PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUTH THEFT,MARIJUANA USE,DEPRESSION, AND POOR ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE*

Explanations for the fact that crime tends to run in families have focused on the deprived social backgrounds of criminal parents, methods of child‐rearing, modeling processes, and genetic mechanisms. However, parental involvement in the criminal justice system itself also might contribute to the intergenerational transmission of crime and have other adverse effects on children's well‐being. We investigated the development of youth problem behavior in relation to parental arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the youngest and oldest samples of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a longitudinal survey of 1,009 inner‐city boys. Parental arrest and conviction without incarceration did not predict the development of youth problem behavior. Parental incarceration was not associated with increases in marijuana use, depression, or poor academic performance. However, boys experiencing parental incarceration showed greater increases in theft compared with a control group matched on propensity scores. The association between parental incarceration and youth theft was stronger for White youth than for Black youth. Parenting and peer relations after parental incarceration explained about half of its effects on youth theft. Because the effects of parental incarceration were specific to youth theft, labeling and stigma processes might be particularly important for understanding the consequences of parental incarceration for children.     

HOW THE U.S. PRISON BOOM HAS CHANGED THE AGE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRISON POPULATION

This article provides a demographic exposition of the changes in the U.S prison population during the period of mass incarceration that began in the late twentieth century. By drawing on data from the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities (1974–2004) for inmates 17–72 years of age (N = 336), we show that the age distribution shifted upward dramatically: Only 16 percent of the state prison population was 40 years old or older in 1974; by 2004, this percentage had doubled to 33 percent with the median age of prisoners rising from 27 to 34 years old. By using an estimable function approach, we find that the change in the age distribution of the prison population is primarily a cohort effect that is driven by the “enhanced” penal careers of the cohorts who hit young adulthood—the prime age of both crime and incarceration—when substance use was at its peak. Period‐specific factors (e.g., proclivity for punishment and incidence of offense) do matter, but they seem to play out more across the life cycles of persons most affected in young adulthood (cohort effects) than across all age groups at one point in time (period effects).     

RECIDIVIST IMPACTS OF DIFFERENTIAL SENTENCING PRACTICES FOR BURGLARY OFFENDERS

The research reported here attempts to examine the recidivist impacts of probationary sentences versus incarceration. Statistically controlled comparisons were run on a probability sample of 100 offenders sentenced for residential or commercial burglary convictions in 1971. Subsequent arrest, conviction. and imprisonment data were gathered from official agency records through March of 1975. The results of this study indicate that for persons sentenced for burglary the likelihood of subsequent conviction for a felony or for any crime is less for probationer offenders than for any other sentence type. The strongest predictors of recidivism (defined as subsequent conviction for crime) were age, previous incarceration experience, and sentence type. Length of sentence. type of release, and number of previous arrests were essentially unrelated to subsequent rates of recidivism.     

Making economically sound confinement decisions: A response to the zedlewski thesis

This paper examines the economic costs and benefits of incarceration of criminals, elaborating upon and correcting flaws in Zedlewski’s 1987 claims that incarceration is a cost-minimizing crime prevention strategy. We use Bureau of Justice Statistics data to demonstrate gross errors in Zedlewski’s crude estimates. We find that the costs of incarceration are more than double the benefits in costs of crime avoided. We conclude that the cost-saving incapacitation effects of incarceration do not warrant either the current levels of imprisonment or any future increases.     

REASSESSING TRENDS IN BLACK VIOLENT CRIME, 1980–2008: SORTING OUT THE “HISPANIC EFFECT” IN UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS ARRESTS,NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY OFFENDER ESTIMATES,AND U.S. PRISONER COUNTS*

Recent studies suggest a decline in the relative Black effect on violent crime in recent decades and interpret this decline as resulting from greater upward mobility among African Americans during the past several decades. However, other assessments of racial stratification in American society suggest at least as much durability as change in Black social mobility since the 1980s. Our goal is to assess how patterns of racial disparity in violent crime and incarceration have changed from 1980 to 2008. We argue that prior studies showing a shrinking Black share of violent crime might be in error because of reliance on White and Black national crime statistics that are confounded with Hispanic offenders, whose numbers have been increasing rapidly and whose violence rates are higher than that of Whites but lower than that of Blacks. Using 1980–2008 California and New York arrest data to adjust for this “Hispanic effect” in national Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data, we assess whether the observed national decline in racial disparities in violent crime is an artifact of the growth in Hispanic populations and offenders. Results suggest that little overall change has occurred in the Black share of violent offending in both UCR and NCVS estimates during the last 30 years. In addition, racial imbalances in arrest versus incarceration levels across the index violent crimes are both small and comparably sized across the study period. We conclude by discussing the consistency of these findings with trends in economic and social integration of Blacks in American society during the past 50 years.     

Locking up my generation: Cohort differences in prison spells over the life course

Crime rates have dropped substantially in the United States, but incarceration rates have remained high. The standard explanation for the lasting trend in incarceration is that the policy choices from the 1980s and 1990s were part of a secular increase in punitiveness that has kept rates of incarceration high. Our study highlights a heretofore overlooked perspective: that the crime–punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave. With individual-level longitudinal sentencing data from 1972 to 2016 in North Carolina, we show that cohort effects—the lingering impacts of having reached young adulthood at particular times in the history of crime and punishment—are at least as large (and likely much larger) than annual variation in incarceration rates attributable to period-specific events and proclivities. The birth cohorts that reach prime age of crime during the 1980s and 1990s crime–punishment wave have elevated rates of incarceration throughout their observed life course. The key mechanism for their elevated incarceration rates decades after the crime–punishment wave is the accumulation of extended criminal history under a sentencing structure that systematically escalates punishment for those with priors.     

Social context of crime control: a time-series analysis of the Korean case, 1973–2002

Regardless of recent attempts to explain crime control in relation to its social structural conditions, few studies have assessed the economic, organizational, and political context of crime control simultaneously. This study integrated these three contexts into a single project to test the relevance of social structural explanations on major crime control practices over the past three decades in South Korea. By using a variety of official statistics, time-series regressions were used. The level of crime consistently explained most variation in the arrest rates for all four categories of crimes. Prosecutions also seemed to be closely responsive to the level of crime. However, the link between crime and incarceration rates was not found for all categories of crimes. This finding indicates that levels of incarceration could be determined by external factors such as the economic conditions, organizational capacity, and political climates. In addition, economic conditions, which were measured by the unemployment rate, appeared to have a strong relationship to all crime control practices; it was positively and statistically significant for arrest, prosecution and incarceration rates. Political repression was inversely related to all three practices. However, organizational capacity only seemed to affect incarceration rates. Failure or inconsistencies of some of the social contexts in explaining crime control practice in South Korea can be assessed in both methodological and substantive grounds. This underscores the need to develop more solid theoretical arguments and empirical measures for their roles in crime control.     

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.     

Beating a dead horse: Is there any basic empirical evidence for the deterrent effect of imprisonment?

Crime has declined over the past several years, renewing the belief that punishments such as imprisonment are useful mechanisms for deterring criminal activity. This article assesses this claim by examining data on U.S. crime and imprisonment trends from 1972 through 1993, a period that saw a continuous increase in levels of incarceration. This period was purposefully chosen because it represents a “natural” experiment concerning the impact of continuous increases in the rate of incarceration on crime rates. A second analysis examining cross-sectional, state level data for the period 1980-1991 is also presented. The findings from these analyses indicate that sentiments concerning the deterrent effect of imprisonment are overstated, and there appears to be no statistically significant relationship between imprisonment rates and crime rates for the period and areas under study. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Fight Against Organised Crime in Europe: A Comparative Perspective

This article provides an overview of the measures and actions taken by the Member States of the European Union in their fight against organised crime and transborder crime. The Action Plan to Combat Organized Crime adopted by the Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs during the Dutch EU Presidency, submitted some 30 recommendations with respect to greater harmonisation regarding the fight against organised crime in the EU Member States. The author gives a concise summary of the most relevant changes and the structural characteristics per Member State, paying attention to developments in the specific countries and the organisations involved. One of the conclusions reached is that few or no reforms within national investigative and prosecution authorities may be directly traced back to the regulatory impulses of the EU. Although the EU Action Plan has not yet realised a convergence of the systems, the European process of integration has increased the mutual transparency and knowledge of one another's systems.     

The effect of maternal incarceration on adult offspring involvement in the criminal justice system

Researchers have estimated that 63 percent of incarcerated women have one or more minor children and most reported living with their children prior to incarceration (Mumola, 2000). Unfortunately, children of incarcerated parents have been a relatively invisible population in the research on the collateral consequences of incarceration. The goal of the current study was to examine the long-term effect of maternal incarceration on adult offspring involvement in the criminal justice system using data from the mother child sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Based on existing research, it was hypothesized that the adult offspring of incarcerated mothers would be more likely to have been convicted of a crime or to be sentenced to probation. The effect of maternal incarceration on correlates of criminal behavior in adolescence and early adulthood (e.g., negative peer influences, positive home environment) was also modeled to assess possible indirect effects. The results highlighted the direct effect of incarceration on adult offspring involvement in the criminal justice system, but parental incarceration had little association with correlates of criminal behavior.     

INCARCERATION AND POPULATION HEALTH IN WEALTHY DEMOCRACIES*

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.     

Revisiting Incapacitation: Can We Generate New Estimates?

A substantial body of empirical research examines how the huge expansion in incarceration in the United States since the early 1970s has influenced crime. These studies merge the effects of three conceptually distinct paths by which incarceration might reduce crime: general deterrence, specific deterrence and incapacitation. This issue of the Journal focuses specifically on the incapacitation path. This Introduction reviews the individual papers and offers the editors’ judgment as to the plausibility of progress using different research strategies. It emphasizes the potential for using individual level data to take advantage of natural experiments.

Institutional anomie and cross-national differences in incarceration†

Messner and Rosenfeld's (2007) institutional anomie theory (IAT) has mainly been applied by criminologists to explain crime rates at various aggregate levels. However, Messner and Rosenfeld also suggest that the same social and cultural forces that lead to high crime may explain differences in punishment, although this latter proposition has yet to be subject to empirical testing. Using a variety of data sources for 41 countries measuring various structural and cultural configurations, in this study we assess the extent to which IAT can explain cross-national differences in incarceration. Our results indicate that the strength of the economic institution and the extent of institutional imbalance reflecting a dominant economic institution are positively associated with incarceration rates when the national culture is characterized by individualism, a competitive achievement orientation, or both. A national culture characterized by both collectivism and a cooperative achievement orientation, however, serves as a buffer against the punitive effects of an institutional imbalance that favors the economy. Our results are discussed in the context of the extant IAT literature and future research on cross-national incarceration.     

Place and Punishment: The Spatial Context of Mass Incarceration

Objectives

Research on race and urban poverty views incarceration as a new and important aspect of social disadvantage in inner-city neighborhoods. However, in quantitative studies of the spatial distribution of imprisonment across neighborhoods, the pattern outside urban areas has not been examined. This paper offers a unique analysis of disaggregated prison admissions and investigates the spatial concentrations and levels of admissions for the entire state of Massachusetts.

Methods

Spatial regressions estimate census tract-level prison admission rates in relation to racial demographics, social and economic disadvantage, arrest rates, and violent crime; an analysis of outlier neighborhoods examines the surprisingly high admission rates in small cities.

Findings

Regression analysis yields three findings. First, incarceration is highly spatially concentrated: census tracts covering 15% of the state’s population account for half of all prison admissions. Second, across urban and non-urban areas, incarceration is strongly related to concentrated disadvantage and the share of the black population, even after controlling for arrest and crime rates. Third, the analysis shows admission rates in small urban satellite cities and suburbs comprise the highest rates in the sample and far exceed model predictions.

Conclusion

Mass incarceration emerged not just to manage distinctively urban social problems but was characteristic of a broader mode of governance evident in communities often far-removed from deep inner-city poverty. These notably high levels and concentrations in small cities should be accounted for when developing theories of concentrated disadvantage or policies designed to ameliorate the impacts of mass incarceration on communities.

     

Science, politics, and crime prevention: Toward a new crime policy

Objective

Crime prevention has entered a new, more robust phase of research activity and holds greater relevance to policy and practice today than ever before. It stands as an important component of an overall strategy to reduce crime. This paper sets out a modest proposal for a new crime policy to help build a safer, more sustainable society.

Materials and methods

Narrative meta-review of the crime prevention literature.

Results

The central features include: ensuring that the highest quality scientific research is at center stage in the policy-making process; overcoming the “short-termism” politics of the day; and striking a greater balance between crime prevention and crime control. Both simulation studies and experiences in Washington State show that early prevention can reduce crime, save money, and reduce the need for costly incarceration.

Conclusions

Quality criminological research should be used to strike a policy balance between crime prevention and crime control.     

PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN'S RISK OF BEING CHARGED BY EARLY ADULTHOOD: EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK*

In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically decreased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the reform affected a child's risk of ever subsequently being charged with a crime. Specifically, we use a difference‐in‐differences framework to compare all Danish children 12–18 years of age whose fathers were eligible for a noncustodial sentence instead of incarceration under the reform [N = 1,546] with a reference group of children whose fathers were convicted of similar crimes but were ineligible [N = 1,852] in the 2 years surrounding when the reform was enacted [July 1, 2000] as a way of testing the effects of the reform on children's risk of ever being charged with a crime by 22–28 years of age. Our estimates indicate that having a father sentenced under the reform sharply decreased the risk of being charged in the next 10 years for boys but not for girls. Taken together, these results indicate that both paternal criminality and paternal incarceration promote the criminal justice contact of male children and, hence, that paternal incarceration is not solely a symptom of criminality but also a cause of it.     

Policies and Imprisonment: The Impact of Structured Sentencing and Determinate Sentencing on State Incarceration Rates, 1978–2004

Research has begun to systematically assess the relationship between sentencing policies and state incarceration rates. Prior studies, however, have examined policy‐based relationships in isolation, failing to consider the impact of combinations of policies. Using a pooled time series design, this article examines interactions between structured sentencing, determinate sentencing, and state incarceration rates between 1978 and 2004. Results show that constraining release discretion through determinate sentencing matters more than constraining sentencing discretion through structured sentencing. Consistent with prior research, determinate sentencing was associated with lower incarceration rates independent of other policies. Contrary to prior research, however, the presence of presumptive sentencing guidelines was associated with lower incarceration rates only when combined with determinate sentencing. These findings suggest that while a state may effectively insulate sentencing decisions from outside social forces, if it fails to insulate release decisions from those same forces, they will continue to affect imprisonment levels.     

RESIDENTIAL CHANGE AS A TURNING POINT IN THE LIFE COURSE OF CRIME: DESISTANCE OR TEMPORARY CESSATION?*

Many former prisoners return home to the same residential environment, with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers, where they resided before incarceration. If the path to desistance from crime largely requires knifing off from past situations and establishing a new set of routine activities, then returning to one's old environment and routines may drastically limit an ex‐prisoner's already dismal chances of desisting from crime. This study tests these ideas by examining how forced residential migration caused by Hurricane Katrina affected the likelihood of reincarceration among a sample of ex‐prisoners originally from New Orleans, LA. Property damage from the hurricane induced some ex‐prisoners who otherwise would have moved back to their former neighborhoods to move to new neighborhoods. Findings from an instrumental variables survival analysis reveal that those parolees who moved to a new parish following release were substantially less likely to be reincarcerated during the first 3 years after release than those ex‐offenders who moved back to the parish where they were originally convicted. Moreover, at no point in the 3‐year time period was the hazard of reincarceration greater for those parolees who moved than for those who returned to the same parish.     

A multi-site, randomized study of strengths-based case management with substance-abusing parolees

Objectives  

To test whether strengths-based case management provided during an inmate’s transition from incarceration to the community increases participation in community substance abuse treatment, enhances access to needed social services, and improves drug use, crime, and HIV risk outcomes.