Criminology最新文献

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.

The crime of corruption ranges from politicians involved in high-profile scandals to low-level bureaucrats granting contracts and police officers demanding bribes. Corruption occurs when state actors criminally leverage their positions of power for financial gain. Our study examines how corruption varies by political power position and within criminal contexts by measuring the embeddedness of corruption within Chicago historical organized crime. We analyze Chicago's organized crime network before and during Prohibition (1900–1919 and 1920–1933) to compare differences across embedded network positions between political, law enforcement, and nonstate actors. Our findings show that more police were in organized crime than politicians before Prohibition, but the small group of politicians had higher embeddedness in organized crime. During Prohibition, when organized crime grew and centralized, law enforcement decreased in proportion and became less embedded in organized crime. Politicians, however, maintained their proportion and high level of embeddedness. We argue that everyday corruption is more frequent but less embedded when criminal contexts are moderately profitable. As criminal contexts increase in profitability, however, corruption moves up the political ladder to include fewer people who are more highly embedded. This work has theoretical implications for the symbiotic relationship between corruption and criminal organizations.

Scholars generally agree that offending decisions occur in social context, with some suggesting that choice models should explicitly integrate the notion that the deviant actions of others can incentivize offending. In this study, we investigate whether group settings can also disincentivize deviant action via reverse bandwagon effects, where individuals reverse their offending decision and express an intention to opt out of the criminal act. Based on survey data from three universities using hypothetical scenarios about theft and fighting, we find evidence of opt-out thresholds. Our findings indicate that deviant groups can serve as both an incentive and a disincentive, and that the relationship between group size and the perceived utility of crime is more complicated than prior work has suggested. Moreover, we find that these self-reported opt-out thresholds vary across scenarios, indicating that socially interdependent decision-making processes may be situation specific. In the end, the study underscores the importance of acknowledging the social context in offending decisions and highlights that group effects may be more complex and nuanced than previously discussed.

The asymmetry hypothesis predicts that negative police encounters matter more than positive ones for legitimacy, suggesting that officers may get little credit for using procedural justice. We tested the asymmetry hypothesis and extended it to other process-based model relationships by estimating asymmetric fixed effects models with longitudinal data from adjudicated adolescents. By utilizing within-individual variability and decomposing accumulated positive and negative changes in the predictors, these models pushed beyond the limits of existing research. Prior studies of asymmetric effects in policing either focused on the impact of a single encounter, often one that was both hypothetical and vicarious, or were unable to control for all time-invariant confounders. Our findings reveal that positive and negative changes in perceived procedural justice are both related to changes in legitimacy. The relationship is symmetric for global perceptions of procedural justice but asymmetric for encounter-specific perceptions. Both positive and negative changes in legitimacy are related to changes in offending variety, but the relationship is symmetric. The implications are that police do get credit for procedural justice, and that they must work to maintain legitimacy once they have it, because it is something that can be lost, and its loss has consequences for offending.

This study examines the role of Islam in shaping processes of criminal desistance among four men, each with extensive histories of crime and violence. The men's life histories are unique, first, in that they came of age in contexts of extreme violence and religious persecution—all men are Muslim and were children during the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia in the early 1990s—and second, in that they all identify their newfound or newly cemented dedication to Islam as the primary catalyst for their desistance. Thematic analyses rooted in the principles of grounded theory reveal some consistencies with extant research on religiously motivated desistance, including the role of faith as a means for self-transformation and behavioral guidance. They also shed light on traditionally understudied mechanisms in the faith-desistance relationship, including the power of religion to reconfigure masculine identities, to reconcile with traumatic pasts, and to cultivate a new moral universe. In examining these men's life histories, we make the case for considering the transformative benefits of Islam in studies of crime and desistance, and for disentangling the role of distinctive faith factors (e.g., faith and religious participation) in processes of change.