Criminology最新文献

Monetary sanctions can expand the scope and depth of punishment. Most research on monetary sanctions has centered on fines and fees assessed by the court, but they are also routinely imposed as part of the probation and parole sentence. In this article, we draw on in-depth interview data from a sample of individuals under correctional supervision to document the often hidden costs of correctional control. We further consider a subsample of participants convicted of sexual offenses to illustrate the unique way that monetary sanctions are levied on groups of people who are considered more morally culpable and worthy of carceral control. We find that monetary sanctions are regularly assessed and challenging for most participants. The stigma of a sexual offense conviction and economic precarity, particularly among Black members of the sample, further the costs of punishment. We contend that costs associated with a sexual offense are unique because they can continue in perpetuity, govern normative behavior, and are centered on an assumption of continued guilt. We argue that the monetary sanctions levied against convicted persons, especially individuals with sexual offenses, demonstrate the often hidden and expansive nature of carceral control for other marginalized groups.

Prosecutors maintain immense power over criminal case processing. Yet, they have not historically been a major target for reforms designed to foster equality and reduce racial disparity in criminal justice outcomes. Using in-depth interviews with 47 line prosecutors, this study explores how prosecutors think about race in criminal justice, and what they believe their role should be in addressing racial disparities. Results show that prosecutors broadly embrace a colorblind approach to prosecution and argue that race should be disregarded in case processing. Their support for colorblind prosecution is reinforced by race-neutral cultural scripts that can be linked to the social and operational realities of prosecutors’ work environment. These findings suggest that efforts to improve fairness in case processing will be more effective if they are accompanied by widespread prosecutorial culture change. Such efforts may also benefit from the consideration of structural features of the prosecutor's office that currently lead line agents to embrace colorblindness and reject a larger role in alleviating racial disparities.

In response to the changing nature of policing in the United States, and current climate of police–citizen relations, research has begun to explore the consequences of adolescent police contact for life outcomes. The current study investigates if and under what conditions police contact has repercussions for future orientation during adolescence and the transition into young adulthood. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a multisite longitudinal study of serious offenders followed from adolescence to young adulthood, results from a series of fixed-effects models demonstrated three main findings. First, personal and vicarious police contact, compared with no additional police contact, are negatively associated with within-person changes in future orientation. Second, any exposure to police contact, regardless of how just or unjust the contact is perceived, is negatively associated with future orientation. Third, the negative association between police contact and future orientation is larger for White individuals compared with that for Black or Hispanic individuals. Considering the importance of future orientation for prosocial behavior, the findings suggest that adolescent police contact may serve as an important life-course event with repercussions for later life outcomes.

The federal court settlement of Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. (2013) mandated that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) implement a series of reforms to address unlawful stop, question, and frisk patterns and practices. Among other changes, the remedial order required the NYPD to implement and evaluate a pilot body-worn camera program to determine whether outfitting officers with the technology led to more lawful and civil police–citizen encounters. A cluster randomized controlled trial involving 40 police precincts and 3,889 NYPD officers was used to evaluate the effects of body-worn cameras on a series of police work activity, civility, and lawfulness outcomes. Relative to control officers, citizen complaints against treatment officers outfitted with body-worn cameras were reduced by 21 percent. Treatment officers, however, also filed nearly 39 percent more stop reports when compared with control officers. Treatment stop reports tended to involve minority subjects, were less likely to involve arrests and summons, and were significantly more likely to be rated as not meeting constitutional justifications for stops, frisks, and searches. These results suggest that body-worn cameras improved NYPD officer compliance with mandates to document all stops and could be used to address unlawful policing through better detection of problematic police–citizen encounters.

This article explores one way prior punishments may contribute to cumulative disadvantage: through more severe sentencing of those under criminal justice supervision. We examine the impact of being on supervision in Michigan on receiving a sentence of imprisonment—comparing the magnitude of the impact reflected in the formal sentencing guideline recommendation with deviations made by court actors. We find that the formal penalty for supervision status is modest, whereas court actors place substantially more weight on current parole status than do the guidelines when deciding to sentence a defendant to prison. They do not seem to give current probation status extra weight in a consistent way. As such, parole is more likely to contribute to cumulative disadvantage stemming from prior punishments. This disproportionately impacts Black defendants because of their higher rates of parole—not through disproportionate sentencing conditional on parole status. Findings suggest that attempts to address factors contributing to cumulative disadvantage will need to consider not only formal rules but also how informal discretion contributes to prison sentences.

As protests erupted across the United States in recent years over racialized issues (e.g., Black Lives Matter and Confederate monuments), so too did questions about when and how police should respond. Understanding public attitudes toward protest policing is important for police legitimacy and policy. One theory is that citizens are willing to trade civil liberties, such as the right to assemble, for security, and thus disruptive or dangerous protest tactics should increase support for police control by elevating public fear. Another theory is that citizens view protests through the lens of group position, and thus, they should be more supportive of repression when protest goals conflict with preexisting racial beliefs and threaten racial interests. To test these theories, we embedded an experiment in a nationwide survey fielded in 2020 after George Floyd's killing sparked the broadest protests in U.S. history. We randomized protest tactics (e.g., weapon carrying) and goals, as well as other contextual characteristics (e.g., protest size). We found that the public generally opposed repressive protest policing. Certain protest tactics, however, increased support for repression by elevating fear. Protest goals (e.g., pro-Black Lives Matter and pro-immigrants) also impacted support for repression, but the effect depended on respondents’ racial beliefs.

Two principal movers of American politics appear increasingly to be connected: racism and guns. The racial content underlying gun rights rhetoric, however, is rarely made explicit during political campaigns. As such, it is possible that espousing pro-gun messages may be an effective way to surreptitiously court prejudiced voters without transgressing popular egalitarian norms. In other words, gun rights rhetoric may function as a racial dog whistle. In the present study, we test this theory using data from a survey experiment conducted with a national sample of registered voters. The findings from our experiment show that election candidates’ National Rifle Association (NRA)-funding status and position on gun control impact voters’ evaluations, and racial resentment moderates these effects. Racially resentful voters are more likely than low-resentment voters to say they would vote for a candidate when the candidate is funded by the NRA and does not support gun control. This is true among voters who own guns and among those who do not, and it is true regardless of the candidate's political party. The findings also show that there is a backlash effect among low-resentment voters—such individuals are aversive to NRA-funded candidates but strongly supportive of pro-gun control candidates.

Social exclusion of those with criminal justice experience increasingly includes a financial component, but the structure of disadvantage in credit and debt remains unclear. We develop a model of financial disadvantage in debt holding during the transition to adulthood among justice-involved groups. We study cumulative criminal justice contact and debt holding by age 30 using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). The NLSY97 cohort transitioned to adulthood during an era of historically high criminal justice contact, with many experiencing arrests, convictions, and incarceration. We develop a distinct measurement approach to cumulative criminal justice contact by age 30 that captures variation between young adults in the severity of justice encounters in the early life course. We conceptualize financial disadvantage as a lower likelihood of holding debt that facilitates property and attainment investments and a higher likelihood of holding higher cost debts used for consumption or emergencies. We find that those with the most punitive criminal justice contact evidence the most disadvantageous form of debt holding, potentially exacerbating social exclusion. We consider the implications of the accumulation of financial disadvantage for our understanding of criminal justice contact as a life-course process.

Alongside capital punishment, sentences to life without the possibility of parole are one of the most distinctive aspects of the American system of criminal punishment. Unlike the death penalty, though, almost no empirical work has examined the decision to impose life imprisonment. The current study analyzes several years of recent federal sentencing data (FY2010–FY2017) to investigate underlying sources of racial disparity in life without parole sentences. The analysis reveals disparities in who receives life imprisonment, but it finds these differences are attributable mostly to indirect mechanisms built into the federal sentencing system, such as the mode of conviction, mandatory minimums, and guidelines departures. Both Black and Hispanic offenders are more likely to be eligible for life sentences under the federal guidelines, but conditional on being eligible, they are not more likely to receive life sentences. Findings are discussed in relation to ongoing debates over racial inequality and the growing role that life imprisonment plays in American exceptionalism in punishment.

Every day, police departments across America are executing stops, summonses, arrests, and increasingly, tweeting. Although scholarship has focused on how social media democratizes news production and information sharing for activist movements, it has yet to explore how police leverage these attributes to advance institutional interests. I argue that, beyond digital surveillance or community engagement, social media provides police with the technological capacity to pursue both daily socialization of online audiences to their worldview and legitimation in the aftermath of contested police violence. I provide evidence by adopting a qualitative approach to “big data” sources analyzing 1) all 3,167 tweets posted by the New York Police Department in 2018; 2) the 778 Twitter replies to their most contested fatal shooting that year; and 3) a sample of 139 news articles covering this shooting over a year afterward. As public scrutiny toward police intensifies, social media represents an independent channel for police to publicize information unfiltered by traditional mass media. These findings have implications for police accountability and the episodes of police violence that do—and do not—elevate into national controversies.