Institutionalizing inequality in the courts: Decomposing racial and ethnic disparities in detention, conviction, and sentencing*
AbstractA significant body of literature has examined racial and ethnic inequalities in sentencing, focusing on how individual court actors make decisions, but fewer scholars have examined whether disparities are institutionalized through legal case factors. After finding racial and ethnic inequalities in pretrial detention, conviction, and incarceration based on 4 years of felony court data (N = 83,924) from Miami‐Dade County, we estimate nonlinear decomposition models to examine how much of the inequalities are explained by differences in criminal history, charging, and for conviction and incarceration, pretrial dete...
Source: Criminology - September 24, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Marisa Omori,
Nick Petersen Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Redemption and reproach: Religion and carceral control in action among women in prison
AbstractCriminologists are increasingly interested in how a variety of justice ‐adjacent institutions scaffold surveillance and punishment in the U.S. criminal justice system. A relevant but understudied institution within the carceral state is that of religion. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women's prison, I interrogate how religion—pr edominately conservative and evangelical Protestantism—served dual purposes in light of carceral control. Religion offered redemptive narratives to counter punitive carceral narratives promulgated by the state. At the same time, this narrative shif...
Source: Criminology - September 22, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Rachel Ellis Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Locking up my generation: Cohort differences in prison spells over the life course
AbstractCrime rates have dropped substantially in the United States, but incarceration rates have remained high. The standard explanation for the lasting trend in incarceration is that the policy choices from the 1980s and 1990s were part of a secular increase in punitiveness that has kept rates of incarceration high. Our study highlights a heretofore overlooked perspective: that the crime –punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave. With individual‐level longitudinal sentencing data from 197...
Source: Criminology - August 21, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Yinzhi Shen,
Shawn D. Bushway,
Lucy C. Sorensen,
Herbert L. Smith Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Issue Information
Criminology, Volume 58, Issue 3, Page 403-406, August 2020. (Source: Criminology)
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Tags: ISSUE INFORMATION Source Type: research
The public salience of crime, 1960 –2014: Age–period–cohort and time–series analyses†
AbstractThe public salience of crime has wide ‐ranging political and social implications; it influences public trust in the government and citizens’ everyday routines and interactions, and it may affect policy responsiveness to punitive attitudes. Identifying the sources of crime salience is thus important. Two competing theoretical models exist: the objectivist model and the social constructionist model. According to the first, crime salience is a function of the crime rate. According to the second, crime salience is a function of media coverage and political rhetoric, and trends in crime salience differ across popula...
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Luzi Shi,
Yunmei Lu,
Justin T. Pickett Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and complaints about abuse of police power †
AbstractResearch findings show that legal cynicism —a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understa nding neighborhood variation in complaints about police misconduct. Using data on complaints filed in Chicago between 2012 and 2014, we show that grievances disproportionately came from racially segregated neighborhoods and that a measure of legal cynicism from the mid‐1990s ...
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Bill McCarthy,
John Hagan,
Daniel Herda Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Perceived arrest risk, psychic rewards, and offense specialization: A partial test of rational choice theory †
AbstractIn prior tests of Beckerian rational choice theory, the notion that individuals are responsive to the (dis)incentives associated with crime has been supported. Much of this research has comprised composite scores of perceived rewards and risks of multiple, often disparate, crime types that are then used to predict “general” offending behavior. Although the results of such prior tests are informative, we believe that this tendency has resulted in two shortcomings. First, a central component of mathematical rational choice theory is overlooked, namely, that responsivity to incentives will be crime specific. That ...
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Kyle J. Thomas,
Thomas A. Loughran,
Benjamin C. Hamilton Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Long ‐term consequences of being placed in disciplinary segregation†
AbstractBeing placed in restrictive housing is considered one of the most devastating experiences a human can endure, yet a scant amount of research has been conducted to test how this experience affects core indicators of prisoner reentry such as employment and recidivism. In this article, we use Danish registry data, which allow for us to link penal conditions to postrelease outcomes, to show how the reentry outcomes of individuals placed in disciplinary segregation, which is placement in restrictive housing because of disciplinary infractions, compare with those sanctioned for in ‐prison offenses but not placed in seg...
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Christopher Wildeman,
Lars H øjsgaard Andersen Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
Feminist criminology in an era of misogyny †
AbstractIn this address I make the case for continuing to focus criminological research on gender, sexism, and racism within our lives and within our profession. I also provide a brief case study of a topic many would feel falls well outside our field: reproductive rights. Data are reviewed to reveal the impact of gender on the lives of women —notably the devaluation of work done by women, particularly if the work is deemed feminist. Afterward, recent data on the persistence of both sexism and racism in our field are reviewed. Despite gains made by women (notably in the membership of the field), the highest positions in ...
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Meda Chesney ‐Lind Tags: 2019 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY Source Type: research
Pubertal timing and adolescent delinquency †
AbstractEarly pubertal timing (PT) increases the risk of adolescent delinquency, whereas late development reduces this risk; however, the mechanisms explaining PT effects on delinquency remain elusive. Theoretically, the PT –delinquency relationship is as a result of changes in parental supervision, peer affiliations, and body‐image perceptions or is a spurious reflection of early life risk factors. Using intergenerational data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a prospective sample of children followed from infancy to age 14 years in the United Kingdom (N = 11,556 parent–child pairs), we find that for both boys and...
Source: Criminology - August 6, 2020 Category: Criminology Authors: Rebecca Bucci,
Jeremy Staff Tags: ARTICLE Source Type: research
