Busted
Prisoner Reentry and the Reproduction of Legal Cynicism
David Kirk
Social Problems, May 2016, Pages 222-243
Abstract:
More than 600,000 prisoners are released from incarceration each year in the United States, and most end up returning to metropolitan areas, concentrated in resource-deprived neighborhoods. To the extent that convicted criminals are distrustful of the criminal justice system, the funneling of massive numbers of former prisoners back into select neighborhoods likely facilitates the reproduction of legal cynicism in those areas. Accordingly, this study tests the effect of prisoner reentry on the culture of neighborhoods, particularly with regard to legal cynicism. Using two waves of data on the geographic distribution of returning prisoners in Chicago from the Illinois Department of Corrections combined with data on neighborhood characteristics from the U.S. Census, the Chicago Police Department, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Chicago Community Adult Health Study, I conduct a cross-lagged analysis of the effect of the concentration of returning prisoners on legal cynicism as well as the effect of legal cynicism on the geographic distribution of returning prisoners. Findings reveal that a dense concentration of returning prisoners in a neighborhood facilitates the reproduction of cynical views of the law in the neighborhood. The substantial growth in the number of releases from prison and the stark concentration of the formerly incarcerated in select neighborhoods has detrimental consequences for the culture of receiving neighborhoods.
---------------------
Crime, the Criminal Justice System, and Socioeconomic Inequality
Magnus Lofstrom & Steven Raphael
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016, Pages 103-126
Abstract:
Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority communities. In this paper, we document these trends. We then assess whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the US criminal justice system. We argue that the crime rate is certainly lower as a result of this expansion and in the early 1990s was likely a third lower than what it would have been absent changes in sentencing practices in the 1980s. However, there is little evidence that further stiffening of sentences during the 1990s - a period when prison and other correctional populations expanded rapidly - have had an impact. Hence, the growth in criminal justice populations since 1990s has exacerbated socioeconomic inequality in the United States without generating much benefit in terms of lower crime rates.
---------------------
Are Active Shootings Temporally Contagious? An Empirical Assessment
Jason Kissner
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, March 2016, Pages 48-58
Abstract:
"Active Shootings," which include shootings in public, confined areas such as schools, often traumatize communities and attract intense media coverage. Proposed policy responses to the phenomenon, such as concealing information as to casualty counts and even the identities of shooters, often suppose that active shootings are "contagious," in that previous occurrences can enhance the likelihood of subsequent occurrences. This study marks the first attempt at assessment of the contagiousness of the active shooting phenomenon, and deploys a statistical model - the series hazard model - that is well-suited to the substantive issue of contagion as well as the fine-grained nature of the active shooting data. Results indicate that the hazard of observed active shootings was a function of the number of active shootings that preceded them in the previous two weeks.
---------------------
The Consequences of Knowledge about Elite Deviance
Cedric Michel, Kathleen Heide & John Cochran
American Journal of Criminal Justice, June 2016, Pages 359-382
Abstract:
The present study sought to understand the consequences of knowledge about elite deviance. Four hundred and eight participants completed an online questionnaire that measured (1) their level of knowledge about white-collar crime and (2) their perceived seriousness of, and punitiveness toward, it. Results of statistical analyses suggest a positive relationship between knowledge and punitive sentiments toward crimes of the powerful. Conversely, less knowledgeable subjects, comprised disproportionately of men, politically Conservatives, Republicans, and conservative Protestants were often more lenient toward elite offenders, both in terms of perceived seriousness of the offenses and punitiveness toward them, when compared with street crime. Implications of these findings are discussed.
---------------------
Guns, laws and public shootings in the United States
Benjamin Blau, Devon Gorry & Chip Wade
Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since the late 1990s, there have been increasing numbers of public shootings carried out with firearms in the United States. These tragedies continually renew the regulatory debate concerning public safety while considering civil liberties. Using a unique data set, we investigate whether laws correspond to whether an event occurs and the effects of event-specific characteristics on public shooting outcomes. In particular, we analyse how state-specific gun laws, the types of firearms, the shooting venues and the mental health of the gunman impact the outcomes of public shootings. Results show that most gun laws are unrelated to whether an event occurs. In addition, common state and federal gun laws that outlaw assault weapons are unrelated to the likelihood of an assault weapon being used during a public shooting event. Moreover, results show that the use of assault weapons is not related to more victims or fatalities than other types of guns. However, the use of hand guns, shot guns and high-capacity magazines is directly related to the number of victims and fatalities in a public shooting event. Finally, the gunman's reported mental illness is often associated with an increase in the number of victims and fatalities.
---------------------
The Impact of Low-Priority Laws on Criminal Activity: Evidence from California
Amanda Ross & Anne Walker
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the impact of low-priority initiatives on criminal activity. Low-priority initiatives mandate that minor marijuana possession offenses be the lowest enforcement priority for police. Localities pass these laws because they believe if officers devote fewer resources toward minor marijuana crimes, more resources will be available to deter more serious crimes. Using data from California, we find that jurisdictions that adopted low-priority laws experienced a reduction in arrests for misdemeanor marijuana offenses. However, we do not find evidence of a consistent effect of enacting a low-priority initiative on the crime or clearance rate of other felonies.
---------------------
When May We Kill Government Agents? In Defense of Moral Parity
Jason Brennan
Social Philosophy and Policy, Spring 2016, Pages 40-61
Abstract:
This essay argues for what may be called the parity thesis: Whenever it would be morally permissible to kill a civilian in self-defense or in defense of others against that civilian's unjust acts, it would also be permissible to kill government officials, including police officers, prison officers, generals, lawmakers, and even chief executives. I argue that in realistic circumstances, violent resistance to state injustice is permissible, even and perhaps especially in reasonably just democratic regimes. When civilians see officials about to commit certain severe injustices - such as police officers engaging in excessive violence - they may sometimes act unilaterally and kill the offending officials. I consider and rebut a wide range of objections, including objections against vigilantism, objections based on state legitimacy, and objections that violence can produce bad fallout.
---------------------
The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy
Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra & Christopher Poliquin
Harvard Working Paper, May 2016
Abstract:
There have been dozens of high-profile mass shootings in recent decades. This paper presents three main findings about the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. First, mass shootings evoke large policy responses. A single mass shooting leads to a 15% increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state in the year after a mass shooting. This effect increases with the number of fatalities. Second, mass shootings account for only 0.3% of all gun deaths, but have an outsized influence relative to other homicides. Our estimates suggest that the per-death impact of mass shootings on bills introduced is about 66 times as large as the impact of individual gun homicides in non-mass shooting incidents. Third, when looking at enacted laws, the impact of mass shootings depends on the party in power. A mass shooting increases the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions by 75% in states with Republican-controlled legislatures. We find no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democrat-controlled legislature.
---------------------
Hollianne Marshall & Robert Lombardo
Trends in Organized Crime, June 2016, Pages 125-148
Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between racket subcultures and informal social control. Specifically, this paper examines the influence of traditional organized crime on informal social control in community areas while controlling for satisfaction with the police, tolerance of deviance, neighborhood and organizational ties, and neighborhood attachment. The data used in this analysis comes from the Community Survey of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. They were obtained from the Inter University Consortium of Political and Social Science Research. Ordered logistic regression was used to analyze the data. The findings indicate that racket areas reported higher levels of informal social control when compared to similar non racket areas in the city of Chicago. These findings have important implications for the study of deviance. Not only do they suggest that criminals can play an important role in controlling street crime, the findings also support differential social organization theory.
---------------------
Reading for Life and Adolescent Re-Arrest: Evaluating a Unique Juvenile Diversion Program
Alesha Seroczynski et al.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present results of an evaluation of Reading for Life (RFL), a diversion program for nonviolent juvenile offenders in a medium-sized Midwestern county. The unique program uses philosophical virtue theory, works of literature, and small mentoring groups to foster moral development in juvenile offenders. Participants were randomly assigned to RFL treatment or a comparison program of community service. The RFL program generated large and statistically significant drops in future arrests. The program was particularly successful at reducing the recidivism of more serious offenses and for those groups with the highest propensity for future offenses.
---------------------
Alyssa Chamberlain & Lyndsay Boggess
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, forthcoming
Objectives: Neighborhood characteristics predict burglary targets, but target attractiveness may be colored by the conditions in which a potential offender resides. We test whether relative differences in concentrated disadvantage, racial/ethnic composition, and ethnic heterogeneity influence where burglars offend, controlling for distance. From a relative deprivation perspective, economically advantaged areas make more attractive targets to burglars residing in disadvantage neighborhoods, but a social disorganization perspective predicts areas lower in social cohesion are most attractive, which may be neighborhoods with greater disadvantage.
Methods: Drawing upon a unique sample of cleared burglaries in the City of Tampa, Florida from 2000 to 2012, we utilize discrete choice modeling to predict burglar offense destination.
Results: Offenders target neighborhoods that are geographically proximate or ecologically similar to their own. When accounting for relative differences, burglars from all neighborhood types are more likely to target highly disadvantaged or heterogeneous neighborhoods.
Conclusions: Burglars generally select targets that are similar to their residence. However, when suspects do discriminate, there is evidence that they target neighborhoods that are worse off relative to their own on characteristics such as residential instability, disadvantage, racial composition, and racial/ethnic diversity. These neighborhoods are associated with lower social control and lower risk of detection.
---------------------
"Selling Smarter, Not Harder": Life Course Effects on Drug Sellers' Risk Perceptions and Management
Jamie Fader
International Journal of Drug Policy, forthcoming
Methods: This dynamic examination of apprehension avoidance strategies relies on in-depth interviews mapping out the careers of 20 drug sellers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It examines their risk perceptions and risk management strategies and techniques, exploring rationales for shifts in offending behavior.
Results: Respondents were highly risk-averse but used a narrow definition of sanctions relevant to shaping future offending behavior, typically making small adjustments in sales techniques. Rationales for these shifts included sanctions, personal preference, and life course events or circumstances. Only one attributed lasting desistance from offending to a sanction, although life course events such as parenthood and employment were associated with short-term and planned desistance.
Conclusions: The limited relevance of sanctions to offenders' thinking about risk avoidance contextualizes the widespread failure of policies designed to deter drug sales. Findings support a growing conclusion that severity of punishment is a less powerful deterrent than certainty and that adjustments in certainty after arrest are offense-specific. The relationship of life course events - especially employment - to desistance and resumed offending suggest that social policies may be more effective than criminal justice sanctions in reducing drug offending.
---------------------
Gabriel Merrin et al.
Drug and Alcohol Dependence, forthcoming
Background: The reciprocal relationship between crime and substance use is well known. However, when examining this relationship, no study to date has disaggregated between- and within-person effects, which represents a more methodologically sound and developmentally-appropriate analytic approach. Further, few studies have considered the role of social risk (e.g., deviant peers, high-risk living situations) in the aforementioned relationship. We examined these associations in a group of individuals with heightened vulnerability to substance use, crime and social risk: emerging adults (aged 18-25 years) in substance use treatment.
Methods: Participants were 3479 emerging adults who had entered treatment. We used auto-regressive latent growth models with structured residuals (ALT-SR) to examine the within-person cross-lagged association between crime and substance use and whether social risk contributed to this association. A taxonomy of nested models was used to determine the structural form of the data, within-person cross-lagged associations, and between-person associations.
Results: In contrast to the extant literature on cross-lagged relations between crime and substance use, we found little evidence of such relations once between- and within-person relations were plausibly disaggregated. Yet, our results indicated that within-person increases in social risk were predictive of subsequent increases in crime and substance use. Post-hoc analyses revealed a mediation effect of social risk between crime and substance use.
Conclusions: Findings suggest the need to re-think the association between crime and substance use among emerging adults. Individuals that remain connected to high-risk social environments after finishing treatment may represent a group that could use more specialized, tailored treatments.
---------------------
Testing the Expressive Theory of Punishment
Kenworthey Bilz
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, June 2016, Pages 358-392
Abstract:
This article presents empirical support for the argument that punishment of a wrongdoer affects the social standing of the victim. This argument is most closely associated with the expressive theory of punishment, especially as articulated by the moral philosopher Jean Hampton (Murphy & Hampton 1988; Hampton 1992). In three experiments I show support for the basic point of Hampton's expressive theory, that punishing a criminal offender does increase the victim's social standing in the community, and failing to punish diminishes it. I show this effect across three very different types of crime: rape, credit theft, and battery. I also test some logical extensions of Hampton's expressive theory of punishment. For instance, if victims gain or lose social standing as a result of punishing, so - inversely - should offenders. In addition, different punishers should affect different sources of social standing (such as ingroup vs. outgroup standing). Finally, the effects on perceived social standing should be felt not just by victims, but by third-party observers as well. I find support for these subsidiary predictions.
---------------------
Variation in the incarceration length-recidivism dose-response relationship
Jason Rydberg & Kyleigh Clark
Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2016, Pages 118-128
Methods: We approximate a large fixed panel of parolees from the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) to implement a dose-response analysis of the relationship between incarceration length and the prevalence and timing of recidivism. Marginal mean weighting through stratification (MMW-S) is utilized to limit confounding effects from selection bias.
Results: We observe that incremental doses of incarceration length increase the likelihood and hasten the timing of parole revocations, and reduce the likelihood and slow the timing of new sentences. Considerable heterogeneity was observed in these effects across conviction offenses, as the direction of effects changed beyond certain thresholds, and was not constant across offender groups.
Conclusions: These results do not provide consistent support for a suppressive, criminogenic, or null effect for incarceration length on recidivism.
---------------------
Gerald Gaes, William Bales & Samuel Scaggs
Journal of Experimental Criminology, March 2016, Pages 143-158
Objectives: This study examines the effect of prison versus community sanctions on recommitment to prison and compares two levels of community supervision, community control (house arrest) and probation, evaluating whether the findings are contingent on the type of matching methods used in the analysis.
Methods: Logistic regression was conducted on unmatched and matched samples. Exact, coarsened exact, and radius-matching procedures were used to create a selection on observables design. Matching variables included current offense, demographics, criminal history, supervision violations, and a rich set of Florida Sentencing Guidelines information culled from an official scoring sheet. Florida judges use this instrument to sentence offenders within the framework of the state determinate sentencing system.
Results: The results show that with exact matching, there is no effect of imprisonment on recommitment, while the other procedures suggest a specific deterrent effect of imprisonment. All four analysis methods showed that offenders under community control are more likely to reoffend than those under normal probation. Analyses between the matched and unmatched prison observations demonstrate that the matched set of prisoners is composed of offenders who have less extensive criminal records and less serious conviction offenses than unmatched offenders regardless of the matching algorithm.
Conclusions: Contrary to a prior analysis of these data, which found a criminogenic effect of prison, a null effect was found using exact matching. Comparing the matching procedures, the more precise the match the less likely there was an effect of prison. However, community control was criminogenic regardless of the matching procedure.
---------------------
Abigail Sewell, Kevin Jefferson & Hedwig Lee
Social Science & Medicine, June 2016, Pages 1-13
Abstract:
A growing body of research highlights the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, including stop-and-frisk policing tactics. Living in a neighborhood with aggressive policing may affect one's mental health, especially for men who are the primary targets of police stops. We examine whether there is an association between psychological distress and neighborhood-level aggressive policing (i.e., frisking and use of force by police) and whether that association varies by gender. The 2009-2011 New York City (NYC) Stop, Question, and Frisk Database is aggregated to the neighborhood-level (N = 34) and merged with individual data from the 2012 NYC Community Health Survey (N = 8,066) via the United Hospital Fund neighborhood of respondents' residence. Weighted multilevel generalized linear models are used to assess main and gendered associations of neighborhood exposures to aggressive police stops on psychological distress (Kessler-6 items). While the neighborhood stop rate exhibits inconsistent associations with psychological distress, neighborhood-level frisk and use of force proportions are linked to higher levels of non-specific psychological distress among men, but not women. Specifically, men exhibit more non-specific psychological distress and more severe feelings of nervousness, effort, and worthlessness in aggressively surveilled neighborhoods than do women. Male residents are affected by the escalation of stop-and-frisk policing in a neighborhood. Living in a context of aggressive policing is an important risk factor for men's mental health.
---------------------
Incarceration and Population Health in Wealthy Democracies
Christopher Wildeman
Criminology, May 2016, Pages 360-382
Abstract:
Everywhere you look, incarceration seems to be doing harm. Research has implicated incarceration not only in worse outcomes for individuals, their families, and their communities but also in growing inequality. Yet incarceration may not always harm society - even if it does harm those who experience it. To consider this possibility, I build an argument demonstrating how the macro-level consequences of incarceration may be distinctively harmful in the United States, focusing on the incarceration-health relationship as one indicator of a broader phenomenon. I then test my hypothesis by using an unbalanced panel data set including 21 developed democracies (N = 414) and a series of ordinary least-squares models predicting three measures of population health as a function of incarceration. Models including only a main effect of incarceration demonstrate an inverse association between changes in incarceration and changes in population health. Models including an incarceration by U.S. interaction, however, indicate that the population health consequences of changes in incarceration are far worse in the United States than elsewhere. Taken together, the results indicate that the United States is exceptional for both its rate of incarceration and its effects of incarceration, although it is unclear what drives this exceptionalism in effects.
---------------------
Unfalsifiability of security claims
Cormac Herley
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is an inherent asymmetry in computer security: Things can be declared insecure by observation, but not the reverse. There is no observation that allows us to declare an arbitrary system or technique secure. We show that this implies that claims of necessary conditions for security (and sufficient conditions for insecurity) are unfalsifiable. This in turn implies an asymmetry in self-correction: Whereas the claim that countermeasures are sufficient is always subject to correction, the claim that they are necessary is not. Thus, the response to new information can only be to ratchet upward: Newly observed or speculated attack capabilities can argue a countermeasure in, but no possible observation argues one out. Further, when justifications are unfalsifiable, deciding the relative importance of defensive measures reduces to a subjective comparison of assumptions. Relying on such claims is the source of two problems: once we go wrong we stay wrong and errors accumulate, and we have no systematic way to rank or prioritize measures.
---------------------
Child Access Prevention Laws, Youth Gun Carrying, and School Shootings
Mark Anderson & Joseph Sabia
San Diego State University Working Paper, March 2016
Abstract:
Despite intense public interest in keeping guns out of schools, next to nothing is known about the effects of gun control policies on youth gun carrying or school violence. Using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS) for the period 1993-2013, this study is the first to examine the relationship between child access prevention (CAP) gun controls laws and gun carrying among high school students. Our results suggest that CAP laws are associated with a 13 percent decrease in the rate of past month gun carrying and an 18 percent decrease in the rate at which students reported being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property. In addition, we find that CAP laws are associated with a lagged decline in the probability that students miss school due to feeling unsafe. These results are concentrated among minors, for whom CAP laws are most likely to bind. To supplement our YRBS analysis, we collect a novel dataset on school shooting deaths for the period 1991-2013. We find that while CAP laws promote a safer school environment, they have no observable impact on school-associated shooting deaths.