Moral Framework of the Dominant Class
The judge and prosecutors likely believed they were being fair. But fairness itself is framed within the moral assumptions of the dominant social group. Gramsci stressed that the ruling class’s “common sense” becomes the nation’s common sense when it infiltrates institutions that appear neutral or professional: schools, the media, courts.
Within this framework success is attributed to individual merit. Failure is attributed to individual moral defect. Social inequality is treated as if it does not even exist or if it does exist, it doesn’t matter.
This is exactly what I saw. The White professional’s sense of what counts as justice was shaped by a class position that insulated them from the realities of life in parts of the city they would never venture to even enter. They judged young Black men according to standards derived from their own middle-class stability, standards the young men had never been structurally permitted to meet. Their moral judgments thus became instruments of racial domination, even as the system claimed colorblind neutrality.
Why Gramsci Helps Us Understand This
The courtroom scene illustrates several key aspects of hegemony.
First, the judge, prosecutor and public defender believe they are rightly following legal norms, unaware that these norms encode class and racial assumptions. Secondly, domination is embedded in “common sense.” The idea that young Black men are dangerous is treated as obvious, not ideological. Third, alternative worldviews are actively marginalized. Sociology, poverty studies and critical race perspectives are implicitly disqualified.
We also see what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the marginalized come to view themselves through the dominant lens. Young defendants internalize narratives of guilt and personal failure, often blaming themselves for what are, in fact, systemic injustices.
The justice system functions as one of the state’s key ideological apparatuses. It does not merely punish, it produces and legitimizes a worldview that reinforces the existing social order, a worldview formed long before the rise of the social sciences. Rather than helping us move toward a more just society, the court system reinforces the status quo.
A “Northern Lynching”
When I describe the scene above as a type of “northern lynching,” I do not mean literal mob violence. I mean the reproduction of the same racialized logic: White fear validated by White authority, resulting in the confinement of Black bodies. The difference is that the modern system sanitizes the process. It is procedural, orderly, professional. But the core dynamic, who gets to define danger, who gets to invoke protection, who gets caged, remains racially structured.
Lynch mobs were extra-legal; the courtroom is the law. It gives the appearance of fairness. This is exactly how hegemony works: domination disguised as moral reason, as long as you do not look too closely into it.
The Myth of Individual Moral Failure
The most disturbing aspect of the experience was the underlying lie: that these young Black men were in their predicament because of personal, moral flaws. This lie is hegemonic because it protects the legitimacy of the unfair and unjust social order.
If crime is the result of individual failure, then the system which creates and maintains poverty and racial segregation remains morally innocent. Yet, individual failure cannot be supported through reason or evidence, it is an excuse, a bias, a justification to maintain the dominance of a racially structured social and economic class.
Sociology tells a different story: that environment, structure, social expectations and history shape opportunities and behavior; that poor, violent, segregated neighborhoods produce risks and vulnerabilities unknown to those who judge folks coming from them; that crime is not a moral category but a social outcome. These young men were not being judged for who they were but for who the dominant class imagines or even wants them to be.
Even as some prosecutors attempt to account for structural or racial contexts, sometimes recommending lighter sentences or declining to prosecute minor offenses, this has limits.
Structural injustice requires structural solutions: ending segregation, investing in schools, creating economic opportunities and providing social, economic and family support. Individualized leniency shows mercy and an awareness of the harsh circumstances under which many in America live; it cannot, however, replace the larger social reforms needed to address the root causes of crime.
Conclusion
What can be done? The first step is to change the narrative and acknowledge that “justice” in our criminal justice system often masks structural failure. We need a framework that recognizes how environment, racism, economic deprivation and inequality shape behavior long before a crime is committed.
One big move toward a solution would be to make sincere efforts to desegregate every American city. There are studies which indicate desegregation would, as a ripple effect, help change many of the harmful factors leading to crime. Many research institutes and academic departments have published detailed policy recommendations and frameworks for desegregating American cities, though these are often not implemented.
One emerging response is also the growing interest in jury nullification in cases where a defendant’s circumstances clearly played a decisive role. This would be an act of ordinary citizens refusing to reinforce a system built on a denial of social science and rendering verdicts of “not guilty” despite court norms and orders from the judge.
Again, this is not a structural solution to a structural problem, but it would signal that some folks are fed up with a “justice” system which does not provide justice. It might apply the pressure needed for structural reform. Jury nullification is a safe, legally protected and historically grounded form of social protest used throughout US history.
Whether through juries, policymakers or public pressure, the path forward begins with rejecting the myth of purely individual blame and insisting on a justice system that acknowledges the conditions creating crime which it has long ignored.
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