Browsing by Subject "Criminology"

A moral dilemma confronts criminal justice in unjust states. If the state punishes marginalized citizens whose crimes are connected to conditions of systemic injustice the state has failed to alleviate, it perpetuates a further injustice to those citizens. If the state does not punish, it perpetuates an injustice to victims of crime whose protection is the duty of the criminal justice system. Thus, no reaction to crime by the unjust state appears to avoid perpetuating further injustice. Tommie Shelby proposes a new solution to this old dilemma, suggesting that certain theoretical and practical qualifications can save the unjust state from perpetuating injustice. He argues that punishment can be just even as society remains unjust if it is: (a) administered through a fair criminal justice apparatus; (b) only directed at mala in se crimes; and (c) not expressive of moral judgment. In the first part of this thesis, I explore Shelby’s solution to show that certain aspects of his framework are superior to alternative ones, but that it nonetheless fails to resolve the dilemma. In Part 2, I use a novel technological reform that promises to make criminal justice fairer, the AI risk assessment, as a case study to show why even punishment that meets Shelby’s criteria will continue to perpetuate injustice as long as it operates under systemic social injustice. Punishment can only be just if society is.

In this dissertation, I seek to understand the power of legal actors in determining punitiveness in plea bargaining in criminal courts. Using a unique combination of administrative court data and qualitative interviews, I evaluate the influence of the chief elected prosecutor, line prosecutors, and defense attorneys on plea bargaining practices and punitiveness in case outcomes across multiple local court systems. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of the association between the elected chief prosecutor and prosecution and active sentence rates in four types of criminal cases in nine districts in North Carolina. The study finds that chief prosecutors influenced punitiveness, but their influence was not aligned with their political party. Although Democratic and Republican chief prosecutors did not differ in levels of punitiveness, the one progressive prosecutor in the sample reduced punitiveness across most crime types to the lowest levels out of all nine study districts. Chapter 3 examines how line prosecutors working in one progressive prosecutor’s office reduced punitiveness in case outcomes, mainly by dismissing weak and low-priority cases even before they reached the plea bargaining stage. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the power of the defense attorney in plea bargaining, and shows how the legal actors and context of the plea bargaining interaction impacted defense attorneys’ leverage and negotiation strategies. These chapters provide insights into current movements to reform prosecution and reduce mass incarceration in the United States, and shed light on how punitiveness may be impacted through the complex process of plea bargaining.

Social class is often discussed in crime and social control research but the influence of class in these contexts is not well understood. Stratification studies have identified effects of socioeconomic status on a diverse collection of important outcomes in many facets of society, but the influence of class on criminality and punishment remains largely unidentified. Scholars attempting to connect class position to criminal behavior or risk of arrest and incarceration have either concluded that a robust relationship does not exist, or been confronted with inconsistent or weak evidence. Indeed, despite substantial interest in the influence of social class on criminality and punishment, researchers have been unable to make very many empirical connections between the two. The present study advances understanding about the influence of social class on criminality and punishment, addressing limitations of previous research using new approaches and statistical methods across three studies: (1) a study of the relationship between immigration rates and societal preference for increased police protection and law enforcement spending, (2) a study of heterogeneity in the effect of class on latent categories of self-reported delinquency, and finally, (3) a study of illicit drug use and rates of drug arrest among young adults, and how college attendance may contribute punishment inequality for non-violent drug offenses.

Recently, research concerning the United States Criminal Justice System has been dominated by discussions of mass incarceration and deadly acts of police violence. Although there is conflicting evidence regarding the impact of racial diversity in criminal justice organizations, it continues to receive consideration as a prescription for racial disparities in policing, sentencing, and incarceration. Few studies have provided a holistic analysis of multiple components of the criminal justice system in one locality. This research focuses on the role of race throughout New York City’s Criminal Justice System. Based on court observations, ethnographic data, and semi-structured interviews I focus on the experiences and perspectives of black and Latino actors involved in the criminal justice process. Findings suggest that race itself is not predictive of active representation, while the link between passive and active representation cannot be completely dismissed. I discuss the implications of these findings for future research and policy initiatives aimed at reducing racial disparities in policing and incarceration.

Jail leasing is the practice by which states enter into contractual agreements with local governments to house individuals under the state’s jurisdiction in local jails. This dissertation is an attempt to understand this practice and its effects on individuals and communities. In the introductory chapter, I briefly explain the history of the jail as a carceral space and then explain jail leasing in the context of mass incarceration in the US. The focus of the second chapter is the location of the jail-leased population across and within states. I show the by-state distribution of the leasing population in 1999 and 2019, as well as the 2019 within-state (i.e., by county) distribution for the nine states for which data are publicly available. In chapter three, I test the effects of jail leasing on recidivism outcomes. I do so using data from six US states over a period of 20 years, 2000-2019. Using matching techniques, I display Kaplan-Meier curves to compare the survival rates of release cohorts leaving prison or jail and Cox Proportional Hazard model results to show estimates of the effects of facility type on recidivism risk. I find that overall, the recidivism risk is higher for those individuals released from jails, but that the difference in risk varies greatly across states. I also show the results of a cost-benefit analysis meant to determine whether differences in recidivism further support or undermine efforts by the state to reduce spending on incarceration. Chapter four explores what, if any, differences in mortality risk exist for the jail-leased population compared to the general jail and prison populations. Using data on deaths that occurred to individuals while they were experiencing incarceration in the US between 2013 and 2019, and data on the composition of the US corrections population over the same time period, I employ traditional demographic methods in order to be able to make the best possible comparisons of these mortality risks. The results suggest that the mortality risk for the jail-leased population is the lowest of the three populations compared in the analyses. In the conclusion chapter, I describe the ways in which jail leasing should and should not be considered a potential tool for decarceration.

Between the 1880s and the First World War, the French public exhibited a broad interest in crime. New forms of crime coverage in the popular press and new scientific practices of criminal investigation were both concerned with the authentic representation of true crime and both claimed their representations would allow jurists, police, or readers to “directly observe” reality. In this dissertation, I examine the iconographies of crime mobilized by French journalists, police, and jurists during this time period, putting them into conversation with emergent notions of objectivity, realism, and verisimilitude. I base my conclusions, in part, upon the formal analysis of images from illustrated newspapers, the French Police Archives, and the archives of the Assizes court of the former Seine department.In the first half of my dissertation, I trace the emergence of certain proto-objective values (non-partisanship, facts over opinion, moral value of distance) in the prospectuses of the major newspapers of the mass press and examine the simultaneous development of sensationalist news coverage. I argue that although French crime coverage was characterized by the emotional tone and lurid language of faits divers, it traded off interests in indexicality, transparency, lifelikeness, and legibility, complementing French editors’ commitments to non-partisanship, informational content, and the empowerment of readership. This reflection is complemented by an analysis of 757 crime-related illustrations published by the illustrated weekly supplements of the Petit Parisien and the Petit Journal. I argue that it was specifically through the iconic medium of engraving and the visual conventions of melodrama that the supplements could reconcile the didactic and editorial aims of prior generations of the illustrated press with the informational news focus of modern journalism. Moreover, I demonstrate that this medium and style could provide a certain lifelikeness and legibility that photo-mechanical prints could not. In the second half of my dissertation, I turn from the field of the French press to the French criminal justice system where concerns about objectivity and representation were also on the rise. Here, I introduce the term “trace objectivity” to refer to the use of indices and measurements to correct for the fallible nature of human memory. Movements of trace objectivity included the professionalization of legal experts and expertise, the rise of forensic analysis of material evidence, the development of the mug shot and other scientific representations of criminals, and a wave of psychology studies which cast doubt upon verbal testimony. I draw upon historiographical research to demonstrate that such practices hit significant obstacles in their implementation. Trace objective representations were, to some degree, neglected in favor of traditional methods like conventional portraiture and vernacular description because they did not align with the aesthetics of memory, which, despite the efforts of scientists, remain essential to the project of criminal justice. In my final chapter, I analyze the images of criminals in the police and court archives. These archives hold souvenirs and reconstitutions which reproduce similar representational strategies to trace objectivity and sensationalism. I notably remark that collectors, and the archives, value souvenirs for their physical connection to the crime event and the relational history that links the final possessor with the original collector - precisely the indexicality and chains of custody that legal reformers like Binet and Garraud valued in material evidence. In other words, souvenir collection draws from the same desire that undergirded trace objectivity: to have an objective, inhuman witness to past events. Reconstitutions, like staged photographs and sketches reproducing violent crimes, provide a foil to the representational strategy of the souvenir or trace. The presence of reconstitutions in the archives indicates that criminal justice actors needed to bring the crime back to life in the present, since the trace was always partial and past. This dissertation thus serves to re-evaluate the power and pervasiveness of iconicity in representations of crime. Iconicity, lifelikeness, and legibility play a key role in the practice and understanding of criminal justice systems and, accordingly, it is our duty to interrogate the aesthetics of representations of crime.

This thesis seeks to determine whether the federal criminal law has been used increasingly in the past several decades to punish conduct that poses a general threat to society, rather than conduct that causes a concrete harm to a particular victim. It situates this question within a broader discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, including rising incarceration rates, the theoretical justifications for punishment, and important legal limitations on its exercise.

To determine whether the federal criminal law has been used increasingly to punish threats, this thesis charts the enforcement of twenty main categories of federal crimes over the past forty years. It gathers and organizes data on criminal case filings published yearly by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. After calculating the trend of enforcement for each crime, it groups the twenty crimes into three categories based on whether the prohibited conduct constitutes a concrete harm versus a general threat of harm.

Analyzing the results, the thesis concludes that there has been a strong trend over the past two decades to use the federal criminal law to target conduct which threatens to harm society, rather than conduct that does concrete harm to an identifiable victim. It argues that this trend is problematic for several reasons: it signifies that federal criminal law will be used to further exacerbate already escalated levels of criminal punishment in the nation; the use of criminal law to target conduct which threatens society is weakly justified theoretically; and using the criminal law to target conduct which threatens society weakens important safeguards in the law designed to constrain the use of criminal punishment.

This dissertation examines the tools residents have at their disposal to facilitate democratic accountability for carceral state actors more broadly, and municipal police, more narrowly. First, I evaluate an increasingly common institutional reform in municipal governance – civilian oversight boards. This research demonstrates that oversight boards are systematically underpowered and unable to improve police behavior. Second, I examine civilian coproduction of accountability, through complaint reporting and meeting attendance. Across two survey based experiments, I show that residents are more willing to engage in coproduction when oversight agencies have strong sanctioning powers and direct democratic influence. Finally, I display how proximal carceral exposure shapes voter turnout when residents are given direct electoral influence over policymaking. Here, I use voter files from California to show that residents of the most high carceral exposure neighborhoods are mobilized to polls in order to support a ballot measure that reduces the reach of the carceral state.

Firearms regulation rarely passes in the United States due to the strength of the gun rights lobby. However, in the past several years, policymakers in traditionally pro-gun states have passed laws that restrict domestic abusers’ access to firearms. The success of these policies suggests that domestic violence and firearms regulations may represent a rare opportunity for bipartisan agreement in this contentious policy area. This dissertation examines domestic violence related firearms regulations from three angles. The first chapter presents a qualitative comparative case study analysis of domestic violence and firearms legislation to understand how these policies overcame robust barriers to passage. The results demonstrate that the prominence of domestic violence prevention advocates and “strategic absence” of larger gun control groups in the policy process increased the probability of the legislation’s passage. The second chapter leverages an original survey experiment involving 1,000 participants in the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) to test whether framing gun regulation as domestic violence prevention instead of gun control can increase support for the legislation. While I find that framing does not impact respondents’ support for a new law, women are more likely to support the policy than men. Importantly, this result remains significant after controlling for political party, suggesting that women’s collective action could bring about bipartisan cooperation on some gun regulations. The third and final chapter demonstrates the importance of preemptive gun regulations for reducing intimate partner homicide through an analysis of homicide data from the North Carolina Violent Death Reporting System. Together, this collection of studies sheds light on the politics and design of domestic violence and firearms regulation and creates a foundation for future research in this important policy area.