Criminology最新文献

Although racial disparities in criminal justice contact are long-standing and the subject of continuing public debate, few studies have linked early-life social conditions to racial disparities in arrest over the life course and in changing times. In this article, we advance and test a theoretical model of racial inequality in long-term arrest histories on a representative sample of nearly 1,000 individuals from multiple birth cohorts in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Large Black–White disparities in arrests from ages 10 to 40 arise from racial inequalities in exposure to cumulative childhood advantages and disadvantages rather than from race-specific effects. Smaller but meaningful Hispanic–White gaps follow a similar pattern, and the same explanations of racial disparities hold across different offense types and across birth cohorts who came of age at different times during 1995 to 2021. These findings indicate that inequalities in early-life structural factors, which themselves are historically shaped, trigger processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage that produce racial disparities in arrests over the life course and that persist across different points in contemporary history.

Legal financial obligations (LFOs) associated with justice system involvement are increasingly a focus for policymakers and researchers seeking to understand sources of inequality and the factors that promote successful reentry. These conversations often rely on an assumption that LFOs are associated with or may even drive higher rates of recidivism. The empirical research in this area, however, has not kept up with the growing strength of these claims. This study reports findings that may offer a new perspective and contribute to an evidence-based debate. Multisourced administrative data on all individuals released from carceral supervision in an East Coast state (N = 21,301) over 3 years are used to examine the complex relationship between criminal justice debt and reoffending. We detail the results of survival analyses estimating the impact of these debts on various forms of recidivism. Broadly, we find that even though the relationship between case-level LFO assessments and future offending did not reach statistical significance, the association with the cumulative effect of monetary sanctions over the life course did. Furthermore, the impact of LFO debt is greater for certain racial groups, supporting theoretical and practical inquiries into factors informing structural disadvantage. Implications for policy and future research are considered.

Crime is often considered a behavior of teenagers and young adults, peaking in adolescence, and declining with age. A growing body of research, however, has demonstrated that the age–crime relationship is neither universal, as the contours of the age–crime distribution vary across countries, nor uniform, as it varies over time. We argue that the dynamics of the age–crime relationship can best be understood through a lens situating birth cohorts within the broader sociohistorical contexts in which they enter their formative years. We apply this framework to the Republic of Korea, a country that has experienced rapid demographic transitions accompanied by decades of economic development and social upheaval after the Korean War. Our findings suggest that the age–crime distribution in Korea has shifted substantially since the mid-1970s, moving from the quintessential age–crime curve characteristic of Western countries to one in which the modal age at arrest is now concentrated in middle age. We find that much of this change can be attributed to the aging of a specific birth cohort—the 86 generation—whose members were dually disadvantaged by being born during a fertility boom and entering young adulthood during the pro-democracy student movements in the 1980s.

Intimate partner homicide (IPH) continues to be a form of violence disproportionately affecting women in the United States, and access to firearms can greatly increase the likelihood that intimate partner violence becomes lethal. In response to concerns about firearms violence and their prevalence in IPH incidents specifically, states have passed restrictive firearms laws and policies. In this study, we provide an analysis of female IPH victimization disaggregated by race/ethnicity that incorporates state-level firearms legislation. Our analytical approach is informed by intersectionality and accounts for other key intimate partner violence policies and structural predictors. We find that the relationship between firearms legislation and IPH varies in magnitude and direction across specific race/ethnicity female victimization groups. As such, our findings provide support for an intersectional framework in that restrictive firearms laws are not consistently associated with lower levels of IPH when incidents are disaggregated by gender and race/ethnicity.

Amid punitive shifts in crime and immigration control during the 1980s and 1990s, Hispanic individuals comprised a growing share of the population confined in U.S. prisons and jails. Although it is widely acknowledged that the nation's wars on crime and drugs contributed to higher rates of minority arrest, limited empirical research has examined whether the merging of immigration control with criminal justice practice during this period intensified these disparities. This article uses county-level arrest data from California between 1980 and 2004 to investigate whether intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) leasing jail space for immigrant detention increased rates of Hispanic arrest. Employing a quasi-experimental design that leverages the staggered adoption of IGSAs across counties, this study finds that these agreements increased rates of Hispanic arrest but had no discernible impact on arrest rates for White or Black residents. Supplemental analyses reveal that these increases were driven by misdemeanor arrests and were particularly pronounced in counties where the Hispanic population comprised between 11 and 22 percent. These findings suggest that IGSAs may trigger minority threat concerns that increase arrests, shedding additional light on Hispanic representation in the criminal justice system.

The veil of darkness (VOD) is a practical and rigorous methodology for examining racial disparities in police traffic stop behavior. Past research, however, has been littered with methodological inconsistencies inhibiting cross-study comparison and decisions regarding policy. Accordingly, we clarify four aspects of its implementation: 1) coding daylight, our treatment condition; 2) constructing an intertwilight period; 3) accounting for seasonal differences in driving or patrol patterns; and 4) modeling VOD multivariable regression equations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of methodological decisions as they pertain to the method's functionality as a natural experiment. Furthermore, we propose a novel weighting procedure to account for seasonal driving population differences. We examined more than 50,000 traffic stops conducted by Michigan State Police during 2021 to demonstrate our suggested framework for future analyses.

Urban greenspace (UGS) has been recently linked to public safety. Criminologists, however, have been largely absent from the discussion about this association, despite having important theoretical tools and empirical findings to contribute. In the current study, we review the prominent criminological perspectives that may be used to explain the association between UGS and crime. Furthermore, we draw from prior work to extend beyond the question of whether UGS affects crime to the more crucial question of when it does. Using a sample of block groups in Washington, D.C., we examine the association between two measures of UGS—tree canopy coverage and noncanopy vegetation coverage—and violent and property crime. We also assess the moderating effects of antecedents to social disorganization (poverty and homeownership) on the association between UGS and crime. Our results suggest that both types of UGS are associated with fewer crimes, even while controlling for a range of criminogenic factors. The effects of tree canopy coverage appear to be crime general, while the effects of noncanopy vegetation coverage only apply to violent crime. The effects of tree canopy, however, are weaker in communities characterized by high levels of poverty and low levels of homeownership.

It is widely held that providing postsecondary education programs to incarcerated individuals will improve postrelease labor market outcomes. Little research evidence exists, however, to support this view. To test the effect of postsecondary carceral education credentials on employer perceptions of hireability, the current study uses a factorial design to survey a sample of employers nationwide (N = 2,538). Employers were presented with résumés of fictional applicants applying to a job as a customer service representative at a large call center. The résumés randomized education credentials earned while incarcerated. Results indicate that employers were significantly more willing to interview applicants with postsecondary education credentials relative to applicants with only a General Educational Development (GED) diploma. Although Black applicants who had earned a sub-baccalaureate certificate saw improvements in hireability relative to GED holders, Black applicants who had earned a bachelor's degree did not. In contrast, White applicants benefited both from sub-baccalaureate certificates and bachelor's degrees. Results from a mediation analysis suggest that these credentials signal important information to employers about applicant attributes and that improved perceptions of applicant ability and likelihood to reoffend drive the overall effect. Implications for future research and policy are explored.

Does a victim's race explain variation in the likelihood of homicide clearance? Attempts to address this issue date back to the 1970s. Yet, despite its theoretical and policy relevance, we lack a comprehensive and clear empirical answer to this critical question. Here, I causally focus on this problem by investigating racial disparity in homicide clearance in the United States, exploiting two sources covering the 1991–2020 period: the Murder Accountability Project data set (N = 522,278) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System data set (N = 98,677). I primarily analyze these sources by employing exact matching to achieve perfect covariate balance and subsequently isolate the effect of race on the probability of clearance. For comparative purposes, I also use regression adjustment without matching obtaining complementary estimates. I demonstrate that the likelihood of clearance is 3.4 to 4.8 percent lower for homicides involving Black victims, depending on the sampling and estimation approach. In addition, I empirically show that this race effect is slightly higher for males and that racial disparity has moderately but significantly increased over time. These findings contribute to the extensive amount of evidence on discrimination affecting Black individuals in the administration of justice in the United States, calling for structural efforts to reduce this divide.