Criminology最新文献

A lack of formal accountability in the aftermath of police violence against communities of color has long fueled public demands for increased police oversight. Yet, little is known about how interorganizational relationships affect citizen complaint investigations once citizen review boards (CRBs) are established. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival sources about the Syracuse Citizen Review Board in New York State, I show how CRBs operate as bureaucratic agencies that ostensibly address police misconduct, yet are managed by municipal power relations that neutralize the agency's ability to actualize change. Specifically, I find that a CRB's embeddedness within a municipality's interorganizational field creates a site of contestation to ensure public legitimation of police despite community concern. To show how the aims of citizen oversight can be upended within the structural and practical politics of local government, I introduce the concept of a police legitimacy regime: a set of (in)formal policies, organizations, and actors that protect and promote the legitimacy of state police power. In Syracuse, police protection happens at the expense of residents’ demands for police reform, and I conclude by outlining the implications of this research for other communities seeking citizen-led approaches to police accountability.

The findings from prior research indicate that positive credentials, or documentation of prosocial accomplishments, can vary in strength and perceived value in mitigating aversions to hiring individuals with criminal records. In the current study, we examine why certain types of positive credentials may be more influential in reducing stigma than others. Using data from a nationwide survey of American adults (N = 3,476), we combine a mediation analysis with content-coding of open-ended responses to identify key themes and patterns in decision processes. The results indicate the factors examined here—employee dependability, trustworthiness, recidivism risk, and workplace crime—explain a large proportion of the total effect across credentials and are the strongest for reference letters. Trustworthiness is the most influential mediator across credentials, whereas general recidivism risk is consistently the lowest. An analysis of open-ended responses provides further context and insight into these patterns. Although policy strategies often target risk reduction on the employer's end, credentials that also relay information about skills, character, and the timeline of recent life events are especially influential.

Public and political discourse has routinely suggested that immigration is linked to higher community levels of violence and drug problems. In contrast to these claims, research has consistently shown that immigration is not associated with greater violence at the macro level. However, few studies have examined the links between immigration flows and community drug problems. The current study seeks to address this gap in research by providing a county-level longitudinal analysis of immigration and drug overdose deaths both overall and by substance type for the 2000 to 2015 period and provides an analysis of homicide for comparison with prior immigration–crime research. In addition, this analysis compares immigration–overdose relationships across immigrant destination types. The current project relies on overdose and homicide data drawn from the Centers for Disease Control's Restricted Access Multiple Cause of Death Mortality files combined with data on county social, economic, health, and legal contexts drawn from multiple macro-level data sources. Findings reveal that immigration is not associated with higher levels of overdose or homicide deaths, and when effects are significant, immigration is linked to lower levels of overdose mortality across multiple substances and destination types.

Recent studies have found that race, work history, postprison employment, and recidivism are intertwined, suggesting that race and work history may shape the employment–recidivism relationship in nuanced, yet underexplored ways. Additionally, the literature has yet to settle on what kinds of employment patterns matter most for recidivism. These issues are especially important to resolve given contemporary concerns about mass incarceration and racial disparities among citizens returning from prison. To investigate these questions, we analyze administrative prison records, unemployment insurance (UI) quarterly data, and a recidivism follow-up documenting multiple failures for approximately eight years. Frailty models, which address unobserved heterogeneity among those prone to multiple recidivism events, reveal that establishing a recent work history unlocks the protective effect of employment, and that the relationship between postprison employment and recidivism does not vary by race. We also find that being sporadically employed is as protective as being more consistently employed. Our findings imply that employment contributes to racial disparities in recidivism via racialized barriers to labor market participation rather than via differential effects. Our results further suggest that addressing barriers to employment, especially for those with no work history and those facing racialized barriers to labor market entry, could significantly reduce recidivism.

A top priority of prison authorities is maintaining a safe and orderly institutional environment. Gangs are believed to impede this objective, warranting bespoke policies and practices. Drawing on the process-based model of regulation, we depart from orthodox explanations for the gang–misconduct link and argue that gang affiliates are treated less fairly than nongang affiliates owing to suppression-oriented administrative policies and harsher day-to-day interactions with officers, which, in turn, impact compliance. We use administrative and survey data sources based on a sample of 802 male prisoners and generalized structural equation modeling to examine whether procedural justice and legal orientations mediate the association between official classification of gang affiliation and self-reported misconduct. Our findings reveal partial support for the process-based model: procedural justice and legitimacy are poorer among gang than among nongang respondents but do not mediate the gang–misconduct link. The traditional pathway between procedural justice, legitimacy, and obligation to obey was observed, none of which were related to misconduct, standing in sharp contrast to the expectations of the process-based model. These findings suggest that factors other than procedural justice and legal orientations may be more relevant for rule violations among gangs, specifically, and within correctional environments, generally.

Harsh prison conditions have been widely examined for their effects on the mental health of incarcerated people, but few studies have examined whether mental health status exposes individuals to harsh treatment in the penal system. With prisoners confined to their cells for up to 23 hours each day, often being denied visitors or phone calls, solitary confinement is an important case for studying harsh treatment in prisons. Routinely used as punishment for prison infractions, solitary confinement may be subject to the same forces that criminalize the mentally ill in community settings. Analyzing a large administrative data set showing admissions to solitary confinement in state prison, we find high rates of punitive isolation among those with serious mental illness. Disparities by mental health status result from the cumulative effects of prison misconduct charges and disciplinary hearings. We estimate that those with serious mental illness spend three times longer in solitary confinement than similar incarcerated people with no mental health problems. The evidence suggests the stigma of dangerousness follows people into prison, and the criminalization of mental illness accompanies greater severity of incarceration.

Extant research has provided support for the micro-level predictions of rational choice models of crime. Yet, a central feature of the rational choice perspective in the broader social sciences—that it is multilevel in focus, situating individuals within broader community social structures—has been neglected within criminology. In this article, we discuss and test a model that links community structural characteristics to several individual expectations and preferences relevant to crime. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance study, we find that objective levels of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage influence individuals’ perceptions of, and preferences for, the risks, costs, and rewards associated with offending indirectly by affecting perceived disorder and perceived opportunities for legitimate avenues of success within one's neighborhood. The implications of a multilevel rational choice model of offending are discussed.

Whereas existing ecology of crime research frequently uses a cross-sectional design, an open question is whether theories underlying such studies will operate similarly in longitudinal research. Using latent trajectory models and longitudinal data in half-mile egohoods from the Southern California region over a 10-year period (2000–2010), we explore this question and assess whether the changes in key measures of social disorganization theory are related to changes in violent or property crime through three possible relationships: 1) a monotonic relationship, 2) an asymmetric relationship, and 3) a perturbation relationship in which any change increases crime. We find evidence that measures can exhibit any of these three possible relationships, highlighting the importance of not assuming monotonic relationships. Most frequently observed are asymmetric relationships, which we posit are simultaneously capturing more than one theoretical process of neighborhoods and crime. Specific findings include asymmetric relationships between change in concentrated disadvantage, racial/ethnic minority composition, or population and violent crime, as well as relationships between change in Asian composition or population and property crime. We consider how this strategy opens a needed area of future research assessing how measures for other theories operate as environments change.

Although women have made dramatic gains toward equality with men over the past century, this progress has occurred alongside tremendous growth in U.S. incarceration rates. Extending prior research on sex differences in offending, we turn our attention to punishment by exploring how gender equality in education, work, and politics is associated with disparities in annual prison admissions. Using pooled cross-sectional data for U.S. states from 1983 to 2010, we conduct a series of fixed-effects regressions to estimate the ratio of female-to-male annual prison admission rates, as well as sex-specific rates, disaggregated by violent, property, and drug crimes. We find partial support for the ameliorative hypothesis, which predicts that increasing gender equality will decrease female incarceration rates relative to male rates. For one of our three measures of gender equality—the sex gap in educational attainment—we find that greater equality is associated with a widening of the sex gap in incarceration rates, particularly for property offenses. We explore the implications of these findings in relation to existing theories of gender, crime, and punishment.

Although employment is central to successful reentry, formerly incarcerated people struggle to find work because of criminal stigma, poor education, and sparse work histories. Prison credentials are proposed as one solution to alleviate these challenges by signaling criminal desistance and employability. Evidence regarding their efficacy, however, is inconsistent. In this article, I develop a novel explanation—the prison credential dilemma—highlighting the numerous and contradictory ways employers may interpret prison credentials as positive and negative signals. Drawing on 50 qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated men in Franklin County, Ohio, I examine how the prison credential dilemma and the uncertainty it produces shape their job search strategies and pathways to employment. I find that participants concealed or obscured institutional affiliations of prison credentials on job applications to signal employability rather than their criminal records. In job interviews, however, prison credentials were used to divert conversations away from their criminal record toward skills and criminal desistance via the use of redemptive narratives. Participants also attempted to acquire credentials outside of prison and/or pursued temporary, precarious jobs, aspiring for such physically strenuous and poorly paid work to materialize into stable employment. This study has implications for prison programming as well as policies and practices aiming to improve reentry outcomes.