Criminology最新文献

Research on reentry has documented how material hardship, network dynamics, and carceral governance impede reintegration after prison, but existing scholarship has left underdeveloped other instances in which adverse outcomes stem from the institution's socioemotional dynamics and people's practical and emotional responses to bureaucratic indignities. Drawing on more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork with people on parole in Philadelphia, this study analyzes three sources of adversity that occur because reentry institutions’ or actors’ practices are incompatible with the behaviors and needs of system-involved people. I demonstrate how unrecognized vulnerability, discretion's benefits and drawbacks, and risk-escalating rules contribute to adverse outcomes—withdrawal and rule-breaking—that sometimes lead to reincarceration. In failing to account for aspects of human agency and dignity, such as the ability to provide for oneself and to advance personal and familial well-being, parole guidelines often prompted withdrawal and subversion.

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 catalyzed a national discussion about policing, including calls to #DefundthePolice that recently manifested in the 2024 national election as presidential candidates debated competing approaches to achieving public safety and police reform. The well-documented “race gap” in views of the police was apparent in this discussion, whereas the views of another minoritized community with a long history of being subjected to police violence, the LGBTQ+ community, were imperceptible. This research examines LGBTQ+ people's support for police reform. Using data from a national probability survey, we find LGBTQ+ people express more support than non-LGBTQ+ people do for three types of reform: defunding the police, reallocating police funds, and disbanding the police. For both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ people, the predicted probabilities for supporting reallocating police funds are higher than for defunding the police and disbanding the police. Within the LGBTQ+ population, the predicted probability for each type of reform is highest for nonbinary people, generally followed by those who are young, of color, and liberal. The findings related to the LGBTQ+ population are foundational to understanding how different segments of the LGBTQ+ community orient to police and prospects for reform.

Mears, D. P., Stewart, E. A., Siennick, S. E., & Simons, R. L. (2013). The code of the street and inmate violence: Investigating the salience of imported belief systems. Criminology, 51(3), 695–728. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12017

The binary variable standard deviations in the original paper differed from those computed manually, suggesting possible errors in the results. Investigation through exact reproduction was not possible due to the loss of the files used in the original analysis, but a close approximation was possible. The descriptive statistics in Table 1, which were produced in the reanalysis, are similar to those in the original tables. Results in Table 2—the paper's main focus—show, again, that street code beliefs are positively associated with prison violence. In Table 3, similar to the original, no interactions surfaced for models 1 (educational training) and 2 (religious participation), but did for model 5 (gang involvement). However, the original table identified a significant interaction in model 3 (family support), but the reproduced analyses do not. For model 4 (disciplinary actions), the coefficients are similar, but the reproduced one is not significant. The results are similar to the original: Street code beliefs are positively associated with prison violence, and mixed evidence exists that prison experiences amplify this association.

Given that the original data were not available, we asked the authors to reproduce their results with the data available from the original study. We then used this data to independently reproduce the results based on the authors' file and achieved the same outcomes.

Documentation and the Stata.do file for this piece can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8IDDKV

New technologies allow unprecedented public visibility of routine police–civilian interactions, but we know little about how the public wants the police to behave during them. We examine public evaluations about preferred punishment and fair treatment using vignette experiments that randomize multiple features of police–civilian interactions. These causal estimates reveal that for the mass public, officer race does not affect public attitudes, while participant demeanor, markers of threat, and civilian race do. Police–civilian interactions are evaluated through a lens of reciprocity: Hostile officers are judged as less fair, while hostile and armed civilians are viewed as deserving of harsher punishment. When civilians remain polite and threat is low, there is little support for punitive outcomes, but poor civilian behavior warrants more punitive state action. Moreover, people prefer more punishment for White compared with Black civilians, as well as in interactions with White officers and civilians compared with those in which both parties are Black. Interactions with a White officer and a Black civilian are judged as less fair, as are the fairness of assigned punishments in them. Finally, views about fairness are not equivalent to views about appropriate sanctions. These results provide critical evidence about public attitudes regarding police punishment and fairness in order maintenance.

Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experiments—comprising in-person audits, online audits, and opt-in surveys—to describe patterns over time in employer receptivity to applicants of different races with criminal records. In Part 2, we use a novel experimental survey of 1080 employers to measure how differences in the signaling of a criminal record impact the criminal record–employment relationship. Our results reveal a substantial hiring penalty for an official criminal record (conveyed by a background check report), with a smaller but still significant penalty for an unofficial criminal record (an Internet search engine “hit”). The experiment also shows that the official criminal record penalty is significantly larger for White applicants than for Black applicants. Although the latter finding was counter to expectations informed by prior studies, it is less surprising considering our Part 1 findings, which reveal a closing racial gap in the criminal record penalty during the last 20 years. We discuss how broader legal, social, and technological changes, as well as changes in methodologies, impact our understanding today of criminal records, race, and employment.

Early desistance research identified a key role for redemption scripts in the process of desisting from crime. This research emerged in an incredibly punitive environment at the turn of the century, when core beliefs about human redeemability were being challenged by popular and academic theories about incorrigible predators incapable of change. Desistance research made a profound impact, inspiring academic scholarship and changes to the policy and practice of reintegration. However, desistance research can also be accused of numerous crimes, as well, ranging from the adoption of an overly individualistic framing to the usurpation of the voices of research contributors. Fortunately, redemption is possible. A new generation of desistance theory and research now explicitly addresses the political and cultural factors impacting the desistance process and proposes that these hardened prejudices will only be changed by supporting a social movement led by and for system-impacted people. With their proven ability to inspire hope and promote action, redemption scripts may, again, be a key tool in such a movement.

Sociolegal research has shown that structural and interpersonal discrimination produce race and gender inequality in access to civil justice. This article draws on interviews with civil attorneys who represent sexual violence victims to theorize “anticipatory discrimination” as a related but distinct explanation for inequality. Attorneys worried about the potential racism and sexism of imagined fact triers (i.e., judges and jurors). They preempted anticipated discrimination by taking fewer cases from Black and Latino victims and from victims whose experiences deviated from dominant gender ideologies. When they did take cases from victims who they anticipated might experience structural or interpersonal discrimination, attorneys lowered their case valuation and demanded they meet higher evidentiary thresholds than similarly situated but less marginalized victims. This article challenges acclamations of the civil legal system as a promising route to redress for sexual violence victims by presenting evidence of race and gender inequality in victims’ access to and experience of civil justice. In so doing, this article extends sociolegal and social cognition research on inequality by showing that actions taken in anticipation of discrimination may sustain inequality separate and apart from existing structural and interpersonal discrimination, a process this article terms “anticipatory discrimination.”

A central tenet of the criminal decision-making literature is that perceptions of the environment shape decisions. Yet the underlying mechanisms linking environmental features to perception remain mostly untested. Those that have been tested have relied on methods that are either correlational or have limited generalizability. We aimed to fill this gap by harnessing the power of virtual reality. Using burglary as a case study, incarcerated residential burglars with varying degrees of proficiency (N = 160) explored a virtual neighborhood with houses that differed in features related to the risks and rewards of burglary. In support of our preregistered hypotheses, offenders adjust their perceptions in response to environmental features related to risks and rewards. Moreover, proficiency modifies these perceptions, with more proficient offenders believing they are less likely to get caught and seen and, as a result, more likely to break into a house. We support our statistical findings with rich data from qualitative interviews.

Criminology has long grappled with the relationship between race/racism and the criminal justice system. In this article, we build on past critiques and demonstrate how scholars of the criminal legal system can use meso-level theories of race/racism to better explain their findings, develop new insights, and pose new research questions. To this end, we introduce the theory of racialized organizations. Drawing examples from recent ethnographic studies of police departments, criminal courts, and jails, we illustrate how criminal legal organizations (CLOs) embody the core tenets of the theory. Specifically, CLOs endow racial schema with power, distribute and extract resources unequally in part by using racialized credentials, legitimize racial harm by decoupling formal commitments to legal rights from actual practice, and reduce the agency of non-White people. We also extend the theory of racialized organizations to describe how legitimacy and racial harm accumulate and deepen across CLOs. The article concludes with actionable research directions that illuminate the complex interactions between race and the criminal legal system.

Monetary sanctions (also known as legal financial obligations or LFOs) are the most common form of state sanction for criminal convictions, yet we know little about the logics that court actors use in their implementation. Merging an inhabited institutions perspective with the institutional logics framework, we present evidence from court actors’ accounts of imposing and collecting LFOs to reveal how they navigate the competing penal and fiscal logics of LFO sentencing across eight states. We show that the polyvalent logics underlying LFOs give rise to individual and collective critiques. Amid this discontent, we discern several patterns in how court actors navigate the tensions between coexisting logics and continue their work unabated, including the use of discretion and prioritization of some goals over others. Our analysis demonstrates how court actors make sense of their work within a complex legal field rife with conflicting priorities and how LFO sentencing and collection persist despite the contradictory logics undergirding them. Our theoretical model connecting institutional logics and inhabited institutions frameworks elucidates how decision-making in the criminal legal system operates. Although we specifically examine monetary sanctions, our findings have implications for other contexts in which decision-makers struggle with interpretation, application, and consequence.