Criminology最新文献

Research has demonstrated that paternal incarceration is associated with lower levels of educational involvement among fathers and primary caregivers, but little is known regarding caregiver educational involvement when mothers have been incarcerated. In this study, we present the first analysis of variation in school- and home-based educational involvement by maternal incarceration history, pairing survey and interview data to connect macro-level group differences with micro-level narratives of mothers’ involvement in their children's education. Our survey data demonstrate that children of ever-incarcerated mothers experience increased school-based educational involvement by their primary caregivers, regardless of whether the caregiver is the mother herself. Our interview data point to compensatory parenting as a key motivating factor in educational involvement, wherein a caregiver endeavors to “make up for” the child's history of maternal incarceration. Findings add to the literature demonstrating maternal incarceration as a distinct experience from both paternal incarceration and material disadvantage alone, and they suggest the need to explore the role of schools as potential points of productive institutional involvement for mothers with an incarceration history.

Many theories emphasize how employment is protective against criminal recidivism, yet a criminal record is a major barrier for getting hired. We asked 591 managers to make hypothetical hiring decisions between two applicants whose key difference was the presence or absence of a criminal conviction. In addition, we randomly manipulated the education, references, wage, or experience of the applicant with the criminal record to identify which manipulations can offset the cost of the record on an applicant's probability of being selected. We found that, when credentials were the same, the applicant with a criminal record was unlikely to be hired. That applicant, however, could become likely to be hired (i.e., the likelihood crossed 50 percent) by having at least 1 year of relevant experience, a GED or a college degree, or references from a former employer or a professor. Incomplete degrees, references from criminal justice professionals, or wage discounts did not make the applicant with the record likely to be hired. Findings confirm that a criminal record carries a high employability cost but also indicate that this cost can be superseded by specific credentials that signal an applicant's reliability, which can be provided by existing programs and institutions.

A growing body of literature has demonstrated that when schools suspend students, the suspension acts not as a deterrent but as an amplifier of future punishment. Labeling theory has emerged as the predominant explanation for this phenomenon, suggesting that the symbolic label conferred along with a suspension shapes how other people perceive and respond to labeled students. Few studies, however, have attended to racial/ethnic differences in this process even though critical race theory suggests the consequences of suspension likely differ across racial/ethnic groups due to prevailing racial/ethnic stereotypes. This study uses six waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (N = 8,634) to examine how the relationship between suspension and subsequent arrest differs for White, Black, and Hispanic students. Using a series of within-person analyses that control for time-stable personal characteristics, this study finds that suspension amplifies Black and Hispanic students’ risk of arrest relative to that of White students. White students’ risk of arrest was not amplified by suspension and, in some models, was diminished. This study's findings underscore the importance of understanding the labeling process as different by race/ethnicity and indicate that suspension is particularly harmful for Black and Hispanic relative to White students.

Employment theoretically serves as a source of informal social control that can promote desistance from crime (Sampson & Laub, 1993). Findings from studies assessing the effects of employment, however, have been mixed. In a seminal study, Uggen (2000) reanalyzed data from the National Supported Work (NSW) Demonstration Project and found that employment significantly reduced the rate of recidivism among individuals aged 27 and older but had no impact on younger individuals. We reproduce and replicate Uggen's (2000) findings with data from four distinct employment programs: The National Supported Work Program (1975–1979), the Transitional Aid Research Project (1976–1977), the Employment Services for Ex-Offenders (1981–1984), and the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Center for Employment Opportunities (2004–2008). We closely reproduced Uggen's original findings in the NSW but found evidence that the statistically significant interaction between age and employment in the NSW was only present at the year 3 follow-up and the observed effect is highly sensitive to minor threats to internal validity. Furthermore, a significant age–employment interaction was not observed in the three other data sources. These findings should encourage scholars to continue to investigate the age-graded nature of employment and crime, especially through a sociohistorical lens.

We show how both the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department sought to settle uncertainty about their propriety and purpose during a period when abrupt transformations destabilized urban order and called the police mandate into question. By comparing annual reports that the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department published from 1877 to 1923, we observe two techniques in how the police enacted that settlement: identification of the problems that the police believed themselves uniquely well equipped to manage and authorization of the powers necessary to do so. Comparison of identification and authorization yields insights into the role that these police departments played in convergent and divergent constructions of disorder and, in turn, into Progressivism's varying effects in early urban policing.

Coerced work on parole occurs when people are required to work under the threat of criminal legal repercussions. In the face of barriers to “good” work for people after prison, coercion helps to funnel parolees into positions at the bottom of the labor market. Parolee workers in these positions experience issues common to precarious, low-wage work (low pay, hazardous working conditions, and labor law violations), as well as heightened vulnerability to predatory employers and exposure to parole-prohibited activities. Because of the threat-backed requirements to work, however, parolees must choose to either accept this “bad” work or face potential sanctions. Using mixed-methods, including a novel form of respondent-driven sampling I call “Hybrid-RDS,” this article documents the prevalence of coerced work for people on parole in Los Angeles County, identifies the mechanisms through which coercive work operates, and illustrates the problematic employment conditions of coerced work after prison.

What does it mean to say that a prison has a “culture?” Scholars have long emphasized the presence of a “prison code” and, more recently, a “racial code” as salient cultural domains in men's prisons. Yet, even though most people intuitively understand what is meant by “prison culture,” little progress has been made regarding the conceptualization and operationalization of culture as an analytical construct in prison scholarship. The current study makes two primary contributions to this literature. First, drawing on advances in anthropology, cultural sociology, and cognitive science, we incorporate the concept of cultural schema to provide a concrete analytical construct. Second, we test varying conceptualizations of cultural schema as either characterized by consensus or as overlapping relational structures. Using cultural consensus and correlational class analyses among a sample of 266 incarcerated men, we find little evidence of a culture of consensus for either the prison code or the racial code. Furthermore, we show evidence of heterogenous schema among these cultural domains. Our study is relevant to wider disciplinary work on culture as the problem of analytical precision we address is characteristic of much of the work in criminology and criminal justice that evokes culture as an explanatory device.

The police murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 and revived claims that public outcry over such high-profile police killings perpetuated a violent “war on cops.” Using data collected by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) on firearm assaults of U.S. police officers, we use Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) modeling to empirically assess if and how patterns of firearm assault on police officers in the United States were influenced by the police murder of George Floyd. Our analysis finds that the murder of George Floyd was associated with a 3-week spike in firearm assaults on police, after which the trend in firearms assaults dropped to levels only slightly above that which were predicted by pre-Floyd data. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and consider their relevance to the contemporary discussion of a “war on cops,” violence, and officer safety.

Studies of crime hot spots have argued that landlords’ management styles, specifically their tenant screening and property monitoring techniques, affect crime. These studies, however, have rarely considered the political–economic contexts in which these actions take place: specifically, how landlords’ behaviors are shaped by, and themselves reproduce, larger rental market structures. Drawing on data pertaining to eviction rates, criminal incidents, housing code violations, and landlord behavior in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this study documents how extractive rental management strategies, such as weak tenant screening, frequent eviction filings, and property disinvestment, concentrate crime at particular properties. In turn, high rates of crime in a neighborhood incentivize these extractive landlord strategies. By showing how landlords’ economic strategies are central to urban crime geographies, this study contributes to our understanding of third-party policing by revealing the limits of market-based solutions to place management dilemmas.

Public belief in redeemability reduces punitiveness and increases support for policy measures such as rehabilitation, expungement, and housing and employment opportunities. Although racial attitudes are known to influence a wide range of criminal justice policy opinions, their effects on beliefs about redeemability and condemnation have not been fully explored. Using data from a 2019 YouGov survey of a national sample of White U.S. adults (N = 766), the current study estimates the effects of three distinct racial attitudes—racial resentment, racial sympathy, and White nationalism—on three measures of belief in redeemability: 1) a race-neutral measure, 2) a measure of belief in redeemability of Black offenders, and 3) a measure of condemnation of Black offenders. The results indicate that belief in redeemability is high—for offenders in general and for Black offenders. These findings are supported by a second 2022 YouGov survey of White U.S. adults (N = 1,505). Racial sympathy and White nationalism have significant effects across all three outcomes, with the positive effect of White nationalism on condemnation of Black offenders being the largest across the three models. These findings suggest that although most Whites agree that formerly incarcerated people are redeemable, racial attitudes influence these beliefs, especially for Black offenders.