The Effect of Incarceration on Re-Offending: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Pennsylvania

Objectives

This paper uses a sample of convicted offenders from Pennsylvania to estimate the effect of incarceration on post-release criminality.

Methods

To do so, we capitalize on a feature of the criminal justice system in Pennsylvania—the county-level randomization of cases to judges. We begin by identifying five counties in which there is substantial variation across judges in the uses of incarceration, but no evidence indicating that the randomization process had failed. The estimated effect of incarceration on rearrest is based on comparison of the rearrest rates of the caseloads of judges with different proclivities for the use of incarceration.

Results

Using judge as an instrumental variable, we estimate a series of confidence intervals for the effect of incarceration on one year, two year, five year, and ten year rearrest rates.

Conclusions

On the whole, there is little evidence in our data that incarceration impacts rearrest.     

Defending and managing the pipeline: lessons for running a randomized experiment in a correctional institution

Objectives

To discuss the challenges faced in an experimental prisoner reentry evaluation with regard to managing the pipeline of eligible cases.

Methods

This paper uses a case study approach, coupled with a review of the relevant literature on issues of case flow in experimental studies in criminal justice settings. Included are recommendations for researchers on the management of case flow, reflections on the major research design issues encountered, and a listing of dilemmas that are likely to plague experimental evaluations of prisoner reentry programs.

Results

Particularly in a jail setting, anticipating the timing of release of a prisoner to the community is probably impossible given the large number of issues that impact release, many of which will be unanticipated. A detailed pipeline study is critical to the success of an experimental study targeting returning prisoners. Pipeline studies should be conducted under what will be the true conditions and context for enrollment, given all eligibility criteria.

Conclusions

With continued and systematic documentation of enrollment challenges in future experimental evaluations of reentry programs, as well as other experimental evaluations that involve individuals, academics can build a deep literature that would help facilitate future successful randomized experiments in the criminal justice field.     

Rational Misbehavior? Evaluating an Integrated Dual-Process Model of Criminal Decision Making

Objectives

Test the hypothesis that dispositional self-control and morality relate to criminal decision making via different mental processing modes, a ‘hot’ affective mode and a ‘cool’ cognitive one.

Methods

Structural equation modeling in two studies under separate samples of undergraduate students using scenarios describing two different types of crime, illegal downloading and insurance fraud. Both self-control and morality are operationalized through the HEXACO model of personality (Lee and Ashton in Multivariate Behav Res 39(2):329–358, 2004).

Results

In Study 1, negative state affect, i.e., feelings of fear and worry evoked by a criminal prospect, and perceived risk of sanction were found to mediate the relations between both dispositions and criminal choice. In Study 2, processing mode was manipulated by having participants rely on either their thinking or on their feelings prior to deciding on whether or not to make a criminal choice. Activating a cognitive mode strengthened the relation between perceived risk and criminal choice, whereas activating an affective mode strengthened the relation between negative affect and criminal choice.

Conclusion

In conjunction, these results extend research that links stable individual dispositions to proximal states that operate in the moment of decision making. The results also add to dispositional perspectives of crime by using a structure of personality that incorporates both self-control and morality. Contributions to the proximal, state, perspectives reside in the use of a new hot/cool perspective of criminal decision making that extends rational choice frameworks.     

“From Your First Cigarette to Your Last Dyin’ Day”: The Patterning of Gang Membership in the Life-Course

Objective

Motivated by the reorientation of gang membership into a life-course framework and concerns about distinct populations of juvenile and adult gang members, this study draws from the criminal career paradigm to examine the contours of gang membership and their variability in the life-course.

Methods

Based on nine annual waves of national panel data from the NLSY97, this study uses growth curve and group-based trajectory modeling to examine the dynamic and cumulative prevalence of gang membership, variability in the pathways into and out of gangs, and the correlates of these pathways from ages 10 to 23.

Results

The cumulative prevalence of gang membership was 8 %, while the dynamic age-graded prevalence of gang membership peaked at 3 % at age 15. Six distinct trajectories accounted for variability in the patterning of gang membership, including an adult onset trajectory. Gang membership in adulthood was an even mix of adolescence carryover and adult initiation. The typical gang career lasts 2 years or less, although much longer for an appreciable subset of respondents. Gender and racial/ethnic disproportionalities in gang membership increase in magnitude over the life-course.

Conclusions

Gang membership is strongly age-graded. The results of this study support a developmental research agenda to unpack the theoretical and empirical causes and consequences of gang membership across stages of the life-course.     

Scaling Criminal Offending

Objective:

This paper reviews a century of research on creating theoretically meaningful and empirically useful scales of criminal offending and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses.

Methods:

The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency, and additivity of offending. Modern practice in scaling criminal offending is measured using a survey of 130 articles published in five leading criminology journals over a two-year period that included a scale of individual offending as either an independent or dependent variable. Six scaling methods commonly used in contemporary criminological research are demonstrated and assessed using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: dichotomous, frequency, weighted frequency, variety, summed category, and item response theory ??theta??.

Results:

The discipline of criminology has seen numerous scaling techniques introduced and forgotten. While no clearly superior method dominates the field today, the most commonly used scaling techniques are dichotomous and frequency scales, both of which are fraught with methodological pitfalls including sensitivity to the least serious offenses.

Conclusions:

Variety scales are the preferred criminal offending scale because they are relatively easy to construct, possess high reliability and validity, and are not compromised by high frequency non-serious crime types.     

Individual Differences in the Deterrence Process: Which Individuals Learn (Most) from Their Offending Experiences?

Objectives

To test whether individuals differ in deterrability by studying whether the effect of criminal experiences on perceived detection risk varies by criminal propensity.

Methods

Data from the British “Offending, Crime and Justice Survey”, a four-wave panel study on criminal behavior and victimization, are analyzed. Two subsamples for analyses are constructed: one of non-offenders at first measurement, to analyze the effect of gaining first offending experiences during the time of study (n = 1,279) and one sample of individuals who have committed offenses within the past year (n = 567), to analyze the effect of police contact among active offenders. Fixed-effects regressions of perceived detection risk on criminal experiences and interactions between criminal experiences and measures of criminal propensity (risk-affinity, impulsivity) are estimated.

Results

Analyses support learning models for the formation and change of risk perceptions, but individual differences by criminal propensity are present in the deterrence process: After gaining first offending experiences, impulsive individuals as well as risk-averse individuals are more likely to lower their perceptions about the probability of detection than less impulsive or risk-affine individuals are. A positive effect of police contact on expected detection risk is restricted to risk-averse individuals.

Conclusions

Findings support claims that deterrence works differently for crime-prone individuals. The differential effects of impulsivity and risk-affinity underline the importance of not combining constituent characteristics of criminal propensity in composite indices, because they might have differential effects on deterrence.     

WILLINGNESS‐TO‐PAY FOR CRIME CONTROL PROGRAMS*

This paper reports on a new methodology to estimate the “cost of crime.” It is adapted from the contingent valuation method used in the environmental economics literature and is itself used to estimate the public's willingness to pay for crime control programs. In a nationally representative sample of 1,300 U.S. residents, we found that the typical household would be willing to pay between $100 and $150 per year for programs that reduced specific crimes by 10 percent in their communities. This willingness amounts, collectively, to approximately $25,000 per burglary, $70,000 per serious assault, $232,000 per armed     

Short-term effects of restorative justice conferences on post-traumatic stress symptoms among robbery and burglary victims: a randomized controlled trial

Objectives

To examine the impact of face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) meetings led by police officers between crime victims and their offenders on victims’ post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Methods

Two trials conducted in London randomly assigned burglary or robbery cases with consenting victims and offenders to either a face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) in addition to conventional justice treatment or conventional treatment without a RJC. Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were measured with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) within 1 month of treatment for 192 victims. We assessed the prevalence and severity of PTSS scores following treatment, using independent sample t tests and chi square statistics. We further measured the magnitude of the differences between the groups, using effect size analyses.

Results

Analyses show that PTSS scores are significantly lower among victims assigned to RJC in addition to criminal justice processing through the courts than to customary criminal justice processing alone. There are overall 49 % fewer victims with clinical levels of PTSS, and possible PTSD (IES-R?≥?25). Main treatment effects are significant (t?=?2.069; p?Conclusions Findings suggest that restorative justice conferences reduce clinical levels of PTSS and possibly PTSD in a short-term follow-up assessment. Future research should include longer follow-up, larger and more stratified samples, and financial data to account for the cost benefit implications of RJ conferences compared to ordinary PTSS treatments.     

Assessing the Effectiveness of Correctional Sanctions

Objectives

Despite the dramatic expansion of the US correctional system in recent decades, little is known about the relative effectiveness of commonly used sanctions on recidivism. The goal of this paper is to address this research gap, and systematically examine the relative impacts on recidivism of four main types of sanctions: probation, intensive probation, jail, and prison.

Methods

Data on convicted felons in Florida were analyzed and propensity score matching analyses were used to estimate relative effects of each sanction type on 3-year reconviction rates.

Results

Estimated effects suggest that less severe sanctions are more likely to reduce recidivism.

Conclusions

The findings raise questions about the effectiveness of tougher sanctioning policies for reducing future criminal behavior. Implications for future research, theory, and policy are also discussed.     

Effectiveness of a prolonged incarceration and rehabilitation measure for high-frequency offenders

Objectives

To estimate the incapacitation effect and the impact on post-release recidivism of a measure combining prolonged incarceration and rehabilitation, the ISD measure for high frequency offenders (HFOs) was compared to the standard practice of short-term imprisonment.

Methods

We applied a quasi-experimental design with observational data to study the effects of ISD. The intervention group consisted of all HFOs released from ISD in the period 2004–2008. Two control groups were derived from the remaining population of HFOs who were released from a standard prison term. To form groups of controls, a combination of multiple imputation (MI) and propensity score matching (PSM) was used including a large number of covariates. In order to measure the incapacitation effect of ISD, the number of convictions and recorded offences in a criminal case of the controls were counted in the same period as their ISD counterfactuals were incarcerated. The impact on recidivism was measured by the prevalence and the frequency of reconvictions corrected for time at risk. Robustness of the results were checked by performing a combined PSM and difference-in-difference (DD) design.

Results

The estimate of the incapacitation effect was on average 5.7 criminal cases and 9.2 offences per ISD measure. On average 2.5 convictions and 4 recorded offences per year per HFO are prevented. The HFOs released from ISD showed 12 to 16 % lower recidivism rates than their control HFOs released from prison (Cohen’s h?=?0.3–0.4). The recidivists of the ISD group also showed a lower reconviction frequency than the control group recidivists (Cohen’s d?=?0.2).

Conclusions

The ISD measure seems to be effective in reducing recidivism and crime. The estimated incapacitation effect showed that a large portion of criminal cases and offences was prevented. DD analysis and sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the PSM results. Due to the absence of actual treatment data, the effects found cannot be attributed separately to resocialization, imprisonment, or improvement of life circumstances.     

“Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line”? Marriage, Spousal Criminality, and Criminal Offending Over the Life Course

Objectives

This study is an analysis of the relationship between marriage and crime in a high-risk sample of Dutch men and women. Marriages are classified as to whether the spouse had been convicted of a crime prior to the marriage, in order to ascertain if one??s criminal career after marriage unfolds differently depending on the criminal history of one??s spouse.

Methods

Data are from the Criminal Career and Life-Course Study, a random sample of all individuals convicted of a criminal offense in the Netherlands in 1977 (N?=?4,615). Lifetime criminal histories for all subjects are constructed from age 12 to calendar year 2003. Official marriage records are also consulted, and the criminal history of all spouses are similarly constructed. Fixed-effects Poisson models are estimated to quantify the relationship between marriage, spousal criminality, and conviction frequency, controlling for age, parenthood, prior conviction, and prior incarceration.

Results

Among men, marriage reduces the frequency of criminal conviction, but only if the marriage is to a non-convicted spouse. Marriage to a convicted spouse, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from singlehood??it neither discourages nor promotes criminal behavior. Among women, marriage has a crime-reducing effect, regardless of the criminal history of the spouse. A set of preliminary follow-up analyses suggests further that men with more extensive criminal histories, and with more stable marriages, benefit in a more pronounced way from marriage to a non-convicted spouse. However, even unstable marriages to non-convicted spouses appear to reduce conviction frequency while they last.

Conclusions

Marriage is indeed a salient transition in the criminal career, but there are important differences depending on the characteristics of the offender (gender, criminal history), the characteristics of the spouse (criminal history), and the characteristics of the marriage (duration). The authors conclude that while marriage matters, it does not necessarily mean the end of a criminal career, and that processes of both partner selection and partner influence deserve close attention by marriage-crime researchers. Qualifications of the study??s findings include the use of conviction data from official sources, the use of a sample of men and women who were all convicted of a crime at some point in their lives, the study of legal marriage in the Netherlands, and the inability to measure potential mechanisms for the observed marriage effects.     

First do no harm: a look at correctional policies and programs today

Objectives

This paper reviews the historical changes in correctional policies and the impact these changes have had on the operations of corrections and correctional programs. Social changes and theoretical perspectives moved corrections away from a focus on rehabilitation to programs characterized by deterrence, incapacitation, and control. Similarly, theoretical criminology encouraged corrections to move away from rehabilitation towards programs designed to provide social opportunities such as employment and housing for offenders. This paper examines whether these changes in policies and programs have been effective in reducing recidivism. The question is: What works in corrections?

Methods

This paper reviews the research examining the impact of correctional policies and programs on the later criminal activities of offenders and delinquents. Research using systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and the Maryland method scores is used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of various types of programs, management strategies, and policies.

Results

Research demonstrates programs based on deterrence, incapacitation and increased control do not reduce the future criminal activities of offenders and delinquents. Nor have programs targeting social opportunities such as employment and housing been effective in reducing recidivism. The most effective programs target individual-level change in thinking and information processing.

Conclusions

In the search for ways to sanction offenders, U.S. correctional policies and programs using control, deterrence, and incapacitation have harmed individuals and communities. Such programs have not been effective in reducing recidivism. While programs that provide social opportunities for offenders do not necessarily harm offenders neither do they decrease later criminal activities. Effective programs bring about a cognitive transformation in offenders and delinquents. Theorists have begun to develop hypotheses about how and why these transformations are effective. The current emphasis on evidence-based programs, the research evidence on what is effective and the need to reduce the cost of corrections suggest we are on the brink of another paradigm change. Where this will take us is still unclear, but the paradigm will have to address the current problems facing the U.S. correctional systems.     

Psychosocial functioning among inmates in prison-based drug treatment: results from Project BRITE

Objective

To assess the impact of a positive behavioral reinforcement intervention on psychosocial functioning of inmates over the course of treatment and on post-treatment self-reported measures of treatment participation, progress, and satisfaction.

Method

Male (n?=?187) and female (n?=?143) inmates participating in 12-week prison-based intensive outpatient (IOP) drug treatment were randomly assigned to receive standard treatment (ST) or standard treatment plus positive behavioral reinforcement (BR) for engaging in targeted activities and behaviors. Participants were assessed for psychosocial functioning at baseline and at the conclusion of treatment (post-treatment). Self-reported measures of treatment participation, treatment progress, and treatment satisfaction were also captured at post-treatment.

Results

The intervention affected female and male subjects differently and not always in a way that favored BR subjects, as compared to the ST subjects, most notably on measures of depression and criminal thinking.

Conclusions

Possible explanations for the results include differences in the male and female custody environments combined with the procedures that study participants had to follow to earn and/or receive positive reinforcement at the two study sites, as well as baseline differences between the genders and a possible floor effect among females on measures of criminality. Limitations of the study included the inability to make study participants blind to the study conditions and the possible over-branding of the study, which may have influenced the results.     

Long-term effects of the Moving to Opportunity residential mobility experiment on crime and delinquency

Objectives

Using data from a randomized experiment, to examine whether moving youth out of areas of concentrated poverty, where a disproportionate amount of crime occurs, prevents involvement in crime.

Methods

We draw on new administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO families were randomized into an experimental group offered a housing voucher that could only be used to move to a low-poverty neighborhood, a Section 8 housing group offered a standard housing voucher, and a control group. This paper focuses on MTO youth ages 15–25 in 2001 (n = 4,643) and analyzes intention to treat effects on neighborhood characteristics and criminal behavior (number of violent- and property-crime arrests) through 10 years after randomization.

Results

We find the offer of a housing voucher generates large improvements in neighborhood conditions that attenuate over time and initially generates substantial reductions in violent-crime arrests and sizable increases in property-crime arrests for experimental group males. The crime effects attenuate over time along with differences in neighborhood conditions.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that criminal behavior is more strongly related to current neighborhood conditions (situational neighborhood effects) than to past neighborhood conditions (developmental neighborhood effects). The MTO design makes it difficult to determine which specific neighborhood characteristics are most important for criminal behavior. Our administrative data analyses could be affected by differences across areas in the likelihood that a crime results in an arrest.     

Lessons from a field experiment involving involuntary subjects 3,000 miles away

Objectives

Describe the challenges involved in conducting field experiments that entail a long distance between the research team and the research site.

Methods

A summary of the lessons learned from the field experiment of Hawaii??s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE).

Results

Pre-trial planning is especially important when the research team is a long distance from the research site. A good communication strategy helps educate practitioners on the merits of conservative design choices, such as intent-to-treat, and helps to signal the importance of the study and therefore of maintaining the condition assignments and delivering the intervention with fidelity.

Conclusions

Distance creates additional challenges for the research team. These challenges make it even more essential to exploit assets at the research site. Distance creates more uncertainty, which makes pre-planning even more important, but it is expensive. Criminal-justice funding agencies?? support for exploratory studies as precursors to full-blown trials would improve the quality of experimental criminal-justice research.     

The Incapacitation Effect of First-Time Imprisonment: A Matched Samples Comparison

Objectives

The logic of incapacitation is the prevention of crime via the forced removal of known offenders from the community. The challenge is to provide a plausible estimate of how many crimes an incarcerated individual would have committed, were s/he free in the community rather than confined in prison. The objective of this study is to provide estimates of the incapacitation effect of first-time imprisonment from a sample of convicted offenders.

Methods

The data are official criminal records of all individuals convicted in The Netherlands in 1997. Two different analytical strategies are used to estimate an incapacitation effect. First, the offending rate of the imprisoned individuals prior to their confinement in 1997 provides a “within-person counterfactual”. Second, imprisoned offenders are paired with comparable non-imprisoned offenders using the method of propensity score matching in order to estimate a “between-person counterfactual”. Incapacitation estimates are provided separately for juvenile imprisonment (ages 12–17) as well as adult imprisonment (ages 18–50), and for male and female offenders.

Results

The best estimate is that 1 year of incarceration prevents between 0.17 and 0.21 convictions per year. The use of additional data sources indicates that this corresponds to between roughly 2.0 and 2.5 criminal offenses recorded by the police.

Conclusions

The current results suggest that, insofar as imprisonment is used with the primary goal of reducing crime through incapacitation, a general increase in the use of incarceration as the sanction of choice is not likely to yield major crime control benefits.     

Public support for vigilantism: an experimental study

Objectives

To empirically examine the absolute and relative impact of situational characteristics and confidence in the criminal justice system on public support for vigilantism.

Methods

In an experimental study with a between-subjects design, members of a Dutch household panel (n = 1,930) responded to vignettes about vigilantism that were varied across two experimental factors: (1) type of precipitating crime and (2) type of formal sentence for the precipitating offender. In the measurement of support, we distinguished between outrage at vigilantism, empathy with the vigilante, and desired punishment for the vigilante. Confidence was assessed 1?month later.

Results

Our findings show that situational characteristics have a substantial and independent influence on support for vigilantism, in addition to the role of confidence. This means that when citizens express support for those who take the law into their own hands, this is not necessarily rooted in a lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. Furthermore, all three measures of support were affected more by the situational characteristics than by confidence.

Conclusions

Citizens are nuanced in their judgment of vigilantism and sensitive to contextual information, which is in line with other recent findings regarding public punitiveness. Future studies should assess whether the findings can be generalized to other settings where citizens cannot rely (as much) on the state to deal with crime.     

Consequences of legal risk communication for sanction perception updating and white-collar criminality

Objectives

Scholars have long emphasized that communicating, or “advertising”, information about legal sanction risk is necessary for the success of deterrence-based crime policies. However, scant research has evaluated whether direct communications about legal risk can cause sanction perception updating, the updating of ambiguity in sanction perceptions, or changes in persons’ willingness to offend. No prior studies have evaluated sanction perception updating for white-collar crimes.

Methods

To address this research void, the current study analyzes data from an experiment embedded in a recent national survey (N?=?878). Multivariate regression models estimate the effect of providing participants with information about the “objective” arrest risk for white-collar offenses on their sanction perceptions.

Results

The findings provide the first evidence that such information, when it is inconsistent with individuals’ prior beliefs, causes them to update: (1) their perceptions of the certainty of arrest; (2) their ambiguity about arrest risk; and, indirectly, (3) their willingness to commit white-collar crimes.

Conclusions

The results imply that individuals are willing to incorporate relevant information into their subjective beliefs about sanction risks. Importantly, however, they also make meaningful distinctions about the value of new information for understanding criminal risks.

     

Retrieving administrative data to assess long-term outcomes: a case study of the 23-year follow-up of the Milwaukee domestic violence experiment

Objectives

To describe how social scientists, criminal justice practitioners, and administrative agencies collected administrative data to follow-up a criminological experiment after two decades. To make recommendations that will guide similar long-term follow-ups.

Methods

A case study approach describes the processes of and sociological benefits to collecting administrative data to assess criminal justice and life-course outcomes.

Results

While maintaining experimental integrity, we developed, executed, and verified processes to retrieve arrest, mortality, and residential data for the experimental subjects, which enabled us to complete the longest ever follow-up of a criminal justice experiment.

Conclusions

When experiments have policy implications, administrative data may be preferable to survey data for assessing primary effects. Successful social science research can be conducted in conjunction with multiple administrative agencies.

     

Immigration and the Changing Nature of Homicide in US Cities, 1980–2010

Objectives

Previous research has neglected to consider whether trends in immigration are related to changes in the nature of homicide. This is important because there is considerable variability in the temporal trends of homicide subtypes disaggregated by circumstance. In the current study, we address this issue by investigating whether within-city changes in immigration are related to temporal variations in rates of overall and circumstance-specific homicide for a sample of large US cities during the period between 1980 and 2010.

Methods

Fixed-effects negative binomial and two-stage least squares (2SLS) instrumental variable regression models are used to analyze data from 156 large US cities observed during the 1980–2010 period.

Results

Findings from the analyses suggest that temporal change in overall homicide and drug homicide rates are significantly related to changes in immigration. Specifically, increases in immigration are associated with declining rates for each of the preceding outcome measures. Moreover, for several of the homicide types, findings suggest that the effects of changes in immigration vary across places, with the largest negative associations appearing in cities that had relatively high initial (i.e., 1970) immigration levels.

Conclusions

There is support for the thesis that changes in immigration in recent decades are related to changes in rates of lethal violence. However, it appears that the relationship is contingent and varied, not general.