Felonious
Deterrence: Increased enforcement versus harsher penalties
Derek Pyne
Economics Letters, December 2012, Pages 561-562
Abstract:
Empirical studies have found that increasing the probability of punishment has a greater effect on crime than the severity of punishment. This note explains this as the result of criminals having imperfect information on their criminal ability. As they commit crimes, they update their estimates of their ability, based on their success rate. Increased penalties deter crime in the period they are applied but offer criminals no information on their criminal ability. Crime is also deterred during a period of increased enforcement. In addition, increased enforcement leads some criminals to decrease their estimates of their ability, leading to reduced recidivism.
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Debtors' Prisons in America: An Economic Analysis
Matthew Bake, Metin Cosgel & Thomas Miceli
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Debtors' prisons have been commonplace throughout history, including in the United States. While imprisonment for debt no doubt elicited some repayment by benefactors of the debtor, we argue that its primary function was to deter default in the first place by giving borrowers an incentive to disclose hidden assets. Because of its cost, however, imprisonment was destined to be replaced by more efficient ways of preventing borrowers from sheltering assets. Empirical analysis of state laws banning imprisonment for debt provides some support for this argument. In particular, the results suggest that states in which the publishing industry developed sooner (thus facilitating the flow of information) were more likely to enact early bans on imprisonment for debt.
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Abhay Aneja, John Donohue & Alexandria Zhang
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public - so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis using county-level crime data for the period 1977-2000. 17 of the 18 NRC panel members essentially concluded that the existing research was inadequate to conclude that RTC laws increased or decreased crime. One member of the panel, though, concluded that the NRC's panel data regressions supported the conclusion that RTC laws decreased murder. We evaluate the NRC evidence, and improve and expand on the report's county data analysis by analyzing an additional six years of county data as well as state panel data for the period 1977-2006. We also present evidence using both a more plausible version of the Lott and Mustard specification, as well as our own preferred specification (which, unlike the Lott and Mustard model used in the NRC report, does control for rates of incarceration and police). While we have considerable sympathy with the NRC's majority view about the difficulty of drawing conclusions from simple panel data models, we disagree with the NRC report's judgment that cluster adjustments to correct for serial correlation are not needed. Our randomization tests show that without such adjustments the Type 1 error soars to 44 - 75 percent. In addition, the conclusion of the dissenting panel member that RTC laws reduce murder has no statistical support. Our paper highlights some important questions to consider when using panel data methods to resolve questions of law and policy effectiveness. Although we agree with the NRC's cautious conclusion regarding the effects of RTC laws, we buttress this conclusion by showing how sensitive the estimated impact of RTC laws is to different data periods, the use of state versus county data, particular specifications, and the decision to control for state trends. Overall, the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from both the state and county panel data models conducted over the entire 1977-2006 period with and without state trends and using three different specifications is that aggravated assault rises when RTC laws are adopted. For every other crime category, there is little or no indication of any consistent RTC impact on crime. It will be worth exploring whether other methodological approaches and/or additional years of data will confirm the results of this panel-data analysis.
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Angela Riley
Georgetown Law Journal, June 2012, Pages 1675-1745
Abstract:
The Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment opinions establish a bulwark of individual gun rights against the state. District of Columbia v. Heller confirmed that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms for self-defense, and the Court applied this analysis to the states via incorporation theory two years later in McDonald v. City of Chicago. As a result of these cases, it is often assumed that individual gun rights now extend across the United States. But this conclusion fails to take account of a critical exception: Indian tribal nations remain the only governments within the United States that can restrict or fully prohibit the right to keep and bear arms, ignoring the Second Amendment altogether. Indian tribes were never formally brought within the U.S. Constitution; accordingly, the Second Amendment does not bind them. In 1968, Congress extended select, tailored provisions of the Bill of Rights to tribal governments through the Indian Civil Rights Act but included no Second Amendment corollary. As a result, there are over 67 million acres of Indian trust land in the United States, comprising conspicuous islands within which individuals' gun rights are not constitutionally protected as against tribal governments. With Indian nations thus unconstrained - bearing in mind that gun rights and regulations are oftentimes set by tribal law - pressing questions regarding gun ownership and control arise for those living under tribal authority.
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Why California's ‘Three Strikes' Fails as Crime and Economic Policy, and What to Do
Robert Nash Parker
California Journal of Politics and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although political leaders and the public believe that California's "tough on crime" policies, most notably its "Three Strikes" sentencing framework, put into effect in 1994, are responsible for a 100% crime drop in California since 1992, the evidence from research and a logical examination of data on violent crime state by state over the past 50 years conclusively shows this is not the case. A multivariate time series model for California over the last five decades shows that the imposition of Three Strikes in 1994 has had no impact on violent crime in the state, but alcohol consumption and unemployment have important impacts on the rate of violent crime. If these results are correct, the budget of California has suffered a tremendous burden caused by the excess imprisonment of many nonviolent offenders under the Three Strikes policy. The time has come to take action to wean California from its obsession with punishment and help relieve the budget crises on a permanent basis by revising California Prison Policy.
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Is Private Time Quality Time? A National Private-Public Comparison of Prison Quality
Matthew Makarios & Jeff Maahs
Prison Journal, September 2012, Pages 336-357
Abstract:
The prison privatization debate has thus far formed around both normative and empirical frameworks. Although not denying the importance of the debate over whether private prisons should exist, the fact that privatization has occurred necessitates empirical examination. We, therefore, use census of federal and state correctional facilities data to compare the quality of confinement across federal, state, and private prisons. After controlling for important institutional differences, we find that across many of the domains of quality, public and private prisons are similar. Public and private prisons did differ on some measures. Private prisons experienced less crowding than either state or federal prisons. Conversely, federal prisons scored higher on measures of activity (work, treatment, education) than privately run institutions.
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Procedural Justice and Prison Violence: Examining Complaints Among Federal Inmates (2000-2007)
David Bierie
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prisons in the United States generally contain an internal administrative system for processing and responding to inmate complaints. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) launched a formal grievance system in 1975 with explicit goals of monitoring prison performance and alleviating inmate tension by resolving problems in a timely and just manner. These systems play an important role in prison administration and the lived experience of inmates, yet little is known about them. Little has been published in terms of basic descriptions of these systems (e.g., volume, outcomes, and processes), and the field knows even less about empirical relationships between outcome or process aspects of these systems and the inmate violence they were expected to reduce. This study draws on monthly panel data covering a 7-year period from all federal prisons-recording complaints, responses and misconduct for each prison. Drawing on a prison fixed-effects framework, the data show distributive outcomes (denial/grant) do not predict inmate violence within a given prison. However, violence within a given prison does increase significantly with the volume of late replies as well as substantive rejections of complaints. This latter finding is consistent with a procedural justice paradigm. Finally, an unexpected finding was that violence grew as the number of support staff per inmate (e.g., teachers, counselors) declined within a given prison. However, the opposite effect was found with respect to custody staff per inmate within a given prison.
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Small Arms Mortality: Access to Firearms and Lethal Violence
Mark Konty & Brian Schaefer
Sociological Spectrum, November/December 2012, Pages 475-490
Abstract:
There is an intuitive appeal to the notion that the more lethal the weaponry the more lethal the violence. We explore one aspect of lethal weaponry, firearm accessibility. Using nation-level (N = 168) data from the Small Arms Survey and the World Health Organization's measures of mortality we examine whether rates of small arm ownership have a positive effect on rates of homicide and suicide. Contrary to the opportunity model, the accessibility of firearms does not produce more homicide or suicide when other known factors are controlled for. Consistent with past research, structural factors, like deprivation, explain a large portion of the cross-national variation in homicide and suicide, with some interesting differences between the two models. We discuss explanations for our findings and suggest that firearm accessibility may make some structural positions more lethal.
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Participatory Behavior at Homicide Scenes: Crowd Formation or Community Continuity?
Patricia Grant & Robyn Diehl
American Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2012, Pages 471-484
Abstract:
Providing an alternative explanation of the cultural expression of crowd formation that occurs at homicide scenes, this article is a descriptive re-assessment of the original study reported by Lacks, Gordon and McCue (American Journal of Criminal Justice, 30:1-20, 2005). These authors espoused that crowd formation at homicide scenes occurred as a result of a "carnival-type" atmosphere; whereas, the current evaluation suggests other socio-cultural components of cultural expression which may more accurately reflect the behaviors of minorities at homicide scenes. Specifically, the current assessment purports that crowd formation at homicide scenes may be more closely related to community continuity and familiar associations rather than a carnival-type atmosphere.
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MoonSun Kim & Melchor de Guzman
Criminal Justice Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research attempts to provide empirical evidence to the claim that community oriented policing (COP) has been supplanted by homeland security policing after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. This empirical evidence is important as it tries to unravel if the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks influenced the focus of police departments away from COP. The 1999, 2003, and 2007 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics were used to analyze the differences among US police departments in the implementation of COP components before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The findings suggest that except for problem solving, police departments have de-escalated their emphases on COP components overall. Additionally, these changes were shown as consistent across every region in the United States. Further research is needed to determine if this trend is for the long term or just temporary. Also, future research should investigate the impact of this paradigm shift on the relationships between community and police officers.
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Recidivism and the Availability of Health Care Organizations
Danielle Wallace & Andrew Papachristos
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Incarceration has been identified as a cause of poor health in current and formerly incarcerated individuals. Given the high likelihood of being in poor health when exiting prison, it is plausible that health impacts recidivism. Furthermore, ex-prisoners cluster in disadvantaged neighborhoods that are unlikely to have decent health services. Currently, there is insufficient research to examine this relationship at an ecological level. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the availability of health care organizations (HCOs) and their changes over time with neighborhood level recidivism, and how these relationships may be moderated by neighborhood disadvantage. We determine that the effect of HCOs on recidivism is indeed moderated through disadvantage: as disadvantage increases, the negative effect of losing significant amounts of HCOs on recidivism accelerates. Our results suggest that while increasing HCOs in disadvantaged neighborhoods is important, keeping HCOs in place is equally important for moderating negative neighborhood level outcomes.
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Min Xie, Janet Lauritsen & Karen Heimer
Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although community responses to the problem of intimate partner violence typically focus on increasing and improving policing and social services, few studies have examined the relationship among police force size, social service providers, and women's safety at home. To address this issue, we use data from the National Crime Victimization Survey to examine patterns of intimate partner violence for 40 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over a 16-year period (1989-2004). We analyze the data using three-level multilevel models, with individual respondents (N = 487,166) nested within years, nested within MSAs. Net of other important individual and contextual factors, the results show that women's likelihood of victimization is significantly lower in MSAs that employ more sworn officers per capita, whereas the states' mandatory arrest laws are not found to have significant independent effects. Above and beyond the effects of police force size, we also find a significant negative relationship between the size of the social service workforce and intimate partner violence. Future research should develop collaborative data collection efforts to examine the specific activities of police and social service workers in dealing with intimate partner violence so that the mechanisms underlying these significant relationships can be understood more clearly.
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Understanding Human Trafficking Origin: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis
Smriti Rao & Christina Presenti
Feminist Economics, Summer 2012, Pages 231-263
Abstract:
Feminist work on global human trafficking has highlighted the conceptual difficulty of differentiating between trafficking and migration. This contribution uses a cross-country United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs dataset on human trafficking from 2006 to empirically evaluate the socioeconomic characteristics of high-trafficking origin countries and compare them with patterns that have emerged in the literature on migration. In particular, the authors ask how and how much per capita income and gender inequality matter in shaping patterns of human trafficking. Ordinal logit regressions corrected for sample selection bias show that trafficking has an inverse U-shaped relationship with income per capita, and, controlling for income per capita, trafficking is more likely in countries with higher shares of female-to-male income. These results suggest strong parallels between patterns of trafficking and migration and lead the authors to believe that trafficking cannot be addressed without addressing the drivers of migration.
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Greening vacant lots to reduce violent crime: A randomised controlled trial
Eugenia Garvin, Carolyn Cannuscio & Charles Branas
Injury Prevention, forthcoming
Background: Vacant lots are often overgrown with unwanted vegetation and filled with trash, making them attractive places to hide illegal guns, conduct illegal activities such as drug sales and prostitution, and engage in violent crime. There is some evidence that greening vacant lots is associated with reductions in violent crime.
Methods: We performed a randomised controlled trial of vacant lot greening to test the impact of this intervention on police reported crime and residents' perceptions of safety and disorder. Greening consisted of cleaning the lots, planting grass and trees, and building a wooden fence around the perimeter. We randomly allocated two vacant lot clusters to the greening intervention or to the control status (no intervention). Administrative data were used to determine crime rates, and local resident interviews at baseline (n=29) and at follow-up (n=21) were used to assess perceptions of safety and disorder.
Results: Unadjusted difference-in-differences estimates showed a non-significant decrease in the number of total crimes and gun assaults around greened vacant lots compared with control. People around the intervention vacant lots reported feeling significantly safer after greening compared with those living around control vacant lots (p<0.01).
Conclusions: In this study, greening was associated with reductions in certain gun crimes and improvements in residents' perceptions of safety. A larger randomised controlled trial is needed to further investigate the link between vacant lot greening and violence reduction.
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Does Risk Assessment Make a Difference? Results of Implementing the SAVRY in Juvenile Probation
Gina Vincent et al.
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, July/August 2012, Pages 384-405
Abstract:
An effective approach to reducing recidivism is, first, to identify a youth's risk of reoffending and then to match the intensity of interventions to that risk level. This pre-post quasi-experimental, prospective study compared 247 (pre) with 217 (post) adjudicated youths to examine the implementation of the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) and its effects on case management practices in Louisiana's Caddo parish probation office. The results indicated that placement rates dropped by 50%, use of maximum levels of supervision dropped by almost 30%, and use of community services decreased except for high-risk youths, but only after the SAVRY was properly implemented. This shift towards more appropriate allocation of resources that are matched to risk level occurred without a significant increase in reoffending. The implications for implementation and for use of risk/needs assessment in juvenile probation are discussed.
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Crime Pays: The Connection Between Time in Prison and Future Criminal Earnings
Donald Hutcherson
Prison Journal, September 2012, Pages 315-335
Abstract:
This study draws on theories of stigma, social and human capital, and opportunity structure to assess the role of prior incarceration on illegal earnings. Tobit regression models are estimated for young adult ex-offenders and nonoffenders using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for 1997 to 2005. The findings reveal that individuals with an incarceration history earn significantly higher annual illegal earnings than those who do not have such a history. This is true net a variety of predictors of illegal income, including race and ethnicity. The current research indicates that spending significant time in jail or prison may force the ex-incarcerated into illegal opportunity structures to obtain income.
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Deterrence, Firearm Arrests, and Subsequent Shootings: A Micro-Level Spatio-Temporal Analysis
Brian Wyant et al.
Justice Quarterly, July/August 2012, Pages 524-545
Abstract:
Do police firearm arrests reduce later shootings in nearby locations and in the days immediately following the arrest? This question is examined at a more detailed level than in previous work in order to better describe the spatio-temporal dynamics linking these two event types. All firearm arrests (n = 5,687) and shootings (n = 5,870) in Philadelphia from 2004 to 2007 were analyzed using a modified close-pair method. Following a firearm arrest shootings declined significantly, 28-47% up to a couple of blocks away. These significant declines, however, lasted for just a few days. Overall, results suggest police firearm suppression effects occur, may extend up to two blocks away from a firearm arrest, but also are short-lived. Potential implications for deterrence are discussed.