INDEFINITE PUNISHMENT AND THE CRIMINAL RECORD: STIGMA REPORTS AMONG EXPUNGEMENT‐SEEKERS IN ILLINOIS*

Although criminal records in the United States are more publicly accessible than ever before, we lack knowledge about how record‐bearers seek to overcome the negative consequences associated with a visible criminal record as they apply for jobs, housing, and financial aid. Furthermore, although criminal histories record all arrests—and not just those that result in conviction—researchers have yet to compare how those with more extensive versus minor criminal records cope with criminal record stigma. We present interview data from a comparative study of expungement‐seekers (N = 53) who have petitioned the courts to remove their criminal records from public view. One group had extensive criminal records (46 percent); the other group had more minor criminal records (54 percent). Several key findings emerged. First, both groups of participants tried, but failed, to persuade potential employers and landlords to overlook the criminal record. They also faced restricted educational opportunity. Second, participants in both groups expressed distress that criminal justice contact could follow them throughout their lives, subjecting them to ongoing stigma. However, those with extensive versus minor criminal records offered different rationales explaining why the visible criminal record history unfairly burdened them. Implications for reintegration theory and policy are discussed.     

A NEW LOOK AT THE EMPLOYMENT AND RECIDIVISM RELATIONSHIP THROUGH THE LENS OF A CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECK*

Criminal background checks are increasingly being incorporated into hiring decisions by employers. Although originally uncompromising—almost anyone with a criminal record could be denied employment—court rulings and policy changes have forced criminal background checks to become more nuanced. One motivation for allowing more individuals with criminal records to work is to decrease recidivism and encourage desistance. In this article, we estimate the causal impact of receiving a clearance to work on subsequent arrests for individuals with criminal records who have been provisionally hired to work in certain nonlicensed health‐care jobs in New York State (N = 6,648). We employ an instrumental variable approach based on a substantive understanding of the state‐mandated criminal background check process. We examine age‐graded effects within this group of motivated individuals and differential effects by sex in the rapidly growing health‐care industry, which is typically dominated by women. Our estimated local average treatment effect indicates a 2.2‐percentage‐point decrease in the likelihood of a subsequent arrest in 1 year and a 4.2‐percentage‐point decrease over 3 years. We find meaningful variations by sex; men are 8.4 percentage points less likely to be arrested over the 3‐year period when cleared compared with a 2.4‐percentage‐point (and nonsignificant) effect for women. Older women in particular are driving the nonsignificant results for women.     

INTERORGANIZATIONAL UTILITY OF WELFARE STIGMA IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM*

The appropriation of “welfare stigma” or stereotypes about poor people's overreliance and abuse of public aid in two core criminal justice functions is examined: felony adjudication in a court system and space allocation in a jail. Through a comparative ethnographic study in which an abductive analysis of data (20 months of fieldwork) was used, we show that criminal justice gatekeepers utilize welfare stigma to create stricter eligibility criteria for due process in criminal courts and occupancy in jails. Specifically, the number of court appearances, motions, trials, jail beds, food, showers, and medical services is considered by professionals to be the benefits that individuals seek to access and abuse. Professionals view their role as preventing (rather than granting) access to these resources. The comparative nature of our data reveals that welfare stigma has interorganizational utility by serving two different organizational goals: It streamlines convictions in courts, which pulls defendants through adjudication, and conversely, it expands early release from jails, which pulls inmates out of the custody population. In the context of diminishing social safety nets, our findings have implications for understanding how discretion is exercised in an American criminal justice system increasingly tasked with the distribution of social services to the urban poor.     

INTERPREIING OFFICIAL RECORDS AS INDICATORS OF RECIDIVISM IN EVALUATING DELINQUENCY PREVENTION PROGRAMS

Evaluations of crime reduction and prevention programs often use information from official law enforcement or judicial records as ostensibly “objective” indicators of criminal or delinquent activity. However. we of data from official police and court records in assessing the effectiveness of a delinquency prevention program in King County. Washington, yielded divergent conclusions regarding program “success,” depending upon choices in interpretation of records used and the data presentation format adopted. these choices also determined which socio demographic and service-related variables appeared to be related to delinquency. The article calls into question the reliability and validity of official record data as indicators of recidivism, calls for rethinking the selection and use of indicators of program effect in evaluation studies, and calls for further research to explore the possible existence of consistent relationships among available delinquency measures.     

The criminal career of men convicted of rape: evidence from a Norwegian national cohort

The extent to which sexual offenders are a group separate from other types of offenders has been debated for many years and investigated from different perspectives. The present study investigated similarities and differences regarding socio-economic background, criminal history and recidivism involving new crimes between rape offenders and three other groups: other sexual offenders, non-sexual violent offenders and other offenders. Data came from Norwegian population registers containing information on all crimes investigated from 1992 to 2012. The sample consisted of all persons convicted in 2002 and 2003 (N = 36,951). Background characteristics and estimated recidivism risk was described using hazard models. Results indicated that men convicted of rape (n = 142) had lower levels of education and that a higher percentage of them were on social benefits compared to the other crime groups. A large majority (79%) of rape-convicted men had previous convictions. Rape offenders were considerably more criminally active and diverse than the other crime groups. Prior criminal record, irrespective of type, increased the risk of recidivism in general. Controlling for other background characteristics did not alter this outcome. Treatment of convicted rapists needs to take into consideration that this offender group has much in common with violent offenders in general.     

REDEMPTION IN THE PRESENCE OF WIDESPREAD CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS*

Criminal background checks have now become ubiquitous because of advances in information technology and growing concerns about employer liability. Also, a large number of individual criminal records have accumulated and have been computerized in state repositories and commercial databases. As a result, many ex‐offenders seeking employment could be haunted by a stale record. Recidivism probability declines with time “clean,” so some point in time is reached when a person with a criminal record, who remained free of further contact with the criminal justice system, is of no greater risk than a counterpart of the same age—an indication of redemption from the mark of crime. Very little information exists on this measure of time until redemption and on how its value varies with the crime type and the offender's age at the time of the earlier event. Using data from a state criminal‐history repository, we estimate the declining hazard of rearrest with time clean. We first estimate a point of redemption as the time when the hazard intersects the age–crime curve, which represents the arrest risk for the general population of the same age. We also estimate another similar redemption point when the declining hazard comes “sufficiently close” to the hazard of those who have never been arrested. We estimate both measures of redemption as a function of the age and the crime type of the earlier arrest. These findings aid in the development of guidelines for the users of background checking and in developing regulations to enhance employment opportunities for ex‐offenders.     

RACE,RACIAL THREAT,AND SENTENCING OF HABITUAL OFFENDERS*

As legislatures proliferate novel “enhancements” to criminal sentencing, such as “three-strikes” and related provisions, and as criminologists debate their effects, the role of existing enhancements, such as habitual offender statutes, has received little empirical attention. This article explores the effect of race in the decision to prosecute and sentence eligible defendants as “habitual” offenders. During FY 1992–93, 9,690 males admitted to prison in Florida were statutorily eligible (two prior felony convictions or one prior violent felony conviction) for sentencing as “habitual” offenders. Approximately 20% received that disposition. They will serve at least 75% of their enhanced sentence as compared with the state average of about 40%. Logistic regression, controlling for prior record, crime seriousness, and other relevant factors, shows a significant and substantial race effect. The disadvantage of black defendants is particularly strong for drug offenses and for property crimes that have relatively high victimization rates for whites (larceny, burglary). Race is less consequential for violent and weapons-related crimes. Race effects are more often significant in sentencing contexts that are low in terms of percent black, racial income inequality, drug arrest rates, and violent crime rates. The relevance of these findings for a “racial threat” interpretation of sentencing outcomes is discussed.     

Facing Your Criminal Record: Expungement and the Collateral Problem of Wrongfully Represented Self

While substantial sociolegal research has analyzed the deleterious effects of criminal records on life outcomes, little has examined the records themselves, or their relationship to the people they represent. In this article I take a novel tact, treating criminal records as the material, textual documentations of an individual's past. I then observe expungement seekers—people who encounter their own records—to understand their reactions. From this data, I use inductive theories of symbolic interactionism to theorize another collateral effect of the criminal record: it represents people in ways that depersonalize their social identities, and prevents them from communicating corrective self‐understandings to the governing bodies that author the records. I conclude with my main theoretical contribution: “having a criminal record,” literally, means having a textual proxy that the state has authored on its own terms, without input from the people whom it permanently represents, and while concealing from those people the apparatus behind authorship. As a consequence, the criminal records system serves as a barrier to reciprocal communication between ex‐arrestees and a legal system that represents them in ways that they may want to contest. This “wrongful representation” is a collateral effect of having a criminal record that impedes the ability of ex‐arrestees to manage or repair their relationship with the state that has punished them.     

THE PREDICTIVE VALUE OF CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS: DO AGE AND CRIMINAL HISTORY AFFECT TIME TO REDEMPTION?*

Criminal record checks are being used increasingly by decision makers to predict future unwanted behaviors. A central question these decision makers face is how much time it takes before offenders can be considered “redeemed” and resemble nonoffenders in terms of the probability of offending. Building on a small literature addressing this topic for youthful, first‐time offenders, the current article asks whether this period differs across the age of last conviction and the total number of prior convictions. Using long‐term longitudinal data on a Dutch conviction cohort, we find that young novice offenders are redeemed after approximately 10 years of remaining crime free. For older offenders, the redemption period is considerably shorter. Offenders with extensive criminal histories, however, either never resemble their nonconvicted counterparts or only do so after a crime‐free period of more than 20 years. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

RACE-SPECIFIC EMPLOYMENT CONTEXTS AND RECIDIVISM*

Although much literature has examined macrolevel employment contexts and crime rates and, at the individual level, employment and offending, few studies have examined systematically whether macrolevel employment contexts influence individual-level offending. At the same time, emerging literature on prisoner reentry increasingly underscores the potential importance of the social environment for impeding or facilitating successful transitions back into society. All three avenues of inquiry have emphasized the salience of race-specific and offense-specific effects. This study extends prior work on ecology and offending, employment and crime, and prisoner reentry by examining the race-specific effects of unemployment rates and manufacturing employment rates on violent, property, and drug recidivism. By analyzing data on male ex-prisoners released to 67 counties in Florida, we found, as hypothesized, that Black ex-prisoners released to areas with higher Black male unemployment rates have a greater likelihood of violent recidivism. No comparable effect was identified for White exprisoners. However, we found that White ex-prisoners, especially those without prior violent convictions, have a lower likelihood of violent recidivism when released to areas with higher White male manufacturing employment rates. We discuss the findings and their implications for theory, research, and policy.     

Offending histories and offending behaviour: A Ten year follow-up of sex offenders tried by Sheriff and District Courts in Grampian,Scotland

From criminal complaint records all incidents of sexual misbehaviour resulting in charges in three North East Scotland courts during 1981 and 1982 were traced. Of the 80 alleged offenders, 75 were followed up for 10 years using current criminal records.

Offending behaviour ranged from obscene telephone calls to rape. Half the offenders made no physical contact with their victims. These “hands-off” offenders were compared with “hands-on” offenders and were found to show a higher prevalence of sexual convictions both before the index offence and in the follow-up period. Those offenders who removed their victims clothes or had sexual intercourse with their victims were found to have the lowest prevalence of sexual reoffending. Degree of intrusiveness was inversely related to sexual recidivism in this sample and there was no evidence of progression over time to more intrusive offending.     

“BACK-END SENTENCING” AND REIMPRISONMENT: INDIVIDUAL,ORGANIZATIONAL, AND COMMUNITY PREDICTORS OF PAROLE SANCTIONING DECISIONS*

An understudied contributor to the massive growth of American incarceration is an increase in the practice of reimprisoning parolees through parole board revocations—now referred to as “back-end sentencing.” To conduct the analyses outlined in this article, we use data from the California Parole Study to analyze the effects of three clusters of factors (parolees' characteristics, organizational pressures, and community conditions) on these sentences. Our analyses are informed by theories that have been used to explain “front-end” (court) sentences, which center on the focal concerns of social-control agents, labeling, and racial threat. Our results indicate that status characteristics—race/ethnicity and gender—affect the likelihood that criminal parole violators are reimprisoned. Moreover, certain “pivotal categories” of parolees—registered sex offenders and those who have committed “serious” or “violent” offenses—are much more likely to be returned to prison than others. Organizational pressure (prison crowding) also affects the likelihood of reimprisonment. Communities' political punitiveness affects the likelihood that technical violators are reimprisoned and that serious or violent offenders are reimprisoned for criminal violations. In this article, we use these findings to consider ways that mass incarceration is driven by both top-down policies as well as bottom-up organizational and community forces.     

DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.     

The Effect of Racial Inequality on Black Male Recidivism

Macrostructural opportunity theorists posit that the unequal distribution of economic resources across racial groups promotes animosities among disadvantaged minorities, disrupts community integration, and fosters criminal activity. Guided by this framework, we hypothesize that Black ex‐prisoners who reenter communities with high levels of racial inequality are more likely to commit new crimes. Support for this argument is found for a large group of males (N = 34,868) released from state prisons to 62 counties in Florida over a 2‐year period. We also find evidence that racial inequality amplifies the adverse effects of person‐level risk factors on recidivism for Black ex‐inmates. In comparison, the effect of inequality on White male recidivism is far less meaningful. These findings underscore the need for researchers to consider social context when studying recidivism among Black males, and also support the efforts of correctional reformers who advocate for state resources to assist prisoner reentry.     

SUPERVISION REGIMES,RISK, AND OFFICIAL REACTIONS TO PAROLEE DEVIANCE*

Parolee deviance has emerged as a central issue in policy debates about crime and punishment in American society as well as in scholarship on “mass incarceration.” Although the prevailing approach to studying parolees conceives of parole violations as outcomes of individual propensities toward criminal behavior (i.e., criminogenic risk), we consider how indicators of individual risk and characteristics of formal social control systems combine to account for reported parole violations. Using data on California parolees, we examine the effects of parolees’ personal characteristics, their criminal histories, and the social organization of supervision on parole violations. We advance the notion of a “supervision regime”—a legal and organizational structure that shapes the detection and reporting of parolee deviance. Three components of a supervision regime are explored: 1) the intensity of supervision, 2) the capacity of the regime to detect parolee deviance, and 3) the tolerance of parole officials for parolee deviance. We find that personal characteristics and offense histories are predictive of parole violations. However, we also find that introducing supervision factors reduces the effects of offense history variables on violation risk, suggesting that the violation risks of serious, violent, and sexual offenders are partially explainable through the heightened supervision to which they are subject. In addition, we find that supervision intensity and tolerance are generally predictive of violation risk. Capacity effects are present but weak. We conclude with a discussion of how the supervision regimes concept illuminates the gap between macro‐ and micro‐analyses of social control.     

Violence risk and gang affiliation in youth offenders: a recidivism study

Abstract

Youth gangs are ubiquitous around the world and have been problematic for the social and criminal justice agencies. Despite widespread public concern, there has been relatively scarce empirical scrutiny of youth gangs internationally and little outside of America and Europe. In particular, the activities of youth gangs, the function of gang membership, the criminogenic needs of gang-affiliated youth, and the risk of criminal recidivism for gang-affiliated youth remain unclear. Against this background, this study explored the sociodemographic characteristics, risk and rate of criminal recidivism in a cohort of 165 male youth offenders in Singapore, of which 58 were gang-affiliated. Multivariate analyses revealed that gang-affiliated youth offenders were significantly more likely to have histories of substance use, weapon use and violence than nongang-affiliated youth offenders. Gang-affiliated offenders also scored higher on measures of risk for recidivism (SAVRY and YLS/CMI), and engaged in violent and other criminal behaviors more frequently during follow-up. These differences indicate a significant relationship between gang affiliation and criminal recidivism in youth offenders. Furthermore, these findings have important clinical and policy implications, indicating an increased requirement for additional and more intensive assessment and tailored interventions for gang-affiliated youth offenders.     

SELECTIVE INCAPACITATION AND THE PROBLEM OF PREDICTION*

Recent innovations in sentencing policy across the United States reveal a renewed interest in the idea of selective incapacitation of criminal offenders. This is perhaps most evident in the proliferation of “Three Strikes and You're Out” habitual-offender statutes across the nation. Although the term was first introduced by David Greenberg in 1975, Peter Greenwood and Allan Abrahamse's eponymous 1982 Rand report represents the most fully articulated plan for implementing such a strategy. The report's release stimulated much discussion, because of the AUTHOR'S claims that selective incapacitation could simultaneously reduce crime rates and prison populations. Ethical problems inherent in such proposals as well as methodological inconsistencies in the original research warrant a reexamination of the proposal and of the empirical basis for the conclusions offered therein. Greenwood and Abrahamse's original research is replicated with a representative sample of California state prison inmates (N = 2, 188) in light of these limitations, with specific focus on the methodological issues concerning the construction of the predictive scale. The selective incapacitation scheme advocated by Greenwood and Abrahamse performs extremely poorly in terms of both reliability and validity, thus precluding the implementation of such schemes. The article contains a discussion of other, more ethically acceptable uses of an instrument that identifies “high-rate” or “dangerous” offenders. In conclusion, some observations on the limitations of incarceration-based strategies of crime control are offered.     

Lifetime conviction risk—a synthetic cohort approach

How common are convictions? The stigma of a criminal record can have serious social and financial consequences for the individual. It is a fundamental question in relation to any policy how many people will be affected by it. For example, if it is desirable to make sentencing generally stricter, or restrict ex-offenders' employment opportunities, how many people will that apply to? Little is known about how many people acquire a criminal record over their life-course. In this paper, I apply life-table methods to a synthetic cohort to calculate the lifetime conviction risk. The findings show that a substantial proportion of the population will be convicted of a crime at some point. Not surprisingly, the figures for men are substantially higher than for women.     

THE EFFECT OF CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS ON HIRING EX‐OFFENDERS*

Research Summary The rapid increase in the nation's incarceration rate over the past decade has raised questions about how to reintegrate a growing number of ex‐offenders successfully. Employment has been shown to be an important factor in reintegration, especially for men over the age of 27 years who characterize most individuals released from prison. This article explores this question using unique establishment‐level data collected in Los Angeles in 2001. On average, we replicate the now‐common finding that employer‐initiated criminal background checks are negatively related to the hiring of ex‐offenders. However, this negative effect is less than complete. The effect is strongly negative for those employers that are legally required to perform background checks, which is not surprising because these legal requirements to perform checks are paired with legal prohibitions against hiring ex‐offenders. However, some employers seem to perform checks to gain additional information about ex‐offenders (and thus hire more ex‐offenders than other employers), and checking seems to have no effect on hiring ex‐offenders for those employers not legally required to perform checks. Policy Implications One public policy initiative that has received considerable attention is to deny employers access to criminal history record information, which includes movements to “ban the box” that inquires about criminal history information on job applications. The assumption underlying this movement is that knowledge of ex‐offender status leads directly to a refusal to hire. The results of this analysis show that policy initiatives aimed at restricting background checks, particularly for those firms not legally required to perform checks, may not have the desired consequences of increasing ex‐offender employment. This result is consistent with an alternative view that some employers care about the characteristics of the criminal history record and use information about criminal history in a more nuanced, nondiscrete way.     

Rights Restoration and the Entanglement of US Criminal and Civil Law: A Study of New York's “Certificates of Relief”

Despite burgeoning interest in prisoner re‐entry and the “collateral consequences” of criminal convictions, we know little about the practical operation of policies governing the rights and privileges of people with criminal convictions. This study examines New York's Certificates of Relief from Civil Disabilities to explore the workings of the US carceral state at the intersection of criminal and civil law. These certificates remove some legal restrictions accompanying convictions, particularly licensure barriers, and are easier to achieve than pardons; other states have used New York's policy as a model. Interviews with judges and probation officers reveal deep variations in how they understand and award certificates. In some cases, differences stem from informal local agreements, particularly concerning firearms in rural communities; in others, from discretionary judgments in a context of legal ambiguity. These practices demonstrate how specific legal, organizational, and cultural factors contribute to complexity and variation in the US carceral state.