Criminological Highlights

Criminological Highlights Vol. 22, No. 6 - February 2026

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:22:13 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

How do Black and White Americans’ views of the criminal justice system differ?
Does a more lenient system for pretrial release lead to increases in crime?
Why is it in a prison system’s interest to try to attempt to reduce the security level of prisoners?
How can conditions of pretrial release set people up to fail?
What was the effect of “defund the police” movements in the US on police budgets?
How did Islamic terrorism increase anti-immigrant attitudes towards other non-Islamic minority groups?
How do programs designed to help people from acquiring criminal records disadvantage certain groups?
Do short sentences interfere with the ability of offenders to get employmen t?

Item 1

Black and White Americans differ in their views of various aspects of the criminal justice system. The portion of White Americans with strong punitive views has increased in recent years. For Black Americans, however, the portion of those who are both concerned about crime and critical of the criminal legal system increased dramatically between 1994 and 2016.

Public opinion research on crime typically measures “punitiveness” using single survey questions about harsh punishment or support for the death penalty. This approach assumes that all respondents interpret questions about crime, courts, and policing in similar ways. This study tests whether Black and White Americans instead organize their views of the criminal legal system into distinct belief patterns — and whether these patterns have diverged over time.

This paper examines US national surveys carried out between 1975 and 2018, focusing on four separate measures: respondents’ views on 1) the level of federal spending to halt crime, 2) spending on law enforcement, (3) the punitiveness of the criminal courts, and (4) the death penalty. Rather than analyzing each question separately, the study identifies common response patterns that reveal how people understand crime and legal institutions as interconnected systems. Changes in these patterns are tracked from the 1970s through the late 2010s.

Distinct dominant belief patterns emerged for White and Black respondents. Most White respondents fell into a group that combines high concern about crime with strong support for harsher courts and the death penalty. A smaller White group showed lower concern about crime and lower support for punitive responses. Among Black respondents, one group expressed great concern about crime and high support for punitive responses relative to other Black respondents, though still lower than their White counterparts. A second and substantively distinct Black group expressed high concern about crime while strongly opposing harsher sentencing and the death penalty.

In short, White respondents are more likely to align concern about crime with support for punitive legal institutions, while Black respondents are more likely to separate concern about crime from confidence in, and support for, the criminal legal system. This aligns with previous research that suggests that Black Americans want to reduce crime but do not favour giving more power to a system that treats them unfairly. Research further shows that Black Americans, who disproportionately face high levels of crime and violence, are often willing to support actions that reduce violent crime even while lacking confidence in formal justice institutions. The distinct belief structures across racial groups underscore the conclusion that “attitudes toward the criminal legal system cannot be reduced to the concept of punitiveness” (p. 571).

When Black and White Americans’ views are examined as configurations, “views [of the criminal legal system] have become more racially polarized since the mid-1990s – a finding that is different from single-item or aggregate measures of punitive sentiment” (p. 572). In recent years, there has been an increase in the fraction of Whites who endorse a punitive criminal legal system, while at the same time, the “fraction of Black respondents evidently concerned about crime but critical of the criminal legal system… has also grown” (p. 585). Therefore, though single-item measures of punitive sentiment continue to decline, “racial polarization in attitudes toward crime and punishment is on the rise” (p. 586).

Conclusion: Black and White Americans organize attitudes toward the criminal legal system in structurally different ways, calling into question dominant punitiveness frameworks that treat criminal legal attitudes as varying along a single continuum. While conventional measures suggest that overall punitiveness has declined since the mid-1990s, “The gap in views about the criminal legal system has widened by race” (p. 587). This conclusion is not surprising: “The defining criminal legal policies of the last four decades [in the US] impacted individuals of different racial identities in profoundly distinct ways” (p. 588).

Reference: Lee, Karen Hanhee, Carmen Gutierrez, and Becky Pettit (2025). Racial Polarization in Attitudes Towards the Criminal Legal System. Social Problems, 72, 570-593.

Item 2

An administrative order that increased the likelihood that an accused would be granted pretrial release did not, during the period prior to the disposition of the case, increase the likelihood of new criminal activity or failures of the accused to appear as required in court.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many jurisdictions looked for ways of reducing the size of their prison and jail populations in order to reduce the spread of the disease. Because these changes were made suddenly and for reasons unrelated to criminal justice goals, it was possible to estimate their effects on the operation of the system.

Previous research (see Criminological Highlights special issue on bail) has reported that accused people who are detained (e.g., they are processed by “tough” rather than “lenient” judges) are likely to have higher conviction, incarceration, and recidivism rates. “These deleterious outcomes are disproportionately experienced by members of racial and ethnic minority groups…” (p 605).

This study looked at people who were charged between 1 October 2017 and 30 June 2021. An administrative order made on 10 April 2020 (soon after the recognition of the COVID-19 pandemic) reduced required cash bond amounts (from $3000 to $1000) for certain felonies in one Florida county and made it possible for people to be released without having to appear before a judicial official. Because the change in policy was sudden (and without much notice), it was possible to divide accused people into two groups: those for whom pretrial release was handled as it normally had been and those who benefitted from the new more lenient policy. The effect of the sudden change, if any, associated with the change in policy could be differentiated from any long-term trend.

No “pretrial risk assessment” was carried out for those processed before or after the change in policy. However, to ensure that any changes in outcome were not attributable to changes in the nature of accused being considered for release, various measures were controlled in the main analyses including the offence type, prior record and failures to appear, race, age, gender, whether the accused was born in the US, education and whether they were married. Clearly those dealt with under the new rules had lower cash bond amounts imposed on them; they were detained in custody for fewer hours; and they were more likely to obtain pretrial release.

The multivariate analyses that included various control factors suggest that those who benefitted from the administrative order allowing easier release back into the community “exhibited [significantly] lower odds of new criminal activity… and failure to appear… than their counterparts charged with third-degree felonies during the period preceding the administrative order” (p. 612).

The administrative order mandating earlier release into the community had “a greater effect on defendants’ odds of pretrial release among Black individuals compared to their White counterparts” (p. 614). But there was no evidence for any group – Black, White, or Latino – of any increase in failures to appear in court or in the occurrence of new charges.

Conclusion: A policy whose explicit purpose was to speed up the pretrial release process and to ensure that more people were released while awaiting trial was effective in accomplishing these goals. It is important to note that this “bail not jail” policy did not contribute to any increase in crime. In fact, it was the opposite: new criminal activity and pretrial failure were lower among those whose offences took place at a time where the lenient policy was in place.

Reference: Copp, Jennifer E. (2025). Cash Bail and Pretrial Compliance: Evidence from a Court-Imposed Policy Shock. Criminology & Public Policy, 24, 601-622.

Item 3

Placing prisoners in a high security prison (compared to a medium security prison) or in a medium security prison (compared to a low security prison) leads to higher rates of violent misconduct than would be expected if they had been placed at a lower level, even when individual characteristics are taken into account.

One theory of placing prisoners in high security prisons is that they can be better monitored and controlled and will have fewer opportunities for rule breaking. This study examines the rate of violent misconduct of first-time male US federal prisoners from the time that they were first placed in a cell related to their security classification until they were reclassified.

The study estimates the impact of prison security level on prisoner behaviour by looking at the relationship of a prisoner’s assessed “risk” score to their violent misconduct in prison. Almost all prisoners were placed in a facility matching their risk scores. With a continuous quantitative risk measure, this means that those at one side of a cutoff point (e.g., between medium and high security) are very similar to prisoners who have very similar scores but are on the other side of the cutoff point and are, therefore, placed in a different security level facility. The study uses this discontinuity to examine the impact of the prison placement independently of the risk score. Other factors (e.g., age, race, sentence length, offence history, etc.) that were not an explicit part of the “risk score” calculation were also controlled. Since prison staff can modify placement for perceived safety or management reasons, the data were examined both including and excluding those whose placement wasn’t solely determined by the risk score.

The main analyses looked at the relationship between risk score and the proportion of people with each risk score who had violent misconducts during their first prison placement. If prison placement makes a difference above and beyond the numerical risk score, one might expect a substantial change in the relationship between risk and misconducts right at the point where the prison placement changes (e.g., from low- to medium- security).

If higher security placement increases misbehaviour, it could be termed an “inflator” effect “where higher security increases misconduct” (p. 307). The change was clear: there is “a discontinuous jump in the misconduct prevalence as one crosses the low/medium-security cutoff into medium security… [just as there appears] to be change in behaviour starting at the medium/high cutoff” (p. 312-313). In other words, medium and high security placements had the effect of increasing violent misconduct compared to the behaviour of prisoners in the neighbouring lower security levels. This increase – determined by a technique known as a “regression discontinuity design” – was significantly larger than would be expected from changes in risk values of those in the lower and higher security groups. Said differently, risk scores did predict misconduct, but the effect of security placement was evident above and beyond the impact of the risk scores themselves.

These results look only at the impact of prison placement during, roughly, the first 7 months of a prisoner’s federal prison sentence. The effect of the security level placement when “minor misconduct” (e.g., refusing staff orders, refusing a work assignment) was examined was smaller and less consistent. The effect on women was not examined because almost all women (of a much smaller sample) were in low or minimum security institutions.

Conclusion: The results of the study strongly suggest that one of the impacts of placing men who have just arrived in a prison in higher security levels in prisons is that they will engage in higher rates of violent behaviour than they would if they were placed in lower security prisons. In other words, violent misbehaviour on the part of some prisoners relates in part to the decisions of prison authorities on where to place newly arrived prisoners.

Reference: Gwinn, Jason D., Miles D. Harer, & Neal P. Langan (2025). Effects of Prison Security Level on the Violent Misconduct for New Federal Prison Entries. The Prison Journal, 105(3), 305-329.

Item 4

When an accused person in Canada is released prior to trial and subject to a bail supervision program, the conditions of release can easily set accused people up to fail.

Canada is facing many challenges in the manner in which it treats people charged with offences and awaiting trial. Most obvious, perhaps, is the fact that (in 2023) almost half (49.3%) of Canada’s adult prisoners were awaiting trial rather than serving sentences. In an increasing number of cases, the accused must demonstrate that pretrial release is justified and, if they are released, must obey conditions that not only are punitive, but also may be difficult to comply with.

The number of people identified by the police as having committed the offence of “failure to comply with a court order” (largely those charged with violations of terms of pretrial release) is 51% higher in the most recent 5 years for which we have data (2020-2024) than it was 20 years earlier. During this same period, the number of criminal offences recorded by the police decreased by 14%.

Previous research (e.g., Criminological Highlights 21(1)#7, 13(5)#5), 16(6)#4) has suggested that the conditions faced by accused people who are released while awaiting trial often create unnecessary punishments for them. This paper examines these conditions from the perspective of those who have the direct responsibility to supervise many of those on pretrial release in the Province of Ontario – i.e., people who are employed by “Bail Verification and Supervision Programs.” These programs typically are used when sureties are unavailable and support and control of accused people in the community is seen as being necessary. 33 employees of 19 such organizations (of 22 across the province) were interviewed. Although the sample may not be completely representative of all employees, the basic views were similar across a substantial portion of the respondents.

Although conditions of release are “ordered” by the court, in most cases accused people do not contest conditions suggested by the Crown because doing so may put them at risk of being detained rather than being released. “Bail at all costs” is the overwhelming priority for the accused and, therefore, the lawyer representing the accused. Not surprisingly, therefore, almost half of the bail supervisors agreed with the proposition that bail conditions set the accused up to fail, since the conditions are often difficult or impossible for the accused to follow. A number of the supervisors noted that in recent years conditions are worded in a more sensitive (and sensible) manner. For example, the condition of abstinence from drugs and alcohol may sound sensible, even though it is likely to be ineffective to “order” accused people to end their addictions. But some of these bail supervisors noted that abstinence conditions are now often restricted to the accused’s behaviour outside of their residence. However, sometimes conditions simply don’t make sense (e.g., curfews for people without stable residences or requirements that the person live in a shelter when shelter space cannot be guaranteed). In some instances, where multiple conditions are imposed by different courts, nobody has bothered to combine them into one record to ensure that they are not inconsistent. Similarly, non-communication orders are rather difficult when they are imposed on only one of two co-accused. Finally, it appears that in some instances simple errors (e.g., in addresses) are made in the required conditions. Such errors can result in an accused being arrested because they are living in a residence not specified on the release order.

Conclusion: Canada’s law specifies that, in most cases, conditions of release should only be imposed if necessary. These conditions are presumably imposed to ensure that an accused will not commit offences while awaiting trial and will appear in court as required. Although some courts appear to be increasingly sensitive to these restrictions, recent legislative proposals seem to be designed to increase the detention of accused people and, in some instances, to impose additional restrictions on those released. What clearly is needed is some systematic investigation of the effects and effectiveness of different release conditions so that conditions of release have empirical justification.

Reference: Yule, Carolyn & Laura MacDiarmid (2026). ‘It’s a Set Up’: Examining the Relationship Between Bail Conditions and the Revolving Door of Justice. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 38, 40-57.

Item 5

In the US, “Black Lives Matter protests did not lead to the defunding of municipal police budgets” (p. 1211). Indeed, in cities dominated by Republicans, these protests may have had the effect of increasing police budgets.

The suggestion that there should be targeted defunding of police emerged in the early 2010s. However, in 2020, when “defund the police” Google searches were prevalent in the US, this policy proposal was opposed by more Americans (58%) than supported it (31%). This paper examines the effect on police budgets in different cities and finds that the impact of protests against the police is not a simple one.

To understand the impact of protests on the funding of local police, the city budgets and the approved number of police personnel of 264 of the largest cities in the US were examined for 3 years (2018/9 through 2020/1). The focus of the study was the share of the city budget assigned for policing. The study examined the impact on police budgets of the number of protesters in each city from 25 May 2020 (the date of the police murder of George Floyd) to 31 December 2020 before the city budgets were approved.

Overall, there was no relationship between the size of the Black Lives Matter protests and the proportion of city budgets transferred to the police or to changes in the number of authorized police positions. However, when the researchers examined the relationship of the amount of Black Lives Matter protesting separately for cities with varying proportions of voters who supported the Republican presidential candidate in 2020, the effect of having large numbers of Black Lives Matter protesters predicted increases in police budgets. For cities with low Republican vote share, there was essentially no consistent impact (positive or negative) of the strength of the protest on police budgets. Other analyses – looking at the strength of police funding at an earlier time (2018-9) – suggest, however, that this “policy backlash to protest” (more protests against policing funding, more funding of police) “may stem from an entrenched conservatism in Republican-governed cities” (p. 1210). Obviously, these data looked at the immediate impacts of the protests.

It seems plausible that “policymakers’ own conservatism and right-wing influences in Republican cities might explain the policy backlash in Republican cities” (p. 1211). “Cities with large Democratic vote shares neither experience a policy backlash nor reduced their police budgets” (p. 1211).

Conclusion: The immediate (or short term) impact of Black Lives Matter protests arguing for reductions of police budgets do not appear to have been successful in changing political actions on the hiring of police or on police budgets. In Republican dominated cities, protests seem to have been used by city politicians to show their support of the police. Cities that supported Democratic politicians seem not to have been affected in any consistent manner.

Reference: Ebbinghaus, Mathis, Nathan Bailey and Jacob Rubel (2025). The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How “Defund the Police” Sparked Political Backlash. Social Problems, 72, 1198-1215.

Item 6

Terrorism by an Islamic group increased not only anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe, but it also increased anti-immigrant attitudes toward Jewish and Roma minorities.

In January 2015, a group of Islamic terrorists attacked the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in France and killed 19 people in two related attacks. Its effects were felt all over the world. This study suggests that events like this alter symbolic boundaries that define who is included in one’s group and who is excluded. Religion – whether actively practiced or simply the basis of the origins of national institutions and identities – and race are likely to be two important factors defining a person’s identity.

At the time of the attack, data for the European Social Survey were being collected. Hence it was possible to compare the responses of those immediately (30 days) before and after the attacks. The focus of this study is on the attitudes of the “native population” of various European countries toward particular immigrant and minority groups: Muslims, Jews, and Roma. Because of sample size limitations, the focus was on three European countries that are traditional immigrant destinations (Germany, France and Belgium) and three that are not (Finland, Czech Republic, and Ireland). 1,814 people from these countries were interviewed before the attack and 1,638 after. The main measure of immigrant sentiment were questions that asked whether members of these groups should be allowed to come and live in their country. Respondents were also asked their views on specific characteristics that the respondent believed a hypothetical immigrant must have (White, Christian background, work skills, commitment to the host country’s way of life, etc.). The focus of the study is on change in these measures associated with the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

In Europe, it would appear that the primary characteristics that define symbolic boundaries between the native population and ‘others’ are race and religion. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, there were significantly higher anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, and anti-Roma sentiments expressed in European countries. Clearly, the anti-outgroup sentiment spilled over to “out-groups” that were not involved in the attack. Compared to before the attack, higher numbers of respondents said, after the attack, that their country should “allow none” of each of these three groups to come to their country. When looking at the details of whom people felt should be allowed to move to their country, it appeared that it was race and religion that were most important in explaining the growth in the symbolic boundaries against immigrants after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Increases in anti-immigrant sentiment were especially strong in the non-traditional immigrant destination countries. “Countries with a long-standing immigration flow moderate immediate effects of terrorism on anti-immigrant sentiment” (p 56).

Conclusion: “The discriminatory processes of specific native European populations are not necessarily manifested through precise social categorization but rather [they are] based on blurry symbolic boundaries that define ‘us’ or ‘them’…. Narrowly focusing on groups [whose members may have been involved in particular events] may overlook the challenges such extreme vents pose for broader minority populations” (p. 60).

Reference: Ramirez, Daniel and Joeun Kim (2025). “Not One of Us”: Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Spread to Multiple Immigrant Groups in Wake of Islamic Terrorism. Social Forces, 104, 44-66.

Item 7

A procedure that allows judges effectively to nullify a conviction after guilt has been established was designed for various purposes including avoiding the consequences of a felony conviction. Unfortunately, racialized and lower socioeconomic status defendants do not get the same level of benefits as do White and wealthier people.

“Deferred adjudication… offers legally guilty defendants protection from the mark of a conviction conditional on the completion of community supervision” (p. 154). This paper examines whether race and socioeconomic status influence who gets a chance, through this procedure, at avoiding a criminal conviction.

Many jurisdictions have procedures whereby people who admit to committing an offence can avoid a formal conviction by completing a period of supervision in the community. (In Canada, for example, there are “alternative measures” provisions in S. 717 of the Criminal Code that allow someone who admits to an offence to avoid formal conviction in certain circumstances.) This paper examines the deferral process at two points. First, it examines judges’ decisions (usually on recommendation from the prosecutor) to defer adjudication after guilt has been determined. Second, it examines the final decision of whether the charges should, in the end, be dismissed (without ever entering a finding of guilt) rather than convicting the person. Previous research has found that “deferred defendants have better employment outcomes and lower rearrest risks than otherwise similar defendants [who were convicted]” (p. 158-9). Hence full implementation of the provisions can improve the life chances of an accused person.

This study was carried out in Texas (the US state with the largest prison population), a state in which those convicted (but not those deferred) can have imposed on them lifetime bans on certain welfare benefits. In addition, in Texas, costs for programs imposed on deferred accused people (e.g., required classes, drug testing, supervision fees) are paid by the defendant, thus creating structural barriers to success for those with few economic resources as well as difficulty for those whose cases are deferred contingent upon their involvement in certain programs.

Data from 69,264 cases in one Texas county filed between 1995 and 2014 were examined. Race and ethnicity were available from case files. Socioeconomic status was estimated from the neighbourhood median income and whether the accused had a court-appointed or privately-retained lawyer. Control factors about the case included sex, age, offence type, severity, number of charges, the accused’s criminal record as well as the identity of the judge and prosecutor. A statistical technique was used to control for the non-random selection of cases for deferral.

Controlling for characteristics of the case, Black men were less likely than White men to have their cases deferred. Independent of race, “defendants who reside in wealthier neighbourhoods are significantly more likely to receive a deferral than those who reside in poorer neighbourhoods” (p 164). White men benefitted most from having a hired attorney. For women, the impact of a hired lawyer did not differ by race.

Turning to the findings on whether a person who was deferred had their case dismissed after their period of supervision in the community, the data show that Black and Latinx men and women were less likely to have their charges dismissed. Racial disparity was more pronounced at this final stage – case dismissal – than it was at the stage of offering to defer the charges.

Conclusion: The findings of this study demonstrate that procedures designed to “sever the mark of conviction from the legal establishment of guilt [can] exacerbate racial and socioeconomic disparity, even when they also benefit people from marginalized groups” (p. 171). If one were looking at formal records of criminal convictions, therefore, it would appear that a procedure designed to avoid the stigma of a conviction accentuates racial and socioeconomic differences across groups.

Reference: Bing, Lindsay and Carmen Gutierrez (2025). Who Gets a Second Chance? Compliance, Classification, and Criminal Conviction. Social Forces, 104, 154-176.

Item 8

For people who were employed before they were arrested, receiving a prison sentence of more than two months reduces significantly their likelihood of getting a job after serving their sentence. Equivalent people who were imprisoned for less than 2 months were not as likely to be disadvantaged in getting employment.

After a period of incarceration, people have special difficulties getting jobs. This paper examines this relationship in detail, looking not only at the length of the incarceration, but also at various comparison groups to try to understand the nature of this relationship.

Most incarceration periods are quite short. (For example, recent Canadian court data suggest that 58% of prison sentences are for one month or less and 19% are between 1 and 3 months in length.) When looking at the effects of these periods of incarceration on issues like employment, it may be important to differentiate “long” from “short” periods of incarceration. But in addition, it may be important to think carefully about which groups to compare. This study examines a number of different comparison groups. In this summary, however, we will focus on people who had been employed before they had been arrested and for whom this was their first adult arrest (that may or may not have resulted in a prison sentence). More specifically, the focus is on the impact on employment for two distinct groups: those who experienced imprisonment for 2 months or more and those who were imprisoned for less than two months. The comparison group, for each of these groups, was those who were arrested, but never incarcerated.

The data from the study came from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Survey participants had first been interviewed when they were youths. They were then interviewed regularly well into their adulthood. Because they had been interviewed so often, “control variables” (demographic, behavioural, educational, etc.) relevant to their experiences in the labor market were available.

The focus was on their labour market experience during the 6-month period immediately following each person’s first adult incarceration or, in the case of the comparison group that was not incarcerated, the labour market experience following their first adult arrest that did not result in incarceration. All of the groups described here had been employed prior to their arrest.

On all the measures of labour market success – whether they were employed 6 months after arrest, the proportion of the time in that first 6 months that they were employed, or whether they were, for any reason, out of the labour market – those who were incarcerated for more than 2 months were less likely to be employed in the 6-month period following the end of their incarceration. However, those who received short sentences (2 months or less) did not show this same deficit. (On one of 5 employment measures – being out of the labour market – those who received short sentences showed a deficit, but it was significantly less than the deficit of those who had been incarcerated for more than 2 months).

Conclusion: Experiencing a short period of incarceration certainly disadvantages people in various ways compared to those who are not involved in the criminal justice system at all, but the impact is not generally apparent when comparing this group to those arrested but not incarcerated. It would appear that the impact of short periods of incarceration should be examined separately from long periods of incarceration for at least two reasons: Short periods of imprisonment may involve very different challenges for the prisoner compared to those imprisoned for longer periods, and by combining short and long periods of incarceration into one group, the impact of long periods of incarcerated may be less evident.

Reference: Siennick, Sonja E. and Alex O. Widdowson (2025) Do Short Spells Matter? Conceptualizing and Testing the Effects of Brief Incarcerations on Labour Market Outcomes. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 62, 856-899.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jane Sprott, Danielle Van Wagner, and Bond Zhang

Criminological Highlights Vol. 22, No. 5 - November 2025

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 23:53:37 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Item 1

Racial inequalities across various domains can be hidden or denied by making race-neutral assumptions about the meaning of the variables that are statistically controlled.

Imagine the situation where a Black person gets a more punitive sentence than a White person for an identical offence, where the White person’s previous criminal record only includes misdemeanor (or summary conviction) convictions and the Black person’s record consists of a similar number of felony (or indictable) convictions for the same offences? Often such situations are interpreted as suggesting that as soon as “criminal background” is controlled for (felonies vs. misdemeanors in this case), there may be no evidence of racially based inequality.

The problem, of course, is that this situation may well reflect racialized decisions at earlier stages in the lives of these two people – where the decision to proceed with a more serious form of the offence is the result of a racialized decision. Furthermore, in the future, the Black person, in this example, would have a more serious recent record (based on the sentence which itself is based in part on the earlier racialized decisions). Hence in the future, when “controlling” for the recent convictions, it is almost inevitable that the Black person will be punished more severely. Some examples of such “racial innocence” – whereby discriminatory decisions are hidden behind other “innocent” variables – are obvious. For example, the original US federal sentencing guideline mandated a much harsher sentence for possession of crack cocaine (with a majority of those being sentenced being Black) than for an equal amount of pure cocaine (where most people sentenced were White). By thinking of rules such one as this as being “race neutral… racial inequalities in sentencing stemming from these factors are [seen as being] warranted” (p. 387).

This paper suggests that there are three mechanisms that “enable racial innocence in social science: treating unequal structural conditions impartially, isolating sample choices to reflect narrow stages, and focusing on individual levels of analysis” (p. 388). The paper uses a dataset from 2012-2015 Miami-Dade County Florida to illustrate the mechanisms of creating “racial innocence”. Race of the person being sentenced was determined by the police categorization on the arrest form. Various personal and legally relevant variables were coded from the data. The main focus of the analyses was on the outcome for the Black and White people being sentenced.

The effect of race, “taking into account” factors known to be relevant to sentencing (e.g., criminal history, most serious charge, whether the person experienced pretrial detention, etc.) was small, but significant: Blacks were about 3% more likely to be imprisoned than Whites. But when the legal and case characteristics were assumed to be racialized rather than treating as if they were not related to race, “racial inequality incarceration doubles” (p. 398). One problem in looking only at the sentencing of those found guilty is that such an approach assumes that being found guilty is not itself a racialized decision. When the researchers looked at the full arrested sample to see who was, in the end, incarcerated, the impact of race on being incarcerated was larger than that of the convicted sample alone. Similarly, when the neighbourhood in which an accused was living was taken into account, the findings showed that “racial inequality in incarceration is more than twice as high in the neighbourhood-level models compared to the individual-level models” (p. 403).

Conclusion: This paper demonstrates that “racial innocence” in the criminal justice system is the result of the manner in which we examine how people are treated by the system. By assuming that factors such as criminal record or pretrial detention are objectively rather than, in part, racially determined, we obscure much of the impact of racialized decisions. It is argued that a race-conscious approach integrated more broadly into criminal justice research would better identify how race-neutral thinking minimizes racial inequalities at all stages of the criminal justice system.

Reference: Omori, Marisa, A. M. Early and L. Torres (2025). A Theoretical and Empirical Critique of Racial Innocence in Sentencing. Law & Society Review, 59, 382-418.

Item 2

The impact of having at least one Black person on a criminal jury far exceeds the direct impact of that juror’s single vote. Black jurors can bring an understanding of the case to the other jurors that might otherwise not be heard.

Restricting criminal jury membership to those who have not had direct experience (or knowledge) of interactions with the police can easily keep juries from understanding legitimate concerns about certain police-citizen interactions. Specifically, restrictions on the inclusion of Black people as jurors can mean that behaviour of an accused person may not be interpreted in a manner that would be easily understood by any Black person who has had interactions with the police.

Using people who volunteered to be on ‘mock juries’, the study examined the impact of the race of the defendant (Black or White) and the race of a key law enforcement-cultivated witness (Black or White) on judgments in a drug conspiracy case. A third key variable was whether the ‘jury’ included one or more Black jurors.

In all, 144 jury groups (consisting of 4 to 7 participants from the Central District of California) were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions (the accused and the prosecutor’s key witness were described as being either White or Black). The case involved a charge of conspiracy to distribute more than 100 grams of heroin.

The mock jury’s deliberations were coded on whether or not there were positive and negative discussions about the law enforcement witnesses. When there was at least one Black juror on the jury, there were significantly more negative discussions about the law enforcement testimony than when there were no Black jurors. This was the case both when the defendant was Black and when the defendant was White. The number of positive discussions about the law enforcement evidence was higher when there were no Black jurors. When there was at least one Black juror in the group, there were fewer favourable discussions about the credibility of the police officers’ testimony and more discussions questioning the credibility of the police officer testimony.

In an attempt to understand how groups moved, in their deliberations, toward acquittal, the deliberations were examined. Jurors sometimes mentioned how they, if they were stopped by the police, would have appeared nervous even if there was no issue of drugs or other criminal matter. They pointed out that, given relationships between the Black community and the police, it was completely normal for a person to be nervous. Hence being nervous did not necessarily signify anything about a criminal offence. Similarly, in their testimony, the police officer mentioned the fact that the accused had his papers (driver’s license, insurance, etc.) ready before being asked demonstrated an unusual level of cooperation which was an indication that the person was attempting to avoid further investigation. A Black juror mentioned that this was what one does: “You’re just being Black. That’s the reason you’re nervous” (p. 434).

Conclusion: In their deliberations, Black jurors appeared to interpret the evidence presented in the trial in light of their own experiences. Black jurors, for example, raised the very real problem of being a Black person who was stopped by the police, including the “disproportionate likelihood of being pulled over, and the risks of being harmed or killed in those encounters” (p. 441). Essentially, as jurors are expected to do, Black jurors interpreted the evidence in terms of their own life experiences. This is, of course, the reason that prosecutors are sometimes motivated to try to avoid having Black jurors on cases such as this one. Doing so, however, deprives the jury of hearing an explanation of an accused person’s behaviour that does not necessarily support a guilty verdict.

Reference: Lynch, Mona & Sofia Laguna (2025). Police Talk in the Jury Room: The Production of Race-Conscious Reasonable Doubt Among Racially Diverse Jury Groups. Law & Society Review, 59, 419-448.

Item 3

The judgement of Americans about police behaviour is based largely on the exact nature of the interactions between police and civilians, and not generally the race of the police officer. “People support punishing civilians who pose threats to order, even though they also view hostile officers as less fair” (p. 355).

Developments in technology have allowed ordinary members of the public to see, and judge, the behaviour of police toward civilians. This paper examines how ordinary members of the public view police behaviour. The focus is on the race of both the police officer and the citizen in the interaction and whether the participants addressed the other person in a polite or hostile fashion.

Vignettes were given to US residents who were volunteers for an online study in 2021 and 2024. Individuals responded to only one vignette. In the first study, the police officer was described as either Black or White. The citizen was also described as being Black or White. The situation was that the police officer had been dispatched to investigate possible gunshots in a park that was supposed to be closed. It turned out to be fireworks. The police officer attending the scene initiated discussion in either a polite or hostile fashion and the citizen responded either politely or in a hostile fashion. The outcome of the interaction described in the first two experiments was that the police officer asked the citizen to leave the park or the police officer gave the citizen a ticket for disorderly conduct.

Some of the findings from the three experiments suggest that compared to the situation where both were described as being polite, people preferred the harsher punishments when the civilian was hostile and the police officer was polite. In all experiments, if the civilian was polite and the officer was hostile, the preferred punishment was no different than if both were polite. But “when civilians are hostile [toward the police officer], the public wants them punished more” (p. 345). “No evidence showed that the public wants lesser sanctions merely because an officer is hostile while a civilian is polite” (p. 345). Officer race did not seem to be very important. However, “When the civilian initiates hostility… preferred punishments are significantly higher when both the officer and civilian are white” (p. 345).

In the final experiment, the police were described as being dispatched because of a report of a fight in a park. Citizens in one set of vignettes had a weapon (a baseball bat). As in the other experiments, citizens and the police officer were described as being polite or hostile. The threat was seen as being higher when the citizen was hostile and the officer was polite. Respondents were asked not only about their preferred outcome, but also whether they thought that the outcome that was given (citizen arrested or ticketed and told to leave the park) was fair. Hostility on the part of the officer did not affect the ratings of the preferred outcome, but it did reduce assessments of fairness.

Conclusion: “Even though the mass public’s punishment preferences and fairness judgements [of interactions between individual police officers and ordinary citizens] are generally not affected by officer’s race, they depend on various civilian and officer behaviours” (p. 354). “When officers and civilians are courteous and civilians are unarmed, the mass public prefers that an interaction end in less punitive ways that nonetheless involve active police involvement. Police-civilian interactions involving hostility and threat… are judged differently…: While hostile officers are evaluated negatively, hostile and threatening… civilians are perceived to be less deserving of lenient treatment” (p. 354-5).

Reference: Vaugh, Paige E. and Gregory A. Huber (2025). Seeing the State in Action: Public Preferences about and Judgments of Common Police-Civilian Interactions. Criminology, 63, 330-381.

Item 4

A new scale for predicting violence after release from prison shows that those assessed as having a high risk of committing violent acts after release were five times more likely to commit a violent offence than those assessed as being low risk of committing violence. Nevertheless, 89% of those assessed as being high risk for committing violence if released did not, in fact, commit a violent act within 12 months of release.

Prisoners and those accused of crimes are often subject to predictions about what would happen if they were to return to the community. This happens most clearly in the case of bail/pretrial release: Release is based largely on what they are expected to do. But it also happens when a prisoner is being considered for conditional release from prison or when consideration is being given to placing conditions on a release back to the community.

Hence it is not surprising that criminal justice agencies often attempt to develop better instruments for predicting behaviour – especially violent behaviour – for use with people who are being returned to the community. This paper examines a risk measure, developed for Dutch prisoners, that can be administered by trained general prison staff (rather than psychologists or psychiatrists).

The total of 1320 former detainees were followed sufficiently long to collect data on reoffending in the 12 months following release. The scale – administered while the person was in prison – is quite elaborate, looking at violence prior to imprisonment and while in prison, four measures of dynamic risk factors and four dynamic protective factors. Clearly this is much more information than is normally available for some people (especially those where detention before trial is being contemplated).

A commonly used index of accuracy used in the literature of predicting future behaviour of those involved in the criminal justice system is the AUC which, psychologists often suggest, is of “medium” accuracy if the score is between 0.66 and 0.71 and “large” if it is above 0.71. In this study, the AUC for violence in the community after release within 12 month was 0.68 (“medium accuracy”) and 0.72 (“high accuracy”) for violence within 6 months. Another way of describing the accuracy of the predictions was that the 6-month reoffending rate was 9 times higher for those with “serious concerns” for reoffending compared to those with “low concerns” (1% vs. 9% reoffending). The ratio for 12-month reoffending was that the risky prisoners were 5 times more likely to commit a violent offence (2.3% vs. 11.4%).

These figures might be interpreted as showing strong support for the use of this predictive instrument except for one set of findings highlighted in the paper: the “false positive” rates. In this case, the proportion of people assessed as having a high likelihood of violent offending after being returned to the community, but who did not engage in violence, was extremely high. Specifically, 92% of the “high risk” people did not commit violent offences within 6 months and 89% of these same “high risk” people did not commit a violent offence within 12 months (Table 4). Simply put, most of those predicted to be dangerous turned out not to be.

Conclusion: The paper demonstrates that apparently very predictive scales can disadvantage an enormous proportion of those it suggests are high risk. In this case, if negative consequences were attached to those who were “high risk” it would mean that approximately 90% of those who experienced these negative consequences (e.g., punitive conditions or delayed release) would not have committed violent offences if they had simply been released. Clearly, any scale described as making “accurate” predictions, such as this one, needs to be examined carefully (as was done and reported in this study).

Reference: Smeekens, Marjam V., M De Vries Robbe, A. Popma, and M.M. Kempes (2025). The Prospective Prediction of Community Violence after Release from Prison with the Risk Screener Violence (RS-V). The Prison Journal, 105, 350-374.

Item 5

When ordinary citizens call the police, an in-person meeting of the citizen with a police officer is often not required. A study comparing in-person to virtual meetings with police demonstrated that virtual meetings are often not only more efficient but are seen in a more favourable light by ordinary citizens.

Many calls to police require some form of follow-up by police officers, though if the call does not require urgent police action, alternatives to a formal in-person visit by a police officer may be more efficient. This paper reports a study in which a subset of citizen calls to the police was randomly assigned to receive either an in-person visit by a police officer or a virtual visit.

In one of the local policing areas in Dorset, U.K., the police received, in 2022, 69,816 calls that required police contact but did not require an immediate response. On average the police-citizen contact took place an average of 67 hours after the call was received. Instead of presuming an in-person meeting in response to all calls, this study compared in-person and virtual meetings. If the call handler determined that a call from a citizen was not an emergency but did require further police contact, the call handler asked the citizen whether the caller would be willing to have a virtual follow-up contact with the police. If the caller was willing to have a virtual rather than an in-person follow-up, the case was then randomly assigned to receive one or the other type of follow-up. The virtual follow-up involved a two-way video communication system that the citizen could connect to, at an agreed time, via a text message or an email.

Not surprisingly, the total time (including travel time) spent by the police was considerably more in the “in-person” condition than in the virtual meeting condition. Witness statements were much more likely to be taken during the preliminary investigation in the virtual condition. Victims were more supportive of the treatment they got from the police in the virtual condition perhaps because the analysis of the victim’s needs analysis was completed more quickly. It was estimated that the total police cost of the cases randomly assigned to the in-person treatment was approximately three times that of the cases handled virtually.

In interviews carried out after the cases were completed, citizens’ overall opinion of the police after the incident was significantly higher in the virtual condition than if they received an in-person meeting. Those who interacted with the police virtually were more satisfied with the outcome of the case. They also had more confidence and trust in the police and were more likely to report that the police had acted in a procedurally fair manner. The favourable response of the public may, in part, have reflected the fact that in situations in which an immediate police response is not necessary, “victims are [often] left waiting for days or even weeks without an investigation commencing” (p. 324). In this case, those randomly assigned to receive a virtual contact with the police not only had their first formal contact sooner but were much more satisfied with the process.

Conclusion: This study demonstrates that in situations in which it is appropriate, a virtual, rather than in-person meeting between citizens and police will not only save money but will be much more likely to satisfy members of the public and create favourable views of the police. But in addition, the study demonstrates that in certain circumstances police services, if they are interested in improving their services and their reputations, can carry out random-assignment studies to test the efficacy of procedural changes in the manner in which they interact with the community.

Reference: Gates, Stewart, Barak Ariel, and Noy Assaraf (2025). Responding to Nonemergency Calls for Service via Video: A Randomized Control Trial. Criminology & Public Policy, 24, 309-331.

Item 6

Firearms prohibition orders are often imposed on those charged with domestic violence offences. This study demonstrates that, even when they are mandatory, these orders are sometimes not imposed. White defendants in domestic violence cases are less likely than Black and Latino defendants to have firearm relinquishment orders imposed on them.

Because of concern about repeat offending from those charged with a domestic violence offence, several US states have instituted civil laws requiring those charged with a domestic violence offence to relinquish any firearms they possess.

The treatment of firearms in the US has, historically, been a racialized legal matter. In the early 1800s, some state laws prohibited the possession or carrying of firearms by Black citizens. This study examines whether Domestic Violence Protection Orders, requiring those charged with a domestic violence offence who have access to firearms to turn them over to legal authorities, are enforced equally for White vs. other racialized groups.

Court records were used to identify accused people charged with a domestic violence offence and who, when asked, indicated they had access to a firearm. White accused people were less likely to be ordered to relinquish their firearms. One way to see the size of the effect is to control for other differences in the groups and look, for example, at the probability of a relinquishment order being ordered in the year 2016 (when the order was mandatory) for a 38-year-old male respondent. The probability of being ordered to relinquish firearms was lower for White accused people (80% received such orders) than it was for Indigenous (84%), Black (83%) or Latino (84%) accused people.

In circumstances where the imposition of the order to turn in one’s firearms was discretionary, the difference across racialized groups was larger. For White accused people, 28% were given such orders, compared to 34% for Indigenous, 38% for Black and 45% for Latino accused people.

The race of the person in question was determined by how the accused person was perceived by others (those responsible for the court records). Given that the focus of the study was on disparity of treatment imposed by others (i.e., the court), this measure would appear to be appropriate in determining whether differential treatment was imposed on different racialized groups.

The data show that White respondents had the highest reported access to firearms, yet they were less likely to be ordered to relinquish those firearms.

Conclusion: The data provide evidence of two effects. Statutory requirements can increase dramatically the imposition of the requirement that accused people should turn in their firearms. And statutory requirements can reduce – but not eliminate – the disparity across racialized groups. However, it is clear that attempts to remove access to firearms for Indigenous, Black, and Latino suspects were more pronounced than for White accused.

Reference: Kafka, Julie M and 7 others (2025). Disparities in Court Orders to Relinquish Firearms in Civil Domestic Violence Protection Orders. Criminology & Public Policy, 24, 405-427.

Item 7

Having a criminal record dramatically decreases the likelihood that a person will be offered a job that they apply for. This appears to be the case both for those who have been described, officially, as having a criminal record and those who appear to have one as a result of a “Google search.”

Experimental research published in the past 20 years has shown that people with criminal records are disadvantaged in getting jobs, housing or admission to universities (Criminological Highlights 6(3)#2, 21(2)#6), 17(2)#6, 18(4)#2, 15(1)#7, 21(5)#6). There is some public support for reducing the impact of a criminal record and there are techniques to overcome the effect of records (19(3)#1), 22(4)#6, 18(3)#6, 20(3)#4). However, overcoming the impact of a record is not a simple task (21(2)#7, 16(3)#2, 19(4)#5).

This paper makes an additional important point: unofficial public information that a person has a criminal record (e.g., obtained via a Google search) can also have a negative impact on those with criminal records.

In this study, a survey was carried out of people who, at one point in their lives, had jobs involving the hiring of employees. As participants in an online survey carried out in 2021, they were asked to assess an applicant’s materials for a position of a front desk clerk at a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. This “job applicant” either had an official criminal record for two minor offences (trespassing 7 years earlier, and petty theft 5 years earlier) or respondents were told that there was no official criminal record for the applicant. They were also given results of a Google search that showed either that a Google search had found that the applicant had apparently been arrested for these offences, or that the search had found nothing relevant. Respondents were described as being either Black or White.

For both Black and White applicants, those with official criminal records were less likely to get favourable assessments than were those without official criminal records. The effect of the unofficial “Google” record of offending by the applicant was significant – those with an unofficial record were rated less favourably (regardless of their official record) but the effect was smaller than the effect of the official record. The existence of a record (“officially” demonstrated or reported as a result of a Google search) reduced the willingness of people to hire the job applicant, though the effect of the evidence of an official record was larger for both Black and White applicants. The effect of a criminal record on willingness to hire the applicant was larger for White applicants than it was for Black applicants.

Conclusion: A criminal record is highly stigmatic independent of the applicant’s race. The effects of a Google hit suggesting a history of offending reduces the job applicant’s chances of being hired suggesting that simple official suppression of a history of committing minor offences such as the ones used in this study may not be sufficient if evidence of previous offending is available to anyone with a computer. An encouraging finding, however, is that when one looks at the US evidence in studies carried out over the past 20 years, there is some indication that the impact of a criminal record on job prospects may be lower than it was at the turn of the 21 ^st century.

Reference: Lageson, Sarah and Robert Apel (2025). The Mark or Trace of a Criminal Record: A Survey Experiment of Race and Criminal Record Signaling. Criminology,63, 382-410.

Item 8

Job applicants’ criminal records can be communicated to potential employers when their job applications indicate that their vocational credentials were obtained as part of a program for prisoners. Having such formal qualifications does help former prisoners get relevant jobs. But the stigma of having a criminal record does not disappear.

There is substantial evidence that having a criminal record substantially decreases the likelihood that a person will be offered a job (see article 7 in this issue). This paper examines the possibility that the stigma of a criminal record might be overcome if the job applicant completes a relevant vocational training program while in prison.

The possibility exists that even though a criminal record may normally signal negative characteristics of the job applicant to a potential employer, the successful completion of a job skills program in prison may erase the negative impact by demonstrating that the prisoner has changed. This study examines the impact of successfully completing a job training program in “heating, ventilation, and air conditioning” (HVAC) – a program often offered in prison in part because of the demand for people with these skills.

The study used job postings from 1502 employers hiring HVAC workers in 5 US states. The employers did not require a specific vocational credential. All applicants were described as having 4 years of work experience and high school skills. Applicants were described either as having a 4-year prison record involving drug offences or there was no mention of any involvement with prisons. Applicants also were described as having successfully passed an HVAC program (in prison or in the community, depending on the condition) or there was no mention of this credential. Finally, applicants were described (by using names associated with race) as being either Black or White. The key outcome variable was whether or not the employer responded positively (e.g., requesting more information or an interview with the applicant).

In the analyses, various controls were included. For example, because the states differed in the manner in which they controlled the use of criminal records, the state was controlled as was the month in which the application for employment was filed and whether the employer required a professional reference.

The analyses showed three main effects. Those with criminal records were less likely than those without criminal records to receive positive responses from employers. Black applicants were less likely to receive positive responses than White applicants. And those with HVAC credentials were more likely to receive positive responses than those without such credentials. The effect of HVAC certification and prison records were very similar for both Black and White applicants. However, for each of the groups (HVAC or not; prison record or not) equivalent Black applicants were less likely to receive a favourable outcome from a potential employer than were White applicants.

Conclusion: The results showed that while “vocational credentials can partially mitigate employment barriers faced by returning citizens, they are insufficient to fully overcome the additive effects of prison record stigma and racial discrimination” (p. 427). “Racial discrimination effects were comparable in magnitude to prison record effects, creating compounded disadvantages for Black returning citizens…” (p. 428). Vocational credentials, then, can help both Black and White prisoners get jobs after they are released. However, at least in the case of HVAC credentials, there is no evidence that vocational credentials put Blacks and those with criminal records in position comparable to White applicants or those who have not experienced imprisonment.

Reference: Lindsay, Sadé L. (2025). Mixed Signals from Prison? Postsecondary Vocational Credentials, Race, and Postrelease Employment. Criminology, 63, 411-436.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner

Criminological Highlights Vol. 22, No. 4 - September 2025

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 17:00:48 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Item 1

People who are accepted into court-mandated therapeutic programs but do not comply with all of the program requirements are “marked as noncompliant and channeled toward more punitive interventions…. By framing marginalized people as unwilling to accept help to improve themselves and their lives, state agencies can justify placing them under more coercive forms of control” (p. 114-5). Diversion from standard criminal justice processes can run the risk of increased punishment.

Many accused people are diverted into diversion programs that replace formal punishments (e.g., imprisonment) with therapeutic programs (e.g., drug treatment programs). This paper examines this practice to determine what can happen to vulnerable people who don’t fully comply with program requirements.

The paper examines a primarily outpatient felony pretrial diversion program in an urban area in the US south. The program was seen as employing best practices for such programs. As part of the study, diversion participants were either interviewed (n=50) or observed in their therapy sessions (n=92). Participation in therapeutic groups – typically after a guilty plea – was required by the program as were other more specific requirements (e.g., drug testing). Non-compliance typically resulted in the return of the participant to the “normal” criminal justice system for sentencing. In these situations, the person was marked as being “noncompliant and [was pushed] toward more punitive interventions” (p. 1126). The study noted, however, that “The people marked for punishment are overwhelming those in need of mental healthcare, Black, and poor” (p. 1127). In other words, groups that are especially vulnerable to harsh treatment by the justice system tend to get harsh treatment by programs designed to be diversions from the justice system.

Some of the most common reasons for removing people from the treatment (diversion) program were the need for mental health treatment, failure to take drug tests, and the inability to pay for the program costs (which were not always predictable). Treatment providers often added requirements (e.g., more drug tests or treatment) to those who appeared to be non-compliant. The result is that if program participants were sent back to the criminal justice system, they often appeared to have been non-compliant in multiple ways.

“This study… found that state agencies frame noncompliance with standard [therapeutic program] performance demands as a signal that an individual is unwilling to change their own behaviour and thus requires more coercive state [criminal justice] control. But because successful compliance is largely defined by health, financial resources, and – in many cases – institutional trust, the most vulnerable individuals cannot submit, despite their best efforts. Their noncompliance then becomes the grounds for punitive state action, as those individuals are channeled toward more coercive forms of intervention” (p. 1135). Noncompliant people were seen as “not just [being] unable to govern themselves but [being] unwilling to change and – in consequence – in need of more coercive control” (p. 1136).

“This study suggests that situating healthcare [for people caught up in the criminal justice system] within agencies that require clients to comply with rigid sets of requirements in order to continue to receive services can increase the precarity of people who are sick” (p. 1138).

Conclusion: People are sorted by these diversion programs according to whether they are compliant with all of the conditions. “By framing marginalized people as unwilling to accept help to improve themselves and their lives, state agencies can justify placing them under more coercive forms of control” (p. 1115). The result is that program compliance is used to produce unequal legal outcomes where the most vulnerable receive the harshest outcomes.

Reference: Stitt, Mary Ellen (2025). Adjudication Under Cover: Compliance and Inequality in the Criminal Courts. American Journal of Sociology, 130(5), 1113-1149.

Item 2

When a homicide takes place near a police officer’s home, White police officers are more likely to use force against Black pedestrians during the next week than they otherwise would have done had there not been a homicide in their own neighbourhood.

In many US cities, police officers’ residences are concentrated in highly segregated neighbourhoods. Given that “people ascribe symbolic meanings to the places they live, and these places can shape their personal identity and sense of belonging” (p. 1395), it would not be surprising to find that violence near a police officer’s home would affect the manner in which they interact with citizens.

Given the importance of race in policing in the US, it is not surprising that previous research has suggested that “Police officers may be particularly sensitive to feelings of racial threat and – perhaps most importantly – uniquely positioned to act on them” (p. 1398). Previous research has shown that “perceptions of disorder in Chicago [the location of this research] are more strongly associated with the racial and ethnic composition of the neighbourhood than readily observed signs of disorder” (p. 1401). Violence near one’s home may also be seen as a violation of an important boundary: the racialized disorder of the outside world and the order of one’s own residential space.

To test whether homicides near a Chicago police patrol officer’s residence had an impact on their dealing with civilians, data were collected from four sources: (1) demographic data on police officers, (2) a record of the location of their daily work assignments, (3) records of arrests, stops and use-of-force incidents, and (4) location of all homicides and nonfatal shootings. Police officers’ home addresses were obtained (for 80% of the officers) by matching them with voting records. “The racial patterning of officer residences mirrors the broader racial and ethnic segregation that characterizes Chicago’s residential landscape” (p. 1410). Whites and Blacks are disproportionately likely to live in areas with higher portions of people of their own racial groups.

In the weeks immediately before the occurrence of a homicide in a police officer’s residential neighbourhood, there were no differences between the rate of the occurrence of a use-of-force incident for Black, Hispanic, and White officers. However, in the week or two immediately after the occurrence a homicide in a police officer’s residential neighbourhood, the data show that “White officers are significantly more likely to use force against Black civilians for the [first two weeks] that follow a homicide within one-eighth of a mile of the [police officer’s] home” (p. 1420). The data also demonstrate that “the closer a White officer lives to a homicide, the more likely they are to engage in force against Black pedestrians during their shifts for the following week” (p. 1422) even though, of course, they may not be working in their own neighbourhoods. However, a nearby homicide had no effect on officers’ likelihood of arresting or stopping Black pedestrians. The effect was limited to the use of force. The study did not find “any evidence that Hispanic or Black officers who were exposed to a nearby homicide are more likely than their unexposed counterparts to use force against pedestrians” (p. 1421).

Conclusion: The study supports the view that discriminatory policing – in this case the use of force against Black pedestrians – is more prevalent after events that officers perceive as personal threats to their wellbeing or that of their families. The data show that White police officers in Chicago are especially sensitive to recent homicides that take place near their homes and that this sensitivity is evident in their use of force with Black pedestrians.

Reference: Donahue, Samuel Thomas and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa (2025). From the Block to the Beat: How Violence in Officers’ Neighbourhoods Influences Racially Biased Policing. American Journal of Sociology, 130(6), 1394-1434.

Item 3

The longer a youth is exposed to neighbourhood disadvantage in their first 9 years, the more likely the youth is to be involved in aggression and violence. Much of the observed difference across racialized groups in aggression and violence can be traced to the different lengths of time that these racialized groups, as youths, experience neighbourhood disadvantage.

Although there is a fair amount of research on the impact of neighbourhood disadvantage on offending (e.g., Criminological Highlights 9(6)#6, 11(6)#8, 22(3)#3), much of this work does not include estimates of the total proportion of a youth’s life that is spent in a disadvantaged neighbourhood. This paper looks at the portion of a youth’s life, before age 9, that was spent in a disadvantaged neighbourhood and relates this to their caregiver’s rating of their level of aggression and their own self-reported violence.

The effects of neighbourhood disadvantage on violence are important for another reason: Recent studies, for example, “indicate that ethnoracial disparities in violence are reduced once concentrated disadvantage is held constant” (p. 3). “Disadvantaged neighbourhoods have fewer institutional resources, such as quality schools… and employment opportunities (p. 4). Hence, it would not be surprising to find that observed differences across racialized groups would completely or largely disappear once neighbourhood disadvantage is controlled for.

This study uses data from a longitudinal study of 4,898 children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large US cities. Primary caregivers were interviewed regularly. Neighbourhood disadvantage data were collected from US census data in 2000 and 2010 and estimates were made as to how much each youth had lived in a disadvantaged neighbourhood. The neighbourhood disadvantage index was a composite of 7 indicators involving such factors as unemployment, poverty, education, and concentration of vacant housing. A measure of the youth’s aggression (e.g., does the child bully others, get into fights, attack others) was obtained from the primary caregiver when the youth was age 15. In addition, (also at age 15) the youth’s self-report of violent behaviour (e.g., getting into a serious fight, using a weapon) was obtained. Various control factors (e.g., sex, mother’s age at youth’s birth, mother’s education, family structure, household income) were included in the statistical models.

The results showed that Black youths’ aggression (measured with reports from parents and youths at age 15) was higher than the measures relating to White youth’s behaviour. However, the difference in the parents’ reports of White and Black youths disappeared when the estimate of the total neighbourhood disadvantage the youth had experienced was taken into account. It would appear that the differences between groups was explained by the experience of neighbourhood disadvantage rather than race. For the youth’s self-reported aggression, the impact of race was substantially reduced when neighbourhood disadvantage was included in the model, but it was still statistically significant. Findings for Hispanic youths were similar, but not completely the same.

Conclusion: Neighbourhood disadvantage, estimated for the youths’ first 9 years, was an important predictor of the youth’s aggression and self-reported violence. The findings also “reveal that prolonged exposure to neighbourhood disadvantage explains the Black-White disparity in aggression….” (p.18). The findings also demonstrate that the measure of the total duration of the youth’s exposure to neighbourhood disadvantage was substantially better at predicting a youth’s aggression or self-reported violence than a simple “point in time” measure.

Reference: Bellair, Paul E., Thomas L. McNulty, and Daniel L. Carlson (2025). The Significance of Duration Weighted Neighbourhood Effects for Violent Behaviour and Explanation of Ethnoracial Differences. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 41, 1-22.

Item 4

Imposing solitary confinement on prisoners increases the likelihood that they will be reincarcerated after serving their sentences.

It is well established that prisoners who have mental health challenges are more likely than other prisoners to serve time in solitary confinement. It is also well established that solitary confinement itself has harmful effects on those placed in those units (Criminological Highlights, 20(3)5, 20(4)#3, 19(6)#4). This paper examines a related question: Are prisoners who spend time in solitary confinement more likely than others to be reincarcerated?

One of the challenges in determining the likelihood of reincarceration is that those who serve time in solitary confinement (regardless of what sanitized name is used for it – structured intervention, segregation, restricted housing, etc.) may be more likely to be held until the end of their sentence rather than being released on some form of conditional release (e.g., parole). The effect of not getting conditional release is, of course, that they are not receiving the same degree of supervision and surveillance as those released on some form of parole prior to the end of their sentences. Hence those who experience solitary confinement may be less likely to be reincarcerated simply because the level of surveillance they receive soon after they are released is less than that experienced by prisoners released on some form of parole.

This paper examines the impact of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania prisons on re-imprisonment controlling not only for various standard individual characteristics (e.g., age, race, mental illness, initial offence, “risk” scores, time in prison, misconduct in prison), but also controlling for the nature of the prisoner’s release back into the community (receiving parole supervision or not). For prisoners who were charged with prison misconduct, two groups were created: those who experienced solitary confinement and those who did not. For those who were never charged with prison misconduct, two separate groups were also created: those who spent time in administrative segregation (e.g., because of threats to themselves or threats they made to others) and those who were never placed in solitary confinement. These groups were then each divided into those who were released on parole (and therefore were being monitored in the community) and those who were released without criminal justice supervision.

The confounding effects of parole were evident in the findings. As expected, those who experienced either form of segregation were less likely to be released on parole. But also those being supervised on parole (whether or not they had experienced solitary confinement) were more likely to be re-imprisoned.

The results of the effects of solitary confinement were straightforward and consistent across groups (those in administrative or disciplinary segregation and those who were released on parole or not). Prisoners who experienced either form of solitary confinement (administrative or disciplinary) were more likely to be re-incarcerated and were likely to be reincarcerated sooner those who had not spent time in solitary confinement. Simply put, time in solitary confinement led to increased likelihood of reincarceration. But in addition, “the risks of re-imprisonment are especially high for those held in isolation for longer periods of time – greater than 90 days” (p. 9). Furthermore, the effects of solitary confinement on the “administrative” sample were stronger than the effects of solitary confinement on those with misconduct charges.

Conclusion: The results are consistent with other research showing the criminogenic impacts of solitary confinement. Though some correctional systems (e.g., Canada’s) might claim that its renamed solitary confinement system is not being used for punishment, the data suggest that both the prisoner, and society more generally, are being punished by solitary confinement. Prisoners who experience solitary confinement are more likely to be returned to prison than those who are not placed in solitary confinement. And society more generally suffers from the effects of solitary confinement because it increases the likelihood of various forms of misconduct in the community.

Reference: Anderson, Claudia N., J. Ben-Menachem, S. Donahue, J.T. Simes & B. Western (2025). Solitary Confinement, Parole, and Criminalization. Journal of Criminal Justice, 98.

Item 5

Motor vehicle drivers do not like speed cameras that trigger the issuing of a speeding ticket to those exceeding speed limits by even small amounts. However, for drivers who are at least 25 years old, including a written explanation with the speeding offence notice stating that speed limits are set to reduce collisions (half of which involve cars exceeding the limit by less than 10 km/hour) had a positive effect: it reduced repeat speeding convictions in the next year by 11%.

Most road policing initiatives are based on deterrence notions: drivers will obey the law if they perceive they will be caught if they commit an offence. In contrast, this paper examines a different approach to reducing driving offences: providing drivers who have committed an offence with an explanation of the value of the law that is being enforced will encourage them to obey that law.

In Queensland, Australia, the reoffending of over 16,000 drivers who received camera-detected notices of a speed infringement in 2017 was examined. Before the notice of the offence was sent to the driver, the cases were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Everyone received the standard infringement notice. But half of them got an additional letter with the heading “No driver means to kill. They were just going too fast.” This one-page letter explained that “Almost half of all serious speed-related crashes happen at less than 10 km/hour above the speed limit.” It further explained that the limits “take into account the history of crashes in the area” (Appendix A). The others received just their infringement notice.

The study looked at the driving records for these drivers for the 12 months before and after the experiment was implemented. The driving records were divided between speeding offences and other ordinary traffic offences (e.g., failing to stop at a stop sign or traffic light). Drivers were separated into two groups: those under 25 years old and those 25 years old or older. The gender of the driver and whether they were low or high risk (zero or one offence in the previous year vs. 2 or more offences in the previous year) were included as control factors in the analyses. Male drivers and those classified as “high risk” were, not surprisingly, more likely to reoffend.

The most important finding of the study, however, was that including the explanation of the importance of speed limits reduced subsequent speeding-reoffending by 11% for those drivers who were 25 years old or older. Obviously, this reduction in speeding offences cannot be attributed to “deterrence” since both those who received the letter explaining the importance of speed limits and those who did not were punished by the offence that they originally committed.

Providing the explanation had no effect for young drivers (those under 25 years old). In addition, there was no effect of the letter on other driving offences. This last finding is not surprising since the communication that drivers received focused solely on speeding offences.

Conclusion: The study demonstrates that a short explanation concerning the social value of obeying speed limits can have an effect in promoting safe driving. Because individual drivers were randomly assigned to receive or not receive the explanatory letter, it is unlikely that the effect had anything to do with deterrence. Obviously, it is not known exactly which aspects of the letter caused the reduction in reoffending. Hence jurisdictions interested in reducing traffic violations using similar techniques would need to test, experimentally, their own communications in order to be confident of their effects.

Reference: Bates, Lundel, Sarah Bennett, Claire Irvine, Emma Antrobus, & John Gilmour (2025). A Procedurally Just Flyer Reduces Subsequent Speeding Offences: Evidence from the Queensland Speeding Engagement Trial (QSET). Journal of Experimental Criminology, 21, 201-217.

Item 6

Society benefits from allowing people with criminal records to get jobs. Governments can easily make it more likely that people with criminal records will get jobs.

“People with criminal records struggle to get jobs… even though their employment would benefit their lives as well as society more broadly…. Employment difficulties resulting from past convictions disproportionately impact Americans of colour… contributing to racial inequality” (p. 210). This paper demonstrates that the stigma of a criminal record when a person seeks employment can be reduced.

In this study, people across the US who had input on hiring decisions in organizations participated in a survey in which the effect of various “incentives” was examined to see which of these incentives would help overcome the impact of a criminal record. Respondents to the survey were given information about job applicants and were asked which ones they would consider hiring. Some of these applicants were described as having criminal records. In the first experiment, the respondents in the control group were simply told that some had criminal records and some did not. The remaining survey respondents were divided into three groups. They were told one of three things: (1) the employer would receive a $2400 tax credit for each person hired who had a criminal record, (2) the employer would be insured for up to $25,000 for losses related to employee dishonesty, or (3) there was be a statutory restriction on negligent-hiring lawsuits where an employee who was hired had a felony conviction. The applicants varied on a number of dimensions. Not surprisingly, people with relevant work experience were more likely to be hired as were applicants with more education or a recommendation letter. In general, applicants with a criminal record were less likely to be hired.

However, offering potential employers a $2400 tax credit for hiring someone with a criminal record increased substantially that person’s chances of being hired. The offer of employee-dishonesty insurance had some effect, but the restriction on lawsuits was completely ineffective.

In the second experiment, employers were told that they were looking at the applications of people who had been tentatively hired, but who then were required to reveal any criminal records they might have to the potential employer. Various aspects of the criminal record – e.g., multiple convictions, recent convictions – made a difference. In addition, applicants with state issued “rehabilitation certificates” were more likely to be hired. As in the first experiment, if the employer was told that they would receive a tax credit for hiring someone with a record, they were considerably more likely to hire the person. Once again providing the employer with insurance against employee offending was also effective, but the lawsuit restriction had no impact on whether or not the applicant was hired.

Conclusions: Each of these experiments demonstrated that providing a financial incentive to an employer for hiring a person with a criminal record or providing an employer with insurance against any losses associated with hiring a former offender would increase the likelihood that a job applicant with a criminal record would be hired. The procedure of offering modest compensation to an employer who hires someone with a criminal record was clearly the most effective approach. The US federal program, however, has various serious restrictions on it (e.g., it only can be used within one year of conviction or release from prison).

Reference: Bushway, Shawn D. & Justin T. Pickett (2025). Direct Incentives May Increase Employment of People with Criminal Records. Criminology & Public Policy, 24, 209-236.

Item 7

The use of an electronic monitored sentence served in the community as a complete substitute for prison sentences of up to six months reduces offenders’ reconviction rate.

There are at least two ways in which electronic monitoring (EM) has been evaluated. First, people have examined whether adding electronic monitoring to a community sentence (as a way of tracking where the offender might be) has any effect on reoffending. Second, researchers have studied whether sentences involving a community sentence with EM have different outcomes than ordinary prison sentences.

There is little evidence to suggest that adding EM to an ordinary community sentence is likely to provide any useful benefit, such as reduced reoffending (e.g., Criminological Highlights 3(2)#4, 4(3)#7, 19(1)#8). However, in cases where the imposition of EM has been used as a justification for additional community sentences rather than imprisonment, there is some favourable evidence (14(6)#5, 17(1)#6, 20(1)#3).

This study examines the effects of a 2005 change in the law in Sweden that allowed for substituting EM for sentences of imprisonment of 3-6 months. Decisions on whether EM was appropriate were made by correctional officers, not judges, after the judge had sentenced the offender to prison. The study examines the effect of EM (rather than imprisonment) on offenders who had been convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for 3-6 months. Such offenders, if they qualified (e.g., they had not been in pretrial detention, they did not live with one of their victims, they were involved in work or an education program, they had an approved residence where all residents have consented to the offender living in the home with EM), were offered EM as a substitute for the prison sentence they received from the judge.

Although only about 23% of these offenders (sentenced to 3-6 months of prison) received releases on EM instead of prison, a conservative decision was made to consider all of those originally receiving 3-6 month sentences as the “treatment” group. Those sentenced to 2-3 months were the comparison group. Again, this would appear to be a conservative decision since, if anything, those sentenced to 2-3 months are likely to have been less serious offenders. It is important to note that the change in the law did not affect the sentence lengths imposed by the judges.

Those sentenced to 3-6 months in prison, some of whom were released to the community on EM rather than serving prison sentences, were less likely to be reconvicted and reincarcerated within 1, 3, and 10 years. Being eligible for EM appeared also to reduce labour market exclusion 1 and 3 years after conviction. The comparison group used for these analyses were those sentenced to 3 months or less. The effects of the reform encouraging release into the community with EM rather than imprisonment was not large: a reduction of about 3% in offending after one and ten years. Perhaps what is more important is that there was no indication of any increase in reoffending as a result of the change in the law allowing offenders to serve their sentences in the community (with EM) rather than in prison.

Conclusion: It is in the public interest to assist offenders to integrate into the community and to increase their labor market participation. Using electronic monitoring as a mechanism to avoid imprisonment, according to this study, can accomplish those goals while also reducing offending and victimization. In Sweden the daily cost of imprisonment is approximately US$220 compared to a daily cost of US$46 for electronic monitoring. There appear to be both crime and cost benefits of using electronic monitoring rather than imprisonment.

Reference: Al Weswasi, Enes & Olof Bäckman (2025). The Effects of Replacing Incarceration with Electronic Monitoring on Crime, Mortality, and Labor Market Exclusion. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 41, 135-172.

Item 8

People are often required to answer questions put to them by police or other public officials. Giving people a chance to present their own narrative of events, rather than simply answering specific questions that are put to them, increases the likelihood that they will believe they have been treated fairly.

People often have to answer questions about why they have done things. Often, however, they are not given an opportunity to express, in their own words, why they have acted the way they have. This paper suggests that assessments of procedural justice increase when people are allowed to explain things in their own way.

Previous research has shown that when police give suspects a chance to tell their side of the story of the offence they are accused of, there is less reoffending. Similarly, being treated in a manner that is seen as fair – quite independent of the actual outcome of a case – increases the likelihood that youths will see the criminal justice system as being fair (Criminological Highlights, 1(1)#2), 11(5)#1). Said differently, it is not just the outcome that is important to people who have contact with those in authority; procedural fairness in the manner in which an outcome is determined also affects how people view the outcome and perhaps how they behave afterwards.

In this study, people were asked to evaluate a procedure involving ordinary citizens who were applying for a special welfare payment to help pay their utility bills. For half of the participants in this experiment, the application form being assessed consisted only of a series of predictable questions, such as the applicant’s income, their rent and related expenditures, their childcare expenses, the size of their household, how long they had lived in the community, etc. For the other half of the participants, the application form was exactly the same except it had a specific section in which applicants were offered the opportunity to “provide any further information you would like to support your application” (p. 91). This did not have a word limit. Respondents were then asked to provide their views of the application process by indicating whether they thought the application process was fair, dignified, and user-friendly, and whether the form treated the applicant “as a person, not just a case to be processed” (p 94).

Those assessing the procedure that included the section encouraging applicants to provide their own narrative of why they should receive the benefit saw the application procedure as more fair, etc. Comments from the participants indicated they thought that it was important for those making decisions to have details that applicants thought might be important, not just those details that the organization had identified. It is important to note that it was the procedure – not the outcome – that was being evaluated. It is likely that procedures that encouraged decision makers to listen to the words of applicants are important determinants of perceived fairness.

Conclusion: The manner in which the state makes decisions about individual citizens is important. In routine situations like this one – where an applicant is applying for a welfare payment – or in situations where a police officer is questioning a citizen about a routine matter (e.g., a traffic infraction), inviting the citizen to provide their perspective on factors that should be considered appears to be important, whether or not the decision ultimately is the one that the citizen might have wanted. Procedural justice appears to be an important dimension in how people evaluate state decisions that directly affect their lives.

Reference: Meers, Jed, Aisling Ryan & Joe Tomlinson (2025). Perceptions of Procedural Fairness and Space for Personal Narrative: An Experimental Study of Form Design. Journal of Law & Society, 52, 81-111.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner

Criminological Highlights Vol. 22, No. 3 - June 2025

t.king@mail.utoronto.ca (Tyler King) — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:21:19 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Do ordinary people really want offenders who are given long sentences to serve the sentences that are originally imposed on them?
What weight should be given to a risk assessment tool that was last validated 12 years ago?
What happens to violent crime when we fix up a run-down neighbourhood?
What children are most affected by the exposure to family violence?
How are Black offenders disadvantaged at sentencing when judges are encouraged to assess their potential for rehabilitation?
How do false confessions bias the evidence used in criminal cases?
Is it safe to release murderers from prison after 10-15 years?
How do blocked economic opportunities for youths affect crime rates?

Item 1

Carefully executed experiments with representative samples of American citizens suggest that there is substantial support for systems of “second look sentencing” where people who have been incarcerated for a very long time can apply to a court to be “resentenced” by a judge.

Imprisonment is seen as an easy solution to crime in large part because many ordinary citizens are not aware of the failure of harsh sentences to reduce crime (see CrimHighlights.ca “special issues”). This paper demonstrates that once someone has been imprisoned for a long time, there is substantial public support for policies that allow for the “resentencing” of such offenders and their return to the community.

“Second look sentencing” (p. 281) is becoming increasingly popular in many US states. In 2017 in the District of Columbia, youths and young adult offenders who had been imprisoned for 15 years or more were made eligible to petition for release. This paper examines public support for extending second look sentencing to all offenders who have served long terms of imprisonment.

In 2023, representative samples of US adults participated in two experiments in which they were asked whether they would support the release of offenders after they had been imprisoned for some time. In the first experiment, the time that they had been imprisoned was varied (randomly) in the questionnaire as was the description of the age when they committed the offence. In the second experiment other information was systematically varied: the programs the offender had participated in, the view of the prison warden, and whether a victim (or victim’s family) supported resentencing and possible early release.

Characteristics of the case that were varied made no difference. In the first study, 56.2% supported second look sentencing, and 19.1% opposed it, with 24.6% having no opinion. In the second study, there was a very small effect of age: support for re-sentencing was greatest for those who offended when they were youths. In addition, support was highest if the offender had completed rehabilitation programs and had support of the warden and/or victim.

The broad level of support from these surveys is similar to some actual “resentencing” experiences in Canada. Since capital punishment was abolished in Canada in 1976, offenders receive life sentences for murder and are ineligible to apply for parole for 10-25 years. However, until 2011, prisoners who had received sentences including parole ineligibility for 15 years or more could go before a jury to have their case reviewed. The jury could reduce this parole ineligibility period, which then allowed the prisoner to go before the parole board. Until the mid-1990s, 8 of the 12 jurors had to agree to reduce the ineligibility period; in 80% of the hearings, juries did so. However, in 1997, the law was changed such that the “resentencing” was not available to those convicted of more than one murder. Furthermore, a judge had to determine that there was a “substantial likelihood that the application would succeed” (Criminal Code S.745.61 (1)). The most dramatic change was that the 12-person jury had to be unanimous for the ineligibility period to be reduced. Nevertheless, Canadian citizens, acting as jurors in these cases, actually did reduce the parole ineligibility periods for 73% of the cases they heard. In 2011, a Conservative federal government eliminated this form of “resentencing” for anyone convicted of a murder that took place after 2011.

Conclusion: It would appear that the public is not opposed to some form of “second look” at very long sentences initially given to people who have committed serious offences. “A majority of Americans are supportive of universal second look sentencing and thus are open to releasing some people currently serving long sentences for serious violent crimes” (p 290). More specifically, survey data from the US, and actual decisions by ordinary citizens in Canada, suggest that after 10-15 years of imprisonment, members of the public are willing to allow a second look at the imprisonment decision and to allow many prisoners to be released.

Reference: Smith, Paula plus 6 others (2025). Public support for Universal Second Look Sentencing, A Research Note. Criminology, 63, 289-293. Public Safety Canada: Corrections and Conditional Release Act Statistical Overview, 1998 and 2021.

Item 2

Risk assessment tools are developed and validated on specific populations at particular points in time. Just as it cannot be assumed that they are equally valid for different groups of people, this paper presents data demonstrating that a measure developed at one point in time is dramatically less accurate for youths who were born, on average, 12 years later.

Predictions are often made about the likelihood that a person caught up in the criminal justice system will commit another offence. Typically, various characteristics about the person (e.g., characteristics of the person’s history, their family and neighbourhood, and their criminal justice background) are used as predictors. But what if the factors that predict involvement in crime change over time?

This paper examines a very simple hypothesis: the accuracy of the prediction from a risk assessment instrument will deteriorate when it is applied to people born a few years later than the original validation sample. The study uses data from 1,057 youths. A “classic” set of variables (e.g., characteristics of the youth, family, poverty, community environment) and a second “full set” of predictors (with 35 measures overall) were used to create prediction measures. As it turns out, the pattern of results for the full model is similar to that of the classic model and the added value of the “full” model was negligible. The outcome measure of interest was whether youths were arrested between the ages of 17 and 24.

For the older cohort the prediction of arrest was as good or better than the predictions made by risk assessment instruments used daily in criminal justice settings. For the older cohort – the youths on whom the scale was developed – the scale was well calibrated: “On average, the predicted probability of arrest from the model is the same as the proportion of participants who actually are arrested at that probability level.” For example, for scores where the model predicted that 75% of the youths would be arrested, it was found that about 75% actually were actually arrested. For the younger cohort, however, the measure substantially overpredicted offending: Youths who were predicted to have a 75% likelihood of being arrested in fact only had about a 40% likelihood of being arrested.

When the data were divided into three groups by race (White and other, Black, Latino), the results were very much the same: There was an over-prediction of arrest for the younger cohort but no evidence of over-prediction of arrest for the older cohort (the group that was used for validation purposes) for any of the race groups. When “high risk” youths were examined separately, the same finding appeared: there was over-prediction of arrest for those who were born later than the sample used to develop the measures.

“Societies, just like the individuals who compose them, change over time” (p 6). In this case, the cohort differences that are reported could well reflect changes in the community in which the measure was being used – in this case, an overall decline in arrest in Chicago. The problem, of course, is that in order to determine why the quality of the prediction of future offending decreased, one would have to re-validate the scale.

Conclusion: The results of this study should not be used to question the value of risk assessment instruments generally: Subjective predictions by humans may well suffer from this same problem. “The most straightforward approach to mitigating cohort bias is to ensure that risk assessment instruments are updated frequently” (p. 8). The performance of prediction models is unlikely to be stable over time. The predictions will fail “if the dynamics of social change are ignored.” But in addition, “In criminal justice applications, the costs of such overpredictions of risk level are high” (p. 3) both to the youth and to society more generally.

Reference: Montana, Erika, Daniel S. Nagin, Roland Neil and Robert J. Sampson (2023). Cohort Bias in Predictive Risk Assessment of Future Criminal Justice Involvement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(23) 1-9.

Item 3

Neighbourhoods with comparatively high rates of violent crime can reduce local violent crime rates by making relatively inexpensive improvements in their physical characteristics.

There is a growing amount of research (e.g., Criminological Highlights 21(6)#6) suggesting that improvements in the physical condition of urban neighbourhoods can reduce local crime. Part of the reason for this may be that depopulated areas of cities “are particularly vulnerable to violent crime because illegal activity can occur in depopulated areas with limited surveillance….” (p. 2).

This study took place in Flint, Michigan, a city that, in the latter part of the 20th century, experienced depopulation and urban decay. In 2011, the city declared a financial state of emergency. In a particularly hard-hit area of the city, federal money was made available to local communities to carry out improvements in the environmental design of their immediate neighbourhoods. These involved improvements in such areas as landscaping, signage, decorative fencing, maintenance of the public areas, removing of graffiti, controls on access to some properties, and the encouragement of positive uses of land (e.g., through the development or improvement of playgrounds). What may have also been important in the City’s plan, however, was that much of these improvements were carried out and/or organized by community residents.

Between 2015 and 2018, improvement activities were carried out in many – but not all – locations in this part of the city. These were typically initiated and carried out by neighbourhood residents. The amount of improvement to the neighbourhood (physical such as maintenance or repairs as well as social such as community events), however, varied dramatically across neighbourhoods. In order to assess the changes that had occurred and the impact of these changes on crime, each “street segment” (both sides of a street between two intersections or the end of the street) in the area was rated such that the “intensity” of the improvements, if any, (between 2015 and 2018) could be scored on 10 different dimensions. In addition, violent crime and violent firearm incidents were obtained from the police for each street segment.

Important controls were included in the analyses: (1) Violence density prior to the start of the improvement activities, (2) Neighbourhood disadvantage (percent of households in poverty, on public assistance, renter occupied, vacant), and (3) Researchers’ ratings of property maintenance (buildings and lawns) at the beginning of the program.

Looking both at the rates of violent crime in the street segment and violent firearm crime, it was found that “higher levels of community engaged [improvement] activities were associated with steeper declines in violent… and violent firearm density over time” (p. 9).

Conclusion: The concept of “crime prevention through environmental design” is not new. This paper suggests, however, that “active resident participation in improving vacant and deteriorating environments can promote safer communities by reducing opportunities for crime and asserting positive community ownership and oversight” (p. 11). “Community engaged Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design may be particularly beneficial [in reducing violence] because it takes a nonpunitive, population-level approach that avoids some of the costs and harms associated with justice-system interventions” (p. 13). At a minimum, it should be remembered that resources (money and time) spent in this project improved the physical and social quality of the neighbourhoods. Crime reduction effects can be seen as additional benefits to the community from the improvement of the quality of the neighbourhoods.

Reference: Rupp, Laney A. and 9 others (2025). Community-engaged Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and Reductions in Violent and Firearm Crime. American Journal of Community Psychology, 1-16.

Item 4

Exposure to family violence when a child is young is most likely to be associated with later violent and non-violent crime when the child also experiences residential instability and the incarceration of a parent.

The relationship between childhood family adversity and delinquency has been demonstrated repeatedly in the history of criminology. In this context, childhood exposure to family violence has also frequently been identified as an important risk factor for delinquency.

This study examines whether the impact of exposure to family violence is especially harmful to a child if it is combined with either or both of two other family disadvantages that are known to contribute to an increased likelihood of delinquent acts by a child: residential instability and parental incarceration. Each of these factors has, on its own, been shown to be associated with delinquency. It could be argued that these factors – which tend to be correlated with one another – are each an indicator of a difficult family situation for a child. If so, it is possible that experiencing more than one of the three is, in fact, no worse for the child since each may simply be an indicator of a less-than-ideal family. Alternatively, family violence may have an especially large impact when it is experienced by youths who are already vulnerable due to residential instability and the incarceration of a parent.

This paper examines data from 3,191 youths born in 20 large US cities between 1998 and 2000. Mothers – especially unmarried mothers – were recruited for the study in hospitals at the time of the birth of their child. They were interviewed 4 times in the next nine years. When the child was 15, both the mother and the child were interviewed.

About 14% of the youths experienced exposure to family violence at age 9 or earlier. This was assessed from answers to a question posed to mothers on whether they had ever been “seriously hurt in a fight with their romantic partner” (p. 398) and whether this had occurred in front of the child or when the child was in the home. Residential instability for the youth was defined as having moved 3 or more times when the child was 3-9 years old. The youth was described as experiencing parental incarceration if one or both parents had been incarcerated between the youth’s 3 ^rd and 9 ^th birthdays. 33% of the youths experienced residential instability and 32% experienced the incarceration of a parent. About 14% of the youths experienced exposure to family violence. Various controls – including the delinquency of peers, childhood emotional or physical abuse, as well as maternal education, poverty, violence of the neighbourhood -- were statistically controlled. The main dependent variable was the self-report of the 15-year-old youth of their involvement in 13 separate forms of violent and non-violent offending in the previous year.

Taken by themselves, “childhood exposure to family violence, residential instability, and parental incarceration are not particularly consistent nor robust predictors of adolescent delinquency” (p. 407) when they are examined as independent predictors. However, when examined in combination with one another, it is clear – especially when looking at any delinquency (violent or non-violent) – that youths who were exposed to all three forms of family adversity (family violence as well as residential instability and parental incarceration) were substantially more likely to be involved in crime.

Conclusion: It appears that the impact of experiencing family violence is intimately linked to other household adversities (residential instability and parental incarceration). Said differently, it is the overall family environment that needs to be understood when trying to understand why a particular youth is responding to household adversities by offending.

Reference: Talaugon, Alyssa R. and Jillian J. Turanovic (2025). Childhood Exposure to Family Violence, Residential Instability, and Parental Incarceration. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 62, 387-428.

Item 5

English judges sometimes use their judgements of an offender’s remorse, good character, and the ability to rehabilitate in their determination of the sentence that they impose. An examination of the use of these judgements in the sentences imposed on those found guilty of assault or drug offences suggests that the use of these subjective judgments helps Whites more than Blacks.

When imposing a sentence, judges decide whether certain factors are relevant and should affect the sentence. For some factors (e.g., whether an offence was committed when the accused was on bail) the assessment is objective. For others (e.g., whether the defendant shows remorse) the judgement is subjective. This paper examines the possibility that factors where there is high judicial discretion and which relate directly to the offender (rather than the nature of the offence) “have the greatest risk of being ‘racially determined’ and, therefore, operating as a source of ethnic disparity in sentencing outcomes” (p. 242).

This study looks at two high volume offence groups: assault (and public order offences) and drug offences. Using the England & Wales sentencing guidelines, 5 sentencing factors were identified that involve both a high degree of judicial discretion and apply solely to the offender: showing remorse, having good character, ability to rehabilitate, having a mental disorder/learning difficulty, and age/lack of maturity.

The study used short check list surveys filled out by Crown Court judges for individual cases. Judges indicated whether certain factors (e.g., use of a weapon, lack of premeditation, whether the offender had previous relevant convictions) were relevant for the case. Although the race/ethnicity of the offender was not included in this survey, the researchers were able to obtain this information from a case identifier that matched other court documents containing this information.

Three of these factors – remorse, good character, and ability to rehabilitate – are more likely to be listed by judges as being important for Whites than for Blacks in both assault and drug cases. Each of these factors is likely to lead to a lower sentence. Remorse, for example, “is a highly subjective factor. Judges have wide discretion in how it is assessed and in deciding if it is a mitigating factor in any given case” (p. 251). If Black and White offenders were to communicate remorse, good character, or their ability to rehabilitate in different ways, it is likely that the predominantly White judges would be more likely to identify it in White offenders than in Black offenders. It is not surprising, therefore, that good character was cited as a mitigating factor in 16% of drug cases involving Whites, but only 11% for Black offenders. Ability to rehabilitate was identified in 15% of White drug offenders but only 9% of Black drug offenders.

Judges do not simply decide on the final sentence based on “facts”. They decide which sentencing factors are relevant and how the offender should be seen on each dimension. It seems likely that factors such as those that are the focus in this study – remorse, good character, and ability to rehabilitate – will explain some of the disparity in sentencing outcomes that we see for different race/ethnicity groups.

Conclusion: This paper demonstrates that in a jurisdiction in which sentencing guidelines are being used to address concerns about variability in sentencing, certain characteristics of offenders may account for race/ethnic variation in the sentences that are imposed. If these factors are to continue to be used by judges to determine the sentence, it is not clear how these racially correlated disadvantages can be eliminated. If, for example, certain groups (e.g., Blacks) are seen as less likely to benefit from rehabilitation programs that are available than are other groups (e.g., Whites), is it fair to sentence Blacks more harshly because of the failure to provide programs that are seen as equally useful for Black and White offenders? It would appear that a more effective approach would be to examine more carefully the factors that judges should be considering when handing down sentences and to ensure that these factors do not, automatically, disadvantage certain groups.

Reference: Guilfoyle, Eoin and Jose Pina-Sánchez (2025). Racially Determined Case Characteristics: Exploring Disparities in the Use of Sentencing Factors in England & Wales. The British Journal of Criminology, 65, 21-260.

Item 6

False confessions made by suspects to the police are not uncommon in criminal matters. Some of the factors leading to false confessions – and false guilty pleas – are known. But in addition, the presence of a false confession can bias other evidence in a case. Enough is known now that we should be able to reduce the likelihood of police-induced false confessions.

Many of the proven exonerations of those found guilty of criminal charges involve false confessions. A 1992 study found that nearly 30% of the DNA exonerations in the US originally involved false confessions (full or partial admissions of guilt) made by suspects. False confessions leading to inappropriate findings of guilt have been documented in many countries including Canada. This paper is an update of an earlier review of this issue ( Criminological Highlights, 11 (3)#4).

“The frailty of human memory poses a significant challenge for investigative interviewers” (p. 23). Most suspects waive their right to silence (see Criminological Highlights 22 (2)#8). There are many different types of false confessions including those where the suspect acquiesces to the demand for a confession to escape a stressful situation, or a harsher punishment, etc. In other situations, people under intensive suggestive questioning by the police appear to “develop such a profound distrust of their own memory that they become vulnerable to influence from external sources” (p. 11). Interrogations that are aimed at extracting confessions often start with the objective of increasing the suspect’s anxiety associated with denial and reducing the suspect’s anxiety by encouraging a confession. Interviews often last 6-12 hours with the suspect isolated from others. Often these interviews link the suspect with assertions made with certainty by the police that are linked to evidence – real or manufactured – supporting the suspect’s guilt. In some countries (e.g., the US), courts have ruled that it is permissible for the police to lie to suspects about the evidence. To combat some of these problems, new science-based approaches to interrogation have been developed in recent years. For example, “information- gathering approaches” (p. 22) have been shown to be more effective at determining actual guilt than are accusatorial approaches.

It is also known that other errors about evidence are especially likely to occur in cases involving false confessions. These include invalid or improper use of forensic science, eyewitness identification errors and informants who have lied (p. 25). In other words, false confessions lead to distortions in other evidence that implicate the suspect.

This paper proposes a number of plausible remedies that can be used to reduce the likelihood of false confessions or to make it more likely that the confession is identified as being false. These include obvious approaches such as video recording all suspect interviews/ interrogations and ensuring that interrogations are based on solid evidence not hunches. In addition, the situations that are associated with false confessions – such as long periods of isolating the suspect, using tactics that imply leniency if the suspect were to confess – need to be eliminated. Similarly, it is important that confessions not be allowed to taint other evidence. Confessions, therefore, should not be disclosed to other lay or professional witnesses or those investigating the crime.

Conclusion: Much more is known now than was known 15 years ago when some of these same authors reviewed the ways in which false confessions are induced and the manner in which they lead to false convictions. The remedies that are suggested in this paper are unlikely to eliminate all false confessions. None of them, however, would appear to interfere with the sensible collection of accurate information about the crime that is being investigated.

Reference: Kassin, Saul M., H.M.D. Cleary, G.H. Gudjonsson, R.A. Leo, C.A. Meissner, A.D. Redlich, and K.D. Scherr (2025). Police- Induced Confessions, 2.0: Risk Factors and Recommendations. Law & Human Behavior, 49, 7-53.

Item 7

In 2012, laws requiring life without parole for youths convicted of murder in the US were found by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutional. The required release of hundreds of these youths demonstrates, once again, the low rate of recidivism of people convicted of murder who are allowed back into the community.

Previous research has demonstrated that the recidivism of people convicted of murder who are released back into the community is very low (e.g., Criminological Highlights 15(1)#2, 18(5)#8). This paper examines the recidivism rates of youths who were sentenced to life without parole who, because of a court ruling, were eventually released back into the community.

There are a number of reasons to suspect that the committing of a serious violent offence by youths may reflect “a lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” (p. 2) in most youths rather than characteristics of the youth that would be stable across the life course. The 2012 US Supreme Court decision allowed for this to be tested by examining the behaviour of the 287 youths originally sentenced to life without parole in Pennsylvania who were released back into the community.

Not surprisingly, most (97%) were male. Although Blacks constitute only about 12% of the population of Pennsylvania (and 42% of the population of its largest city, Philadelphia), the vast majority (76%) of those youths sentenced to life without parole who were made eligible for release and who were subsequently released were Black. 54% had been sentenced for first degree murder. This paper examines the involvement of these 287 youths in offending after release. At the time the data were collected, most (84%) had been in the community for 3 years or more. 15 of the 287 former prisoners (5%) were charged with criminal offences.

There was one murder charge laid against one former prisoner. Five other former prisoners were charged with other person offences (4 aggravated assaults, and one “disarming a police officer”). The vast majority of those who had been sentenced as youths to spend their full lives in prison after a conviction for murder did not, obviously, commit any offences when they were released. This is, of course, not very surprising for two reasons. First, as noted above, it is well established that few of those who commit a murder early in their lives will commit another if they are released back into the community. Second, by the time that they were released back into the community, they were past the most vulnerable period in their lives for committing violent offences. In this case, only 5% were charged with committing any criminal offence within an average of 4.8 years after having been released. Two thirds were charged only with non-violent offences.

Conclusion: The idea that people who have committed very serious crimes – e.g., murder – must be incarcerated forever to protect society is obviously challenged by these findings. Most of those who have committed a murder either as a youth (this study) or as an adult (other Criminological Highlights papers cited above) and are then released back into the community are likely to live out their lives in a peaceful manner. Although the exceptional cases – e.g., the one person charged with a new homicide offence in this study – are likely to receive a fair amount of publicity, we need to think about this one case in the context of the other 286 who did not commit murder.

Reference: Sbeglia, Colleen and 6 others (2025). Life after life: Recidivism among Individuals Formerly Sentenced to Mandatory Juvenile Life Without Parole. Journal of Research in Adolescence, 35, 1-11.

Item 8

There is strong evidence that being exposed to high levels of violence in their communities reduces the likelihood that children will experience upward mobility. This paper demonstrates that the reverse may also be true: that depressed levels of upward economic mobility in a community increase the likelihood that residents will be violent.

Previous research has demonstrated that high rates of violence in a community reduce the likelihood of upward economic mobility of its residents. This paper examines the reverse relationship: that depressed economic mobility in a community leads to increases in rates of violence.

“Ethnographic research suggests that community-level violence flows not only from the need to find alternative forms of economic advancement or self-defense, but from a communal milieu of frustration and hopelessness created by blocked opportunity, a structural condition that pushes some community members toward violence” (p. 1).

Based on income tax data from 2,141 counties in the United States, the researchers estimated “the county’s mean adult income rank at age 26 for those born between 1980 and 1986 whose parents were at the 25 ^th percentile in the national distribution between 1996 and 2000…. Conceptually, this [independent] variable describes the average level of economic mobility… in early adulthood for children who were raised in low-income families…” (p. 7). The dependent variables – violence and homicide rates – were from county-level Uniform Crime Reports for 2008.

To demonstrate a relationship between depressed mobility and crime, it is important to control for other community variables known to relate to violence levels. Therefore, in this study poverty (as a measure of absolute economic disadvantage), economic inequality (the GINI index, as a measure of relative inequality within the county), the number of law enforcement officers per 100,000 residents, and the unemployment rate (as an indicator of the county macroeconomic conditions) were included as control conditions. In addition, control measures were included that measured outmigration from the community, housing stability, past levels of violence (10-12 years prior to the dependent variable measure) and the state in which the county was located.

As it turns out, including these control factors made little difference to the overall finding: the measure of intergenerational mobility is significantly related to violent crime and to homicide rates. People growing up in a community where upward mobility from poverty is not likely to occur are more likely to be involved in violent crime and homicide. “While these models do not… identify a causal relationship, they offer initial evidence that [the] results are not merely capturing the reverse documented relationship between violence and later mobility” (p. 5).

Conclusion: The results “offer strong descriptive support” for the hypothesis “that lower levels of intergenerational mobility in communities sparks higher levels of violent crime” (p. 6). Furthermore, it would appear that the size of the reported effects is quite large. The violent crime rate for low-income people who were near the bottom of the mobility measure was roughly twice that of low-income people who grew up in counties with an average rate of mobility.

Reference: Mann, Olivia, Kathryn J. Edin, and H. Luke Shaefer (2024). Understanding the Relationship Between Intergenerational Mobility and Community Violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121 (33), 1-8.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jihyun Kwon, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner

Criminological Highlights Vol. 22, No. 2 - April 2025

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:13:57 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

1. Does the pretrial release of accused people increase crime?

2. How can a scale that has the same error rate for two distinct groups disadvantage one group more than the other?

3. How are Black youths disadvantaged by a youth justice system that emphasizes diversion?

4. How are convictions for minor offences disproportionately punitive for immigrants?

5. Does the neighbourhood in which an offence takes place affect the way it is processed?

6. Does setting plausible conditions for the pretrial release of accused people change the outcome of a case?

7. Do risk assessment instruments validated on White accused people perform equally well for Indigenous accused people?

8. What happens to accused people who exercise their right to silence when questioned by the police?

Item 1

Compared to similar people who are released back into the community almost immediately after being arrested, accused people who are held in pretrial detention for more than a week before they are released have a higher likelihood of missed court appearances, new arrests, and new arrests for violent crimes.

Detaining people – even for relatively short periods of time – is an important part of criminal justice punishment. In Canada, for example, 46.3% of federal and provincial/territorial prisoners were awaiting trial on an average night in 2022.

There is a fair amount of evidence that pretrial detention itself is harmful and does not appear to reduce overall offending (e.g., Criminological Highlights 17(2)#7, 17(3)#1, 17(5)#3, 18(4)#1, 21(4)#4), 21(5)#7, #8).

In some jurisdictions, such as the three US counties contributing data to this study, people are often arrested and imprisoned, but released very quickly (i.e., within one day or less). But many accused people are held for at least a week before being released. This study examines the impact of a stay of more than 7 days in remand custody before being released into the community. One group of people charged with an offence were released almost immediately or the day after being arrested. They were compared to a group of people who were charged with an offence and remained in custody for at least 7 days before eventually being released into the community. Clearly, these two groups (released in less than 1 day vs. released after more than 7 days) are different. Therefore, in all analyses, various factors (e.g., previous criminal justice outcomes, previous incarcerations, number of charges, type of offences, race, age) were controlled statistically. The study looked at how these accused people behaved during the roughly 6-month window when they were at risk of misbehaving after release into the community.

Expressed as estimates of what would happen with these two outcomes (controlling for other factors), the results suggest that about 25% of those who were detained for more than 7 days would fail to appear in court at least once, compared to 18% of those detained one day or less. Those detained for more than 7 days were also more likely than those released almost immediately to be arrested for a new criminal offence (28% vs. 21%) and a new violent criminal offence (9% vs 6%). Finally, consistent with a substantial amount of research, being detained for longer is associated with a higher conviction rate (50% vs. 41%).

The findings are a reminder that pretrial detention is, indeed, a punishment (in terms of what it does to the accused person) and is also a cause of crime.

Conclusion: “Pretrial detention is unlikely to achieve the crime prevention goals set out for jails. Rather, being detained pretrial for more than 7 days (compared to 1 day or less) appears to increase missed court appearances, arrests, and convictions” (p. 115). When people suggest that their community has a soft bail system and that pretrial release, therefore, is an important cause of crime, they are probably focusing on two things. First, they are only thinking about the short-term impact of being incapacitated. Second, they may be drawing attention to the inherent imperfections of the criminal justice system: some people who are released on bail do, of course, commit new offences. The question is not whether people released on bail sometimes commit new offences. The question is whether, in the long run, those released from pretrial detention commit more crime than those detained for a long period while awaiting trial. This paper suggests that pretrial detention for over 7 days is likely to lead to an increase in crime when compared to the alternative (release).

Reference: DeMichele, Matthew, Ian A. Silver, and Ryan M. Labrecque (2025). Locked up and Awaiting Trial: Testing the Criminogenic and Punitive Effects of Spending a Week or More in Pretrial Detention. Criminology & Public Policy, 24, 99-121.

Item 2

A scale that appears to have the same error rate for two groups (Indigenous and non-Indigenous prisoners) can still discriminate against Indigenous prisoners because the errors for the two groups are substantially different.

Scales developed by psychologists are often used to predict misbehaviour in prison or reoffending when people are released from prison. Often, their use is justified for a variety of groups because some statistics indicate that their “error rate” is the same across groups. This paper examines whether the types of errors that these scales make are the same for different groups.

In assessing the accuracy of a scale, there are two types of errors that can be made. A scale can predict that a person will misbehave when in fact they do not (“false positive”), or it can predict that a person will not misbehave and they do (“false negative”). It’s easy to have no false positives: simply predict that nobody will misbehave, just as it is easy to have no false negatives (predict everyone will misbehave). The “meaning” of any accuracy index, then, is quite complex. Many scales used to predict whether someone will misbehave try to reduce “accuracy” to a single number. The measure often used by psychologists – “Area Under the Curve” (AUC) – is one of them. An AUC of .5 is equivalent to flipping a coin, and 1.0 is a perfect prediction.

A Canadian study of the “Psychopathy Check List,” for example, found that the AUC for Indigenous and non-Indigenous penitentiary prisoners was about the same. However, actual accuracy was fairly low for both groups (AUC ≈. .65) despite it being “statistically significant” (See also Criminological Highlights, 18(5)#6). This is very similar to results described in a Correctional Service Canada “Research in Brief” (2023: RIB-23-35) report of its “Criminal Risk Index” prediction of reoffence rates (AUCs of .64 for Indigenous and .69 for non-Indigenous).

The current study was carried out in New Zealand and used Psychopathy Check List data from Indigenous and non-Indigenous prisoners assessed between 1998 and 2020. Recidivism was operationalized as a new offence resulting in conviction within 5 years of the prisoner’s release. Previous research, using these same data, had demonstrated “statistically equivalent recidivism discrimination performance within Maori [Indigenous] and [non-Indigenous] and [the overall sample]” (p. 456). This conclusion, like that of the Correctional Service Canada study, was based on the finding that the AUCs were similar.

However, a closer analysis of the New Zealand findings demonstrates that Indigenous prisoners were more likely to score high on this measure and were more likely to be reconvicted than non-Indigenous. The analysis presented here also demonstrated that the types of errors were different for the two groups. Of the Indigenous prisoners who were not reconvicted after release, 62% had been predicted to reoffend. For non-Indigenous prisoners, “only” 28% of those who did not reoffend had been predicted to offend. Looking at those who were reconvicted, 25% of the Indigenous had been predicted not to reoffend, compared to 38% of the non-Indigenous prisoners. From a prisoner’s perspective, a similar error rate isn’t very helpful. In situations like this (where the groups differ in various important ways), a similar overall error rate does not describe what kinds of errors are being made. One group may be disadvantaged more than another even though their error rates look similar.

Conclusion: These findings should be seen as part of a long series of empirical findings suggesting that predictive instruments developed using one group do not necessarily work the same – or as well – with other groups. Questions that predict the outcome variable for one group may not predict for other groups. And, as this paper shows, the types of errors that are made may be different for different groups. An index of accuracy may treat as equal different types of errors (false positives and false negatives) for different groups. From the perspective of a prisoner, being falsely predicted to reoffend (more likely in this study to be made for Indigenous prisoners) is not the same as being falsely predicted to be safe (more likely to be predicted for non-Indigenous prisoners).

Reference: Botha, Ryan, Tara Nichols, and Devon L. L. Polaschek (2025). Cross-Cultural Fairness of the PCL:SV – A New Zealand Analysis. Criminal Justice & Behavior, 52(3), 447-463.

Item 3

The over-representation of Black youths in the justice system starts early in the process. Youths without a record of previous contact with the police who were apprehended for a minor offence in a southern Ontario (Canada) region were unlikely to be charged. However, Black youths were more likely to be formally charged than white youths. White youths were more likely to receive a caution.

Canada’s 2003 Youth Criminal Justice Act encourages police not to send youths apprehended by the police to court. Section 6(1) requires police officers to consider whether, before starting judicial proceedings, taking no action or some other action (other than taking the youth to court) would be sufficient. This paper examines whether Black and White youths are equally likely to benefit from these police decisions.

The region in which this study was carried out had created a formal pre-charge youth diversion program for relatively minor offences. Hence, police officers dealing with a youth who had been apprehended for an offence could choose one of three approaches: charge the youth and take them to court, divert the youth to the diversion program, or simply caution the youth. Cautioning the youth was used more than half of the time for both female and male youths. Males were more likely to be charged than females (17% vs. 11% of all cases).

Looking only at those offences that were eligible for the diversion program, it was found that Black youths were more likely than White youths to be formally charged and sent to youth court and less likely to be released with a simple caution. This same finding – harsher treatment for Black youths than White youths – held when the author looked at specific (high volume) offences – minor theft and possession of marijuana. (The data covered years prior to the legalization of simple possession of marijuana.)

Females apprehended by the police were more likely to be cautioned by the police if they were White rather than Black. Black females were more likely to be sent to the formal diversion program and less likely simply to be cautioned than White females. Black male youths apprehended by the police for a minor offence were also more likely to be charged and sent to court and were less likely to be let off with a simple caution than were White male youths. Since being cautioned is almost certainly less punitive than being sent to a formal diversion program (and being sent to court is the most punitive outcome), it would seem that Black youths – both male and female – received more punitive outcomes than their White counterparts.

“The police [in Ontario] have the unique power to stop, question, search, investigate, arrest, detain, and monitor anyone they deem a potential criminal… [Their] discretion is often vulnerable to bias” (p. 405). Given numerous other studies showing differential treatment of suspects by the police, these findings are not surprising. However, given that they involve youths in a jurisdiction where the police are urged not to charge any youth who is apprehended for a minor offence (like the offences covered by this study), it is important to discover that Black youths are still treated more harshly. Even if “harsher” in this setting means sending them to a diversion program rather than simply being cautioned and released, the difference matters as it still imposes structured requirements, mandatory attendance, and various behavioural conditions.

Conclusion: Black youths who had no record of being apprehended by the police were treated more harshly than comparable White youths. One consequence of this differential treatment is that Black youths, when first apprehended by the police, are more likely to acquire a record of offending than are White youths. Hence, if they are apprehended again as youths, Black youths will be more likely to look like “repeat offenders” than will White youths, making them especially likely to be treated formally and sent to court.

Reference: Samuels-Wortley, Kanika (2022) Youthful Discretion: Police Selection Bias in Access to Pre-Charge Diversion Programs in Canada. Race & Justice, 12, 387-410.

Item 4

Being convicted of a minor (misdemeanor) offence obviously has fewer consequences than being convicted of a more serious (felony) offence. However, for immigrants, misdemeanor convictions can have very serious consequences, including the risk of deportation. Immigrants are also more likely than non-immigrants to be imprisoned for such offences.

In the US, “there is no group for whom the consequences of misdemeanor arrests are more severe than for non-US citizens” (p. 677). In many ways, being an immigrant in the US is equivalent to having a racialized legal status.

Prosecutors, for example, are said to be “less apt to offer diversion programs [to undocumented immigrants for minor offences] because they believe that [immigrants] cannot complete the program prior to removal [from the US]” (p. 659). Similarly, it seems that it is acceptable for a judge to suggest that a crime by an immigrant is more serious than the equivalent offence committed by a non-immigrant (p. 660). Not surprisingly, then, “immigration consequences [deportation] are an explicit goal of a conviction in some jurisdictions and immigration officials often encourage prosecutors to seek plea agreements that guarantee removal [from the country]” (p. 661). Finally, it is important to remember that, unlike cases with serious felonies, “police officers are often the sole source of evidence for many minor crimes” and charges are typically “dismissed only after imposing significant burdens on defendants” (p. 658).

This study looks at the criminal justice treatment of immigrants in two states. In Texas, local police participate in immigration enforcement, often with the goal of removal from the country. California is very different. Their local police are banned from cooperating with immigration officials in cases involving minor crimes by apparent immigrants. California also lowered the maximum sentence for many misdemeanors to 364 days’ imprisonment, just under the federal 1-year threshold that can automatically trigger immigration repercussions. The recorded data on those charged with offences in both states include citizenship and whether the accused was foreign born. But only Texas records whether the accused is a legal or illegal immigrant.

In both states, non-US citizens are more likely to be charged, convicted, and incarcerated than are US citizens. When various controls (demographics, arrest information, criminal history) are included in the estimates of the effects of citizenship on criminal justice outcomes, the effects of citizenship on conviction and incarceration still hold, as does the impact of citizenship on arrest in California (the small difference in the same direction is not significant for Texas). In Texas, where non-citizens could be categorized as either lawfully present or undocumented, the data reveal a clear distinction between the two: the undocumented accused people are most likely to be convicted and incarcerated. “The incarceration difference between citizens and undocumented immigrants is more than double the estimated incarceration gap between White and Black misdemeanants” (p. 675).

Conclusion: The results from these two large, but politically different, US states “reveal that noncitizens, and especially undocumented immigrants, are exposed to disproportionate punishment” (p. 677) when apprehended by the police for possible misdemeanor offending. “Although the punishment of noncitizens disproportionately impacts racial minorities, [the] results suggest that citizenship is a unique and consequential axis of legal inequality, even in local criminal cases that involve only minor offences” (p. 679).

Reference: Light, Michael T., Jason P. Robey, and Juingmyung Kim (2024). Citizenship, Legal Status, and Misdemeanor Justice. Criminology, 62, 655-703.

Item 5

People from poor neighbourhoods who commit offences in nearby wealthy neighbourhoods are less likely to benefit from prosecutorial charge reductions than are people from the same poor neighbourhoods who commit offences in their own neighbourhoods.

Prosecutorial decision-making – which generally is not subject to any appeal or review process – can be an important contributor to inequalities of outcome in criminal courts. This paper looks at the interaction between who the accused is (defined by what kind of neighbourhood they are from) and what kind of person they victimized (defined by the wealth of the neighbourhood where the crime took place).

Plea negotiations provide the site where prosecutorial charge reductions can most clearly be seen and measured. Data from New York City were analyzed for 68,113 cases in which the accused pleaded guilty and information on the defendant’s residence and characteristics was available. These were, in effect, cases in which the prosecutor decided the case outcome. The focus was on charge reductions: whether the statutory severity of the most serious charge was reduced during the prosecutorial process. The socioeconomic status of neighbourhoods was operationalized by using the median income of the neighbourhood. The analyses focused on low- (median income of $40,900 or less) and high-income (median income of $98,160 or more) neighbourhoods. The results were controlled for various factors (e.g., criminal record of the accused, severity of the offence, age, race, gender).

The study found that 53% of the defendants received a charge reduction. While 64% of the defendants came from low-income neighbourhoods, only 5% were from high-income neighbourhoods. As one might expect from other research, young, male, and Black defendants had lower odds of getting a charge reduction than older, female, and White defendants. Interestingly, however, defendants from low-income neighbourhoods were slightly more likely to receive charge reductions while those arrested in high-income neighbourhoods were less likely to receive charge reductions.

Charge reduction outcomes also reflect a complex interplay between a defendant’s socioeconomic background and the neighbourhood where the arrest occurred. Defendants from low-income areas who were arrested in high-income areas were less likely to receive charge reductions than those who were arrested in their own or similar (low-income) areas. Those defendants from high-income areas who were arrested in low-income neighbourhoods had the same likelihood of receiving a charge reduction as those arrested anywhere else. In other words, the defendants least likely to receive a charge reduction were those from poor areas charged with offences that took place in wealthy areas.

Prosecutors seem to view those from a low-income area who commit offences in wealthy areas as particularly deserving of harsh penalties. This could be the result of prosecutors’ views that such offences are more serious or (assuming that prosecutors see harsh charges as a way of deterring offending) that this is an effective approach to providing additional protection to residents of high-income neighbourhoods. “Offenders from low-income areas may be perceived as especially dangerous and threatening when they are viewed as ‘out of place’” (p. 883).

Conclusion: The decisions by prosecutors to reduce the severity of the initial charge against a defendant “are not only impacted by ecological stereotypes tied to defendant home neighbourhoods, but also the combination of home and arrest areas, with unique disadvantages for low-income residents who target high-income areas… [These findings] detail the subtle and indirect ways that environmental influences can shape punishment disparities and unintentionally perpetuate social inequality in the criminal legal system” (p. 884).

Reference: Hernandez, Raquel A. and Brian D. Johnson (2024). Traveling to Criminal Opportunity: Defendant Mobility, Socioeconomic Context, and Prosecutorial Charge Reductions. Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency, 61, 860-899.

Item 6

When the conditions of release from pretrial detention take into account the accused person’s ability to meet these conditions, not only are more people released from pretrial custody, but the accused people are also less likely to be eventually found guilty. They were not more likely to be re-arrested or convicted of a new offence.

Prior to a court decision in 2018, San Francisco’s bail system did not consider an accused person’s ability to pay when determining the amount of money they had to post to be released from custody after arrest. A 2018 court decision required that the accused’s ability to pay be considered when setting the bail amount.

Being detained in custody while awaiting trial obviously reduces the ability of the accused to contribute to their own defence, to show good conduct to the court that is supervising their release, and to participate in treatment programs. Accused people held in custody may also feel pressure to accept unfavourable plea offers. This study looks at the impact of that 2018 court decision on the outcome of cases and the accused’s subsequent behaviour.

To assess the impact on those most likely to be affected by the new (more liberal) policy, accused people who were released after the change in policy were matched on a wide range of variables with those who were charged before the new policy was imposed by the court.

The 2018 court decision reduced the number of people who were detained or released as a result of posting cash bail, and it increased the number of people released on some sort of supervision. In addition, those released after the court decision were less likely to be convicted than those whose cases were decided before the court decision. It would appear that those who attained release as a result of the court-imposed change in policy were “less likely to accept a plea bargain than very similar individuals who were detained prior to [the court decision], controlling for other changes [that might have affected plea bargains]” (p. 137).

A separate analysis examined the impact on subsequent contact with the justice system. Controlling for various characteristics of the case, there were no differences in the likelihood of re-arrest or a new conviction within 6 months of being released. With people expressing concern about the release of those awaiting trial, this finding is important because increasing the number released did not lead to any increase in crime. The specific programs available in the jurisdiction (San Francisco) for the supervision and treatment of those awaiting trial may have contributed to this finding.

Conclusion: It would appear that changes in the practice of pretrial detention that resulted in more people being released prior to trial did not affect the likelihood of subsequent contact with the criminal justice system. Those who were processed under the new provisions (favouring pretrial release) were, however, less likely to be convicted, in large part because they did not accept unattractive plea offers.

Reference: Lacoe, Johanna, Alissa Skog, and Mia Bird (2025). Bail Reform and Pretrial Release: Examining the Implementation of In re Humphrey. Criminology & Public Policy, 24, 123-148.

Item 7

Risk assessments are often carried out on people who are charged with a crime to determine whether they would appear for their required court appearances if they were to be released. A standardized scale that had often been shown to be “valid” for “Americans” was, in this study, shown to be worthless for this purpose when applied to Native American accused people.

When a person is arrested, they are presumed to be innocent and should, therefore, be released until their trial unless it can be shown that they are likely not to appear in court or they are likely to commit a new offence. This paper examines whether a standardized scale (the “Public Safety Assessment”) is as effective for Native Americans as it is for Whites.

There is “no universal threshold of acceptability for the predictive validity of pretrial risk assessments, in terms of strength or practical significance” (p. 399). Hence, the question of whether a risk assessment “works” is often reduced to a relative one: Does it work better than an intuitive guess? Alternatively, does it work as well for one group (e.g., Indigenous people) as for another (White residents of the community).

The Public Safety Assessment uses easily available information (e.g., age, current offence, criminal record, previous failures to appear) to predict whether a person will appear for trial and/or be arrested for a new criminal offence if they are released. In previous research, this scale has been shown to predict both new criminal arrests and failures to appear. However, most of the previous research has been carried out in urban settings, and little of it has compared the value of the scale for predicting the behavior of Indigenous and non-Indigenous samples.

This study was conducted in a largely rural South Dakota (US) county, where Native Americans make up about 10% of the general population and about 50% of the jail population. It examined cases involving 4,570 people who were booked on new charges between 2018 and 2021. Notably, 63% of these individuals were Native American. The study examined two outcome variables: whether the accused person failed to appear in court during the pretrial period and whether the accused person was charged with a new criminal offence.

The measure of accuracy – the AUC (“area under the curve”) – can be thought of as the likelihood that a randomly chosen positive instance (e.g., in this study, a person who actually did fail to appear) would have a higher score than a randomly chosen negative instance (a person who appeared as required). If the scale predicted perfectly, the AUC would be 1.0, whereas if the scale had no predictive value, the AUC would be 0.5 (the likelihood of a positive instance having a higher score being 50%). As shown elsewhere (this issue, Item 2), AUC scores have an important weakness: They can obscure the type of error that is made. Hence, the AUC, like many single measures, is not a fully adequate indicator on its own.

In this study, when looking at “failure to appear,” the overall AUC – pooling all groups – was better than chance (AUC = .55) but not by much. More important was the fact that the AUC for Whites was .64 and for Native Americans was slightly worse than it would be if one flipped a coin (AUC = .48). Given that 8 of the 11 items on the scale related to prior justice system involvement, it is not surprising that the AUCs were slightly higher when “new criminal arrest” was the outcome measure examined. For this measure, the AUC for Native Americans was higher, but still below that for Whites.

Conclusion: The predictions were not very accurate for any group and were clearly worse for Native Americans. Said differently, if this scale were used with Native Americans, they would be more likely to be misclassified than would Whites. These results are not surprising: What they show is that the determinants of a “fail to appear” are different for Indigenous people than are the determinants for White Americans. The lesson is clear: Predictive instruments like this one need to be tested regularly on any group they are used for.

Reference: Zottola, Samantha A., K. Stewart, V. Cloud, L. Hassett & S.L. Desmarais (2024). Predictive Bias in Pretrial Risk Assessment: Application of the Public Safety Assessment in a Native American Population. Law & Human Behavior, 48, 398-414.

Item 8

In many jurisdictions, people have the right to remain silent when asked questions by the police. Although this may be their legal right, this study demonstrates that when accused people invoke their right to silence, they are perceived, by ordinary citizens, as being more likely to be guilty than if they simply waived their right to silence and denied committing the crime.

The theory behind the right to remain silent when questioned by the police is that accused people do not have to put themselves in a situation in which they might incriminate themselves. Many accused people waive their right to silence because they “believe that their innocence will shine through to investigators and ultimately protect them” (p. 369).

The problem with the “right to remain silent” is that people – those in the criminal justice system and those who might ultimately be deciding the cases (e.g., juries) – may assume that someone who is truly innocent would not invoke this right since they have nothing to hide. Indeed, there is some research that suggests that guilty suspects invoke the right to silence more often than do innocent suspects. It would not be surprising, therefore, if both ordinary citizens and police investigators inferred guilt from the decision of an accused person to remain silent.

This paper reports the results of two experiments: one carried out with undergraduate psychology students and the other with undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in courses related to law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Study participants were given a set of vignettes describing criminal investigations for various serious crimes. The vignettes described the crimes as reported by victims and/or witnesses and were designed to be somewhat ambiguous (so that people could not easily decide that the accused was either guilty or innocent). Each of the three vignettes (aggravated assault, drug-related death, and drive-by shooting) contained information about police questioning of the suspect. The suspect was described as remaining silent throughout the interview with the police, telling the police that they were going to invoke their right to silence, or simply denying they committed the crime. The experimental conditions (silence, invoking the right to silence, denial of guilt) varied such that each vignette was, across the experimental participants, equally likely to be used in each of the three conditions.

The main measures obtained from each participant for each vignette were the perception of whether the suspect was guilty as well as various ratings (e.g., honesty, trustworthiness) of the suspect. In both studies (which differed mainly in the group from which people were recruited), there were no important differences in the responses to accused people who formally invoked their right to silence and those who were completely silent during police questioning.

The important finding was that those who waived their right to silence and simply asserted their innocence were less likely to be seen as guilty and received fewer negative ratings than those who were described as having sat in silence or who explicitly invoked their right to remain silent.

Conclusion: The right to remain silent when questioned by the police clearly has serious costs associated with it: The suspect who implicitly or explicitly invokes the right to remain silent will be seen, by ordinary citizens, as more likely to be guilty than they would be if they waived this right and simply asserted their innocence. The notion, therefore, that it is impermissible to penalize someone for invoking their right to silence sounds better than it actually is in practice.

Reference: Lawrence, Megan L., E.R. Saiter, R.E. Eerdmans, and L. Smalarz (2024). The Miranda Penalty: Inferring Guilt from Suspects’ Silence. Law & Human Behavior, 48, 368-384.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jihyun Kwon, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner

Criminological Highlights Vol. 22, No. 1 - January 2025

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 19:57:27 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

1. Why do risk assessments discriminate against Indigenous and Black prisoners?

2. How do the economic conditions of a community affect prisoners released from prison into that community?

3. Can Black police officers reduce aggressive policing by White officers?

4. How can police training improve the quality of police-citizen interactions?

5. How do prosecutors go about making decisions on the charging of accused people?

6. How can general deterrence be integrated effectively into criminal justice policy?

7. Why are unreasonable conditions of release imposed in bail courts?

8. How do criminal justice systems punish people without first ensuring they have committed an offence?

Item 1

Risk assessments are used in Canadian prisons to help determine a prisoner’s security level for housing purposes, as well as whether they should be released on parole. However, these assessments “leave Black and Indigenous Canadian [prisoners] worse off than their white counterparts…” (p. 1).

Federal prisoners in Canada (those serving sentences of two years or more) are required to complete a number of actuarial risk assessments at intake into prison. These statistical techniques are used to predict how likely a prisoner is to engage in “risky” behaviour that, in turn, affects a prisoner’s assigned security level in prison (minimum, medium or maximum) and whether they should be released on parole. Many criticisms of risk assessments have been made in the past (e.g., whether the individual items predict equally for all groups of prisoners). One critique is that the factors they measure – such as past employment, drug use, and victimization – are not solely the result of individual decisions but rather reflect social and political policies. If, for example, a Black or Indigenous prisoner has a less favourable work history than a white prisoner, or has friends who have been imprisoned, etc., the actuarial measure implicitly assumes that these differences are due to differences in the individuals rather than systemic inequalities present in the communities in which they once lived. Similarly, “Black and Indigenous people in Canada… are disproportionately targeted by the police and are more likely to be arrested for out-of-sight offences” (p. 5). Hence at least a portion of a prisoner’s past criminal-legal involvement is due to the treatment they’ve received from society rather than their own individual behaviour.

This paper analyzes data on all Canadian federal prisoners between 2011 and 2018 in order to examine racial and gender differences in risk assessment scores as well as outcomes in assigned security-level and parole. “Overall, the results show that Indigenous men and women score higher on both static risk and dynamic needs compared to Black and white men and women” (p. 10). Not surprisingly, “Indigenous and Black people are more likely to receive higher offender security level scores than their white counterparts” (p. 10). On a number of other measures, the patterns for women differed from those for men. The paper describes these findings in detail and demonstrates the importance of these differences to the lives of the prisoners.

Recommendations by correctional officers for parole and actual parole decisions are obviously not completely determined by actuarial measures (such as reintegration potential) or the prisoner’s security level. The researchers examined whether prisoners, once they were eligible for parole, were indeed released on parole and whether the variation that exists on this decision is related to race. In these analyses, they typically controlled for Corrections’ “reintegration potential score” and age. Among prisoners scored as medium or good candidates for reintegration, Black and Indigenous men were significantly less likely to be on parole once they were eligible compared to their white counterparts.

Conclusion: This paper finds “important racial and gender disparities in risk assessment scores assigned to federally incarcerated individuals in Canada and evidence of racial bias in how those scores affect the decisions made by carceral personnel” (p. 17). Risk assessments that are used to determine a prisoner’s institutional security level reflect, in part, differences in the social situations in which people lived prior to being convicted. In other words, these measures reflect Canadian society’s differential treatment of Black and Indigenous peoples in addition to differences over which the individual prisoner had control. Furthermore, “reintegration potential scores capture most of the information that should inform parole decisions and, once taken into account, there should be little [systematic] variation by race. However, the data show that among men who receive the least restrictive reintegration scores, Black and Indigenous men are 11 percentage points less likely to be on parole, once eligible, compared to white men” (p. 21). Overall, the findings suggest that the effects of differential treatment by race and gender in our communities are replicated and extended in Canada’s penitentiary system such that critical decisions, like release on parole, are affected by race and gender even when reintegration potential and age are held constant.

Reference: O’Connell, Siobhan and Ayobami Laniyonu (2025). Race, Gender, and Risk Assessments in Canadian Federal Prison. Race and Justice (in press).

Item 2

Prisoners who were released into US counties that had experienced a rapid improvement in their economic circumstances were less likely to reoffend than those whose post-release destination, after imprisonment, was economically stable.

Previous research has shown that prisoners released into communities with large numbers of new construction and/or manufacturing jobs were less likely to reoffend (Criminological Highlights 17(3)#7). This study examines a similar phenomenon: the impact of being released into a community that has experienced a substantial and rapid increase in its economic health.

After release from prison, most people return to their home communities. These communities vary in the availability of jobs and other economic supports. This study examined the impact on former prisoners’ reoffending of a recent economic boom in the community they return to. The economic boom, in this study, is the opening of new oil/gas wells using the controversial technique known as fracking. Independent of its environmental effects, the impact of new fracking on employment in the community is measurable: new jobs are created (largely filled by unskilled young men) and the overall economic condition of the community is improved. The result of the in-migration of large numbers of people who, traditionally, are most likely to commit crime is predictable: there is an increase in reported crime.

Quite separate from this increase, however, is the impact of those who are released from prison and who, typically, return to their communities, some of which have experienced economic booms from fracking. This paper uses two sources of data to understand this impact. First of all, the US National Corrections Reporting Program tracks prisoners released from 43 state correctional systems. It tracks all returns to custody (in the same state). If the former prisoner reoffends, it records the county in which the offence took place. Various standard measures on each released prisoner (race, age, offence, time served, etc.) were used as control variables. The total value of natural gas and oil from new (fracking) wells in each county (for each year) was also obtained.

More than 2.5 million prisoners released from state institutions into 2653 counties were tracked between 2006 and 2014 to see if they reoffended within 12 months of release. About 11% of these prisoners returned to prison within one year. Offenders were divided into two groups: those under age 35 – a group who was most likely, normally, to be criminally active – and those age 35 or older. For younger prisoners who returned to a county that had experienced an economic boom equivalent to an increase of 10 million dollars in oil and gas production per 1000 people in the county there was a reduction in reoffending of about 4.1%. For older prisoners, the impact of the economic boom was not significant.

The effect is not likely to be a result of choices made by people being released from prisons because similar effects were found when only those on some form of “conditional release” were examined. This group (in contrast to those released without conditions) typically had requirements to return to a particular county. The findings were similar when analyses were repeated that examined reoffending in the second and third year after release.

Conclusion: The sudden economic boom experienced in some counties reduced recidivism by younger (under age 35) people returning to a booming community from prison. Increased wages and increased job availability are likely responsible for at least part of the decrease in reoffending. More generally, however, the findings might be seen as a reminder that community characteristics – job availability and general economic conditions – are important factors in determining whether a person is likely to be involved in crime.

Reference: Eren, Ozkan and Emily Owens (2024). Economic Booms and Recidivism. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 40, 343-372.

Item 3

Increasing the number of Black police officers in communities with Black residents reduces the amount of aggressive policing carried out by both White and Black police officers.

Increased diversity of police officers in the US has been shown to be associated with fewer officer-involved killings of Black Americans, less overall police misconduct, and fewer complaints against the police by Black civilians. This paper takes these findings one step further and examines the impact of police diversity on police stops of civilians.

Police stops can be seen as a direct measure of police officer discretion in their interactions with civilians. However, diversification of police services does not invariably lead to change in the way in which discretion is exercised, in part because “Police departments mold and change the beliefs over time of the officers they hire” (p. 460). It may well be, therefore, that it is not the overall diversity of police services that is important but rather the “unit level diversity” – the diversity of police officers at the level of local policing shifts.

The focus of this study is on police stops. Under US law, “Officers may stop anyone and briefly detain them as long as an officer could… [explain] why they stopped the individual” (p. 464). Hence, more than arrests or use of force, police stops can be seen as being a direct measure of police discretion while they are on patrol.

Using Chicago, Illinois. records, the study looks at police officers’ assignments to police units for 36 months (2013-2015). The unit of analysis is the individual shift, defined in terms of time (3 shifts per day), date, and place (the patrol area). The number of police stops of Black civilians per month in each unit, then, was the main dependent variable. The independent variables were the percent of the police unit that was Black and the racial congruence of the police unit with the area being patrolled. Control variables included crime rates in the area, the number of officers, the officers’ average years of policing experience, and the size of the local Black population. Not surprisingly, Black police officers are generally under-represented compared to the proportion of Black residents in Chicago.

Police units whose racial makeup was more in line with the neighbourhood they were policing were less likely to stop Black civilians. Similarly, an increase in the percent of the police unit that was Black was associated with a reduction in the stopping of Black civilians.

Looking at individual decisions, “Black and Hispanic officers tend to make fewer stops [of Black civilians] and more experienced officers make fewer stops of Black civilians” (p. 475). More interesting is the finding that the more Black officers there were on a shift, the greater the reduction in the expected number of stops of Black civilians by all officers. And, when looking at the behaviour of White officers, the larger the number of Black or Hispanic officers on a shift, the lower the number of stops of Black civilians. Having more White officers on a shift was associated with an increase in the expected number of stops of Black civilians.

Conclusion: The findings show that “the number of stops of Black civilians declines as a police unit becomes more diverse or representative of the community it serves” (p. 480). The findings show that the decisions to stop Black civilians by both Black and White police officers are affected by the racial makeup of the police unit. “A more diverse and representative police force could better deliver on its potential to lower aggressive policing of minority communities….” (p. 483)

Reference: Risi, Joseph and Corina Graif (2024). Community Representation and Policing: Effects on Black Civilians. Criminology, 62, 454-502.

Item 4

Police training can ensure that community residents are treated more fairly and respectfully. It also can increase the likelihood that arrests of citizens are more selective. To accomplish these changes, however, the training must be intensive.

It is not controversial to suggest that police officers should provide fair and respectful treatment of citizens in the area they are patrolling. This paper examines the impact of a training program for police that explicitly focused on these goals.

In three US cities, high crime areas were identified. These neighbourhoods were then assigned at random to one of two conditions: areas which were policed primarily by officers who had received special procedural justice training and areas that received standard policing. The procedural justice training emphasized the importance of providing fair and respectful treatment to citizens. A number of police officers in each city were chosen as participants in the study. Then pairs of officers were identified with the same race, gender, and experience as police officers. One of these officers was then randomly assigned to the procedural justice (PJ) training condition. The other officer (the “standard condition” or SC officer) got no special training. The PJ training was 40 hours long and took place over a 5-day period. About half of the routine policing in the chosen high crime areas came from the officers in this experiment.

A variety of different outcomes were examined. Systematic observation of routine police patrols by research personnel who accompanied the PJ and SC officers on a total of 129 shifts was carried out. In addition, reported crime and arrests were examined. Door-to-door surveys (or telephone surveys after COVID-19 hit) were carried out before and after the implementation of the experiment. A total of 667 residents (roughly half of whom had been policed by PJ and half by SC police officers) were surveyed.

In the interactions witnessed by the researchers, the willingness of the officer to listen to the citizen, the degree of neutrality shown by the officer, the showing of dignity and respect/disrespect to the citizen, and a judgment about the officer’s motives were assessed by the researchers. Overall (and on four of the five individual measures), the PJ officers showed significantly more procedurally just behaviour toward the citizens. This observational finding is consistent with the community survey data showing that people living in the standard treatment neighbourhoods were significantly more likely than people living in the areas policed by PJ-trained officers “to see police officers as harassing people on their block and using more force than they thought to be necessary” (p. 4).

Compared to the change in crime rate for the areas policed by SC officers, areas receiving police services from PJ officers had slightly lower crime rates after the period of implementation. PJ officers were less likely to use arrest than SC officers.

Conclusion: The findings suggest that police interactions with citizens in high-crime areas of a city can be improved through intensive police training in procedural justice. However, in this study, only a portion of the officers in each of the three cities received the special training on procedural justice. Furthermore, the 5-day (40-hour) training program was clearly intensive, including role-playing exercises in which police officers got to practice applying procedural justice in interactions with others. A follow-up “refresher” session was also provided. Furthermore, officers were given explicit training on working with diverse populations and those with behavioural health problems. Hence this was not just a “training” module placed in an initial training package. The intensity of the training may have communicated the values that were expected to govern interactions with citizens. Clearly, however, the findings demonstrate that change is possible if that change receives serious organizational support.

Reference: Weisburd, David, Cody W. Telep, Heather Vovak, Taryn Zastrow, Anthony A. Braga, & Brandon Tuchan (2022). Reforming the Police Through Procedural Justice Training: A Multicity Randomized Trial at Crime Hot Spots. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(14), 1-6.

Item 5

Prosecutorial charging decisions are based not only on the facts of the case. Prosecutors appear to start their examination of a case by deciding what outcome they desire. They do this by “weaving together legal and extralegal factors, often relying heavily on criminal history, to evaluate defendants’ moral character” (p. 452).

This paper looks at how prosecutors in three mid-sized jurisdictions in the US apply the written law. Courts have made it clear that as long as there is reasonable cause to believe that the accused has committed an offence, the prosecutor has the power to decide what charges to pursue or whether to decline to prosecute.

The findings from this investigation suggest that prosecutorial charging decisions usually start with an examination of the facts of the offence. After determining the nature of the offence, prosecutors often consider the “character” (broadly defined) of the accused. They then decide what they think the desired outcome of the case should be. This decision is based not only on the details of the crime, but also the character of the accused. This desired outcome then helps determine the charges that will be pursued and whether to accept a plea arrangement. This process is constrained by the priorities of the (local) chief prosecutor as well as the court community (e.g., the police). There was some variability across offices in the amount of discretion that prosecutors felt that they had.

Defendant blameworthiness – which under this model is a crucial determinant of the outcome of the case – “may draw on racial and ethnic stereotypes in evaluating blameworthiness and dangerousness” (p. 454) as well as the criminal history of the defendant. In other words, the defendant’s character and criminal history may be important not only in terms of sentencing (where these factors typically come into play), but also in how the case is prosecuted.

These conclusions were drawn from interviews with 47 prosecutors and 15 focus groups (each with 3-5 prosecutors) that were carried out in three mid-sized jurisdictions in the US. The findings show that “Even at the earliest stages of charging, prosecutors had a downstream orientation toward the eventual outcome of the case…. Thus, rather than charging based strictly on the governing law, they charge with an end in mind…” (p. 459). They start by creating an understanding of “the type of person the defendant was… often drawing heavily on the defendant’s criminal history” (p. 459). The goal was to understand the defendant’s character. The nature and severity of the crime, then, was interpreted in the context of the prosecutor’s assessment of the accused. There was some evidence that “While newer prosecutors tended to be focused on the elements of the offence, experience generally moved prosecutors away from strict application of the law to a more contextualized decision-making process where they were able to charge with an end in mind” (p. 466).

“In selecting a charge, prosecutors subjectively categorize defendants into either being inherently ‘bad guys’ or someone with a fixable problem…. This process is vulnerable to bias and may contribute to less favourable outcomes for Black and Hispanic defendants who may be more likely to be seen as violent or dangerous rather than deserving of help and support…. Stereotypes linking young, Black or Hispanic, and male individuals with notions of dangerousness and threat may inadvertently fill in the gaps in prosecutors’ assessments of defendants’ character” (p. 472).

Conclusion: “Prosecutors charged with an end in mind…. [They] determined that ‘end’ through a process of defendant character construction… The purpose of charging was to set the groundwork for getting a final disposition that fits, not just the crime, but the defendant” (p. 471). This interpretation, however, was related to the prosecutors’ own identities and professional experiences. Decisions were also affected by the priorities of their office and the local court community.

Reference: Bowman, Rachel, Belén Lowrey-Kinberg & Jon Gould (2024). An Integrated Model of Prosecutor Decision-Making. Law & Society Review, 58, 452-480.

Item 6

“Substantial potential exists for policies to generate deterrence [of crime] effects” (p. 7), but at present the empirical foundation for deterrence theory and deterrence-based policy effectiveness in the criminal justice system is weak.

This paper explores the “limits and possibilities of effective deterrence-based criminal justice policy” (p. 1). Deterrence, especially in sentencing, is central to the views of many political leaders even though empirical evidence shows that harsher sentences do not deter (see Criminological Highlights “special issue” Issues Related to Harsh Sentences on our website).

This paper suggests that deterrence should be thought of as being more complicated than simply increasing the certainty or severity of punishment. A very important limitation on the notion that “more” (certainty, severity, and speed of punishment) makes a difference is that these factors may interact in important ways. Changes in severity, for example, will likely not have any impact if certainty of apprehension is very low. More generally, if changes are made in one of these three factors, the results are likely to be specific to the levels of the other two factors. Similarly, we often fail to distinguish between objective conditions and perceptions of punishment. One cannot assume that objective increases in severity or certainty of punishment will translate into changes in perceptions of these factors by ordinary people or by those contemplating offending. Similarly, changes in severity or certainty are very likely to be affected by the original level of each of these variables: the effect of a change is likely to depend, at least in part, on the level before the change.

“Contemporary deterrence-based policies are not likely to be effective because they ignore almost all of [the subtleties and interactive aspects] of deterrence and target only punishment. They prioritize greater severity of punishment… and ignore the three-way interaction of certainty, severity, and celerity, and assume that levels of each have no relevance for effects of levels of other factors” (p. 5). “The likelihood that policies that ignore all these parts and focus on only one will or can be effective is vanishingly small” (p. 5). This superficial analysis may explain, in part, “why empirical research has found little consistent or strong evidence of the effectiveness of deterrence-based policies” (p. 6).

Strategies that simultaneously target the costs and rewards of crime while also examining the costs and rewards of non-criminal alternatives may be necessary. Similarly, focusing on certainty when severity is already moderate-to-high may be more effective than policies that focus on severity when certainty (or perceived certainty) is low.

In sum, it would appear there are good reasons that deterrence-based policies are less effective than simplistic accounts would suggest. At the same time, “substantial potential exists for policies to generate deterrent effects, but the policies must take into account the complexity of deterrence. For example…. [p]olicies that change punishment in some way and communicate the change effectively may have a greater likelihood of deterring crime than those that do not” (p. 7). Similarly, policies that target certainty are likely to be more effective in areas with low baseline levels of punishment certainty rather than targeting offences where the certainty is already quite high. Finally, “deterrence-based policy is more likely to be effective when it recognizes that a given strategy will not necessarily have a uniform effect” (p. 8).

Conclusion: “Deterrence-based policies always occur within a context in which alternative approaches to crime prevention already occur or are possible…. Efforts to align these policies in complementary ways may be more effective than ignoring the fact that each exists. An evidence-based approach to crime prevention would be one that considers all the potential policy options that exist…. and implementing each in the degree to which it is feasible to do within a given context” (p. 8). Realizing that deterrence is not a simple unidimensional construct, therefore, may help rehabilitate the relevance of deterrence for controlling crime.

Mears, Daniel P. and Mark C. Stafford (2024). A Theoretical Critique of Deterrence-Based Policy. Journal of Criminal Justice, 95, 1-9.

Item 7

The goal of getting a detained client released on bail can easily lead defence lawyers and their clients to accept unreasonable bail conditions that may set the accused person up to fail.

For the accused person and their lawyer, success at bail hearings is defined as getting the accused released. The conditions that the accused person must obey while in the community are seen as being of secondary importance. Although the Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that it is the responsibility of the court to ensure that “bail provisions are applied consistently and fairly,” the strong preference of the accused – and their lawyer – is to present the court with an agreement to release the accused. The conditions of that release are seen as of secondary importance.

Most cases are resolved as a result of discussions between the Crown and the defence prior to a court appearance. The Supreme Court of Canada has emphasized the importance of using the least onerous conditions possible. It has also made it clear that any form of release more intrusive than a release of the accused on their own recognizance must be justified. However, courts seldom are placed in a position where they have to examine the true meaning of the details of release conditions because they are presented as an agreement between the Crown and the accused. There are good reasons why accused people do not challenge conditions of release when these are offered. In the first place, doing so is almost certain to require the case to be adjourned to a later date. The accused can avoid delay by agreeing to release conditions that the Crown proposes. Second, a challenge could result in the accused being detained.

In this study defence lawyers who have recently represented accused people at bail hearings were interviewed about the bail process. Three broad themes emerged from these discussions. Although preparation and negotiations with Crown attorneys were not described by them as being complex, they were often described as being hectic and disorganized. If the case were to be decided in court, the Crown would, in theory in most cases, have to justify any conditions that were requested. Unless an outcome was successfully negotiated between the Crown and the defence, the Crown would typically argue for detention before trial. In light of the fact that “the client’s overwhelming desire [is] to avoid additional pretrial detention,” (p. 54), defence counsel reported that “Clients end up agreeing to [onerous] conditions [that the Crown suggests as part of a] proposed consent release” (p. 54). As one defence counsel put it, “The Crown can pick whatever terms they want… If they say it, and we agree to it, then that’s what it’s going to be. You’re almost never going to opt for a contested bail hearing to challenge a condition or two” (p. 56). “Arguing matters before a justice [comes with] an uncertain outcome compared with securing a [release based on] a joint submission” (p. 56). Another theme that emerged was that justices vary, and if the defence knew that the justice might by sympathetic to the case, they might be willing to suggest a hearing. On the other hand, defence counsel suggested that “certain justices make unreasonable bail decisions” (p. 59) and are to be avoided.

Conclusion: Defence counsel are risk averse not only in terms of acting in a manner consistent with their client’s desire for release, but they will sometimes accept conditions “they know their client is unlikely to be able to follow” simply to avoid the possibility of detention before trial. “Bail at all costs is the overwhelming priority” (p. 61). Hence “Counting on defence counsel alone to resist onerous bail conditions is unlikely to bring bail practices into conformity with the law on bail…. Defence lawyers are not as incentivized to push against the conditions [of release] as the formal adversarial model would suggest. Instead, they adopt strategies that make onerous conditions more likely” (p. 62).

Reference: Nixon, Jenaya, Carolyn Yule, and Dennis Baker. Reasonable Bail or Bail at All Costs? (2024). Defence Counsel Perspectives on a Coercive Environment. Canadian Journal of Law & Society, 39, 44-64.

Item 8

Pretrial detention is typically justified as a procedure to ensure that the accused person appears in court as required and does not commit offences. Its stated purpose is not to punish the accused, since a finding of guilt has, by definition, not been made. This paper finds that pretrial detention is experienced as being just as punitive as incarceration in a jail or prison.

In the US, 65% of those incarcerated in local jails are in pretrial detention. In Canada, 72% of those in provincial/territorial prisons, and 46% of those in any Canadian prison (federal and provincial/territorial) are in pretrial detention. Previous research (e.g., see Criminological Highlights 17(6)#1) has demonstrated that pretrial detention is quite clearly part of the justice system’s punishment process. This paper takes these findings one step further by comparing the experience of pretrial detention to the experiences of those serving sentences.

“Pretrial detention is linked to long-term harms for people that are similar to the established harms of legal punishment” (p. 792). These punishments include family disruption, loss of employment, financial stress, and worsened health. Furthermore, “the consequences of pretrial detention are racially and ethnically disparate” (p. 792-3). These harmful effects are, of course, similar to those that might be expected from post-conviction imprisonment. Hence the question that should be asked is not whether pretrial detention is punishing, but rather how the degree of punishment might differ between pre- and post-conviction imprisonment. This study provided an answer to this question by comparing prisoners’ experiences with pretrial detention to prisoners’ experiences with post-conviction imprisonment on four dimensions: the experience of security, victimization, perceptions of legitimacy of correctional staff, and social support.

Data were used from the (US) National Inmate Survey (2011-12) which sampled prisons and jails across the country. A sample of prisoners within each chosen institution was interviewed. For this study, prisoners in pretrial detention were matched (on a number of dimensions) with prisoners serving sentences in (state) prisons or local jails. The variables on which they were matched included such factors as time in the institution, offence type, and prior arrests, as well as personal characteristics (e.g., whether they suffered a mental illness, whether they were married, and their race and age). The matching process was designed to ensure that any differences that might be found could not be attributed to background characteristics of the pre- vs. post-conviction samples.

Looking first at the comparison of people who were in jail on pretrial detention and those serving sentences in jails, it was clear “that many aspects of jail life are similar irrespective of conviction status” (p. 803). There were differences in only two out of 19 comparisons that were made: those in pretrial detention were more likely to report the presence of gangs and less likely to report that staff made them feel safe and secure. Said differently, the pre- and post-conviction prisoners in jails experienced very similar degrees of punishment.

When comparing pre-trial detention prisoners (who were in jail) with post-conviction prisoners in state prisons, the findings show that on 5 of 11 measures of institutional social order and victimization, those in pretrial detention reported more disorder and victimization. On some dimensions (e.g., whether staff protected them, contact with outside people), those in pretrial detention gave more favourable reports than did those serving sentences.

Conclusion: In general, “individuals in pretrial detention reported similar perceptions and experiences as individuals serving a sentence in jail…. Individuals in jail who are not convicted of an offence… are generally not simply being held; they are experiencing pains and conditions that look much like punishment” (p. 805). Clearly there were some differences between those in jail vs. those in state prisons. However, no matter how one looks at the data, it is clear that “pretrial detention exposes people to some of the most consequential pains of imprisonment” (p. 807) that are not reliably different from the experiences of those serving sentences in jails or prisons.

Reference: Anderson, Claudia N., Joshua C. Cochran & Andrea N. Montes (2024). How Punitive is Pretrial? Measuring the Relative Pains of Pretrial Detention. Punishment & Society, 26(5), 790-812.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jihyun Kwon, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner

Criminological Highlights Vol. 21, No. 6 - November 2024

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:19:22 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Item 1

There would be little or no difference in the arrest rates of Black, Hispanic, and White people across the lifespan if their early-life social life experiences were similar. Differential arrest rates, then, are the result of different levels of exposure to cumulative advantages and disadvantages by different groups.

This paper examines “how the history of racial inequality drives differential exposure to cumulative disadvantages in childhood and adolescence at the individual, family, and neighbourhood levels, including persistent exposure to concentrated violence and intensive policing practices… [It demonstrates] that the resulting differences in contextual exposures between racial groups over their early lives to social advantages and disadvantages can explain group-level racial inequality in trajectories of arrest over the life course” (p. 183).

The study examines the level of exposure to various early-life conditions of over 6,200 children. Data on them and their families (their primary caregiver was also interviewed) were collected 4 times starting in the mid-1900s. Arrest records were examined for a random sample of 1057 of this group between 2015 and 2020 by which time the oldest in the sample were in their early 40s. Data on neighbourhood conditions (e.g., poverty rate, percent foreign born) and family structure, as well as characteristics such as residential stability and household income, were collected. Information on parental criminality and family troubles (e.g., contact with the police, incarcerations, alcohol problems, exposure to violence) was also collected.

The goal of the study was a simple one to describe, but complex to operationalize: Determining “how arrests vary by race after sequentially equalizing key differences in early-life backgrounds and experiences across various domains” (p. 191). In other words, the focus of the main analyses was to determine what members of the different groups (Whites, Hispanics, Blacks) would look like if they had faced the same structural contexts.

The findings are straightforward. After controlling for the various differences, most notably neighbourhood disadvantage and family structure, the arrest patterns of Blacks and Hispanics were very similar to that of Whites. The data demonstrate that “it takes the coming together of a wide array of neighbourhood and family-level disadvantages early in life to set Black and Hispanic individuals on a separate path to the criminal justice system from Whites” (p. 192). Most of the variables on which Blacks and Hispanics differed from Whites contributed to the amount of subsequent crime they exhibited at various ages. And for each group, the ‘standard’ age-crime curve was evident (with crime rates peaking when people were in their early 20s).

“These early life conditions [on which Whites differ from Blacks and Hispanics] are unlikely to have direct [or simple] effects; instead, they act as the precipitants of cumulative advantages and disadvantages that later manifest as differences in criminal behaviour; exposure to law enforcement, or both. An exception is Black-Hispanic disparities in arrests, which mainly reflect immigration differences in that Hispanics are arrested less frequently because they are more often members of immigrant families” (p. 198).

Conclusion: “Had Black and Hispanic individuals faced similar early-life social contexts as Whites did, there would be little or no racial or ethnic disparities in arrest counts over the subsequent life course” (p. 198). Said differently, different arrest rates by these groups would disappear if the treatment that they received in society were the same. The findings were robust across various analyses.

Reference: Sampson, Robert J. and Roland Neil (2024). The Social Foundations of Racial Inequalities in Arrest over the Life Course and in Changing Times. Criminology, 62, 177-204.

Item 2

Young people (age 14-17) who had been found guilty of a criminal offence were tracked for 7 to 10 years. Self-reported offending and arrests by police were recorded periodically throughout this period. Compared to Whites with exactly the same arrest records, Blacks had committed fewer offences.

Criminal records – arrests and convictions – are used for many purposes. These include the decision to proceed with a criminal prosecution if a person is suspected to have committed an offence. Similarly, a criminal record is routinely used in sentencing those found guilty (e.g., to determine whether a person should be imprisoned). The working assumption is that a specific criminal record (e.g., a record showing that a person has a certain number of previous arrests) has the same meaning for all people. Even though it is understood that an official record does not describe all wrongdoing, it is assumed that two people with the same record have similar criminal histories. This paper examines this assumption and “validates a longstanding worry that many decision points in the criminal process are influenced by racial biases in criminal records” (p. 491).

Neighbourhoods that vary in their racial makeup may also vary in terms of how intensely they are policed. In addition, police officers may be more likely to lay formal criminal charges for some suspects than for other suspects. It is plausible, therefore, that the ratio of formal charges to offences committed would vary in systematic ways. But these factors are often ignored later in a person’s life when some new decision (e.g., whether to charge, whether to imprison, whether to employ) is being made. At that point, the criminal record itself is seen as a simple unbiased indicator of past misbehaviour. This paper demonstrates that, as a record of misbehaviour, a criminal record is not unbiased.

To determine if an “official” record of offending reflects actual offending equally across racialized groups, we need to see whether a measure of “actual offending” – in this case self-report offending – is equally accurate across groups. In this study, self-reported offending by Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites was examined. The concern is simple: Is there, in self-reports, differential reporting rates across racial/ethnic groups? One way to examine whether there is any differential self-reporting is to look at changes in reporting rates between reports for the month immediately before self-report offending data were collected and the reports for the month immediately following a data collection. (These latter data were collected at the next data collection, months later.) The assumption is that if there is systematic under-reporting, it would be most likely to appear when the questions dealt with the most recent period. For property and violent offences, there was no evidence of systematic differences in reporting. For drug trafficking, there was some evidence of under-reporting by Black respondents.

The data for property and violent offending, therefore, appear to be free of systematic reporting errors. The findings were quite clear on the central issue being examined: A Black respondent with a specific number of arrests (e.g., two arrests) had fewer actual offences than did a White respondent with an identical number of arrests. The data suggest that “Black subjects committed 53%, 30%, 23%, and 56% fewer offences than White subjects with the same number of arrests for property, violent, drug, and [drinking-driving] crimes, respectively.” [Data for Hispanic respondents were also collected and showed a bias in criminal records, although it was not as consistent as that for Blacks.]

Conclusion: The data suggest that the meaning – in terms of actual offending – of a criminal record is biased against Blacks. A Black person in this study had committed fewer actual offences than a White person who had exactly the same criminal record. In certain ways, this is not surprising. If those making decisions on the deployment of police officers or whether to charge someone apprehended for an offence are at all likely to see Blacks as more “criminal” one can easily imagine that a Black person would be more likely to be charged than a White person who had done the same thing. The possible biasing effects could also affect decisions about Blacks and Whites in other areas (e.g., access to housing, jobs, etc.).

Reference: Grunwald, Ben (2024). Racial Bias in Criminal Records. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 40, 489-531.

Item 3

Undocumented immigrants in the American state of Texas “have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offences” (p. 32340).

Donald Trump, as well as the current Texas governor, Greg Abbott, have often made evidence-free assertions that immigrants – especially undocumented immigrants – are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime. The data on legal immigrants is quite consistent (see Criminological Highlights 18(5)#1, 18(6)#6): Immigrants to the US and Canada are not disproportionately responsible for crime. If anything, they are less likely to be involved in offending than native born residents. This paper takes these analyses one step further and looks at the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in the State of Texas.

The challenge in estimating a “crime rate” for undocumented immigrants is that estimating both the numerator (number of crimes they are responsible for) and the denominator (a reasonable estimate of their number in the community) is not straightforward. Texas, however, is unusual. It checks the immigration status (native born, legal immigrant, illegal immigrant) for all people arrested (using both state and federal data). The Texas population is estimated as being 17% foreign born. Census data as well as peer-reviewed data sources from the Center for Migration Studies were used to make estimates of the total “foreign born” population as well as the number of government authorized immigrants. This allowed the researchers to estimate the residual group: undocumented immigrants. Texas is unique among US states in requiring knowledge of the immigration status of everyone in its criminal record system.

The study examines felonies – violent and property crime as well as drug violations and traffic violations – during the period 2012-2018. “Relative to native-born citizens and legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants have the lowest felony arrest rates across all four crime types. For violent, property, and drug offences, legal immigrants occupy a middle position between undocumented immigrants and US-born citizens” (p. 32342). For traffic violations, the rate for undocumented immigrants was the lowest, but legal immigrants had the highest rate.

When the broad categories of crime were broken down into more specific categories, it was found that “Without exception, undocumented immigrants have the lowest crime rates” (p. 32343) when looking at homicide, assault, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, theft and arson. “For most crimes, the criminality of legal immigrants tends to be less than that of native-born citizens” (p. 32343). In each of the 7 years (2012-2018) in which crime rates were calculated, native born US citizens achieved the highest overall crime rates. Undocumented immigrants had the lowest overall crime rate (measured by felony arrests). The results are “consistent with research on the selective nature of migration, which suggests that immigrants tend to fare better on multiple social indicators than would be expected by their level of socioeconomic disadvantages” (p. 32346).

Conclusion: “These findings clearly run counter to some of the basic assumptions behind strict immigration enforcement strategies… The results presented [in this paper] undermine the claims that undocumented immigrants pose a unique criminal risk. In fact, [the] results suggest that undocumented immigrants pose substantially less criminal risk than native US citizens” (p. 32345). Unlike what is proposed by some politicians, it is clear that “removing those with relatively low felony crime rates [undocumented immigrants] is unlikely to reduce the overall risk of criminal victimization” (p. 32345).

Reference: Light, Michael T., Jingying He, and Jason P. Robey (2020). Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-Born US Citizens in Texas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 22, 2020, 117, 32340-32347.

Item 4

In the US, when people either live in or move into locations where there is a high concentration of foreign-born residents, their arrest rate becomes lower than that of people who do not have the benefits of having foreign-born neighbours.

“Public opinion has historically linked immigration with increases in crime and social disorder…. Yet what is different today… is that… the findings emerging from this research – both at the individual and macrolevel – are that immigrants are less criminally involved than their native-born peers and that the influx of foreign-born residents into the community generally exerts an inverse or null effect on aggregate crime” (p. 561).

This study examines whether changes in the immigrant concentration in the county in which people live has an effect on the arrest rates of individual people. These decreases in crime could occur in two ways. First, an increased concentration of immigrants in a neighbourhood might decrease its crime rate. Second, if a person were to move into a county with a higher concentration of immigrants, that person’s likelihood of arrest might decrease. [This study also examines self-report offending, using a measure of the number of different types of offences the person reported engaging in. And it also looked at the children of immigrants. Some results using these measures are slightly different, but the overall results are much the same as described here.]

The study uses data from a US sample of 7,897 youths born between 1980 and 1984 who were interviewed annually between 1997 and 2011. The concentration of immigrants in each respondent’s county was estimated from US census data. Various time-varying (e.g., age, school dropout, concentrated disadvantage of the neighbourhood) and time-invariant (e.g., sex, race, parental education) factors were controlled for.

Within individuals, increases in immigrant concentration in the area in which they live reduces the likelihood of arrest. Furthermore, the effect on arrest of the change in the percent foreign-born in a person’s neighbourhood does not depend on whether individuals moved into a county with a different concentration of foreign-born residents, or whether the country itself changed in its proportion of immigrant residents.

During the period of time in which data were collected for this study, there was, generally, an increase in the proportion of foreign-born people in the various counties in which respondents lived. The “crime reduction” effect of a higher concentration of immigrants in a person’s county tended to reduce arrests for other immigrants, their children, and others.

Conclusion: The fact that living in, or moving to, a county with a high concentration of immigrants reduces the likelihood of a person being involved in crime is a fairly simple reminder of how the presence of immigrants benefits more than just those immigrants. This study does not attempt to explain why a high concentration of immigrants reduces offending. But it is clear that “Immigration serves as a pro-social force for the community that promotes within-individual reductions in criminal offending and that these effects influence a wide range of living situations and people” (p. 585).

Reference: Widdowson, Alex O., Javier Ramos, Kayla Alaniz, and Kristin Swartz (2024). The Within-Individual Effects of US Immigration on Individual-Level Offending During Adolescence and Early Adulthood. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 61(4), 560-593.

Item 5

When a person violates a condition of probation, revoking their probation and incarcerating them does little, overall, to affect the likelihood that they will eventually be sent to jail for a new offence. However, for low-risk offenders, revoking their probation for a technical violation increases substantially the likelihood that they will subsequently commit a new offence and be jailed.

Probation is a very common penalty for criminal offences. In Ontario, Canada, for example, 41% of adults found guilty in criminal court have probation as the most serious component of their sentence. But given that probation sentences often involve many conditions, and complying with all of these conditions is often a serious challenge, it is not surprising that there are a fair number of cases in which probation is revoked and the person is sent to custody.

This paper looks at the impact of probation revocations that involve sending the offender to jail. Specifically, to determine the impact of imprisoning those who do not comply with probation conditions, this study takes advantage of the fact that in many cases offenders do not comply with their probation conditions but are not incarcerated. In the US, probation terms average around 2 years and involve an average of about 15 separate conditions. Non-compliance with any of these conditions puts the person in jeopardy of being incarcerated. Other research (e.g., see Criminological Highlights collection on The Effects of Imprisonment ) suggests that being sent to prison might, if anything, increase the likelihood of reoffending, at least for some types of offenders.

This paper follows a sample of 1,873 probationers in Indiana who completed their probation between 2014 and 2016. About half were serving a sentence for a misdemeanor; few (6.8%) had been found guilty of a violent offence. Most (64%) were seen as low-risk offenders. They had all apparently violated at least one probation condition, though only about 12% were imprisoned as a result of this violation. The focus was on whether revoking probation and sending the offender to jail had different criminal justice consequences than simply re-releasing the offender on probation (perhaps with modified conditions). The follow-up period was 5 years from the end of the original probation term or from the end of the revocation of the original term of probation.

Focusing largely on whether the offender re-appeared in the Indiana jail system for a new criminal offence within 5 years, those who had their earlier probation revoked were considerably more likely to be charged with new offences, returned to jail, and have technical violations. This is not surprising because the two groups (those whose probation was revoked and those who were re-admitted to probation) were very different on such things as their “risk of reoffending” profiles (e.g., prior arrests, prior imprisonment, etc.). However, after controlling for a wide range of background characteristics, “revocation was not a significant predictor of any of the five [criminal justice outcomes that were examined]” (p. 5). Said differently, the revocation of probation and the placement of the offender in jail did not, in the long run, affect the likelihood of reoffending.

There was, however, an indication that for a subset of probationers – those who were low risk and had their original probation revoked for a purely technical violation (rather than a new offence) – revocation was responsible for an increase in the likelihood that, during the five-year follow-up period, they would be jailed for a new offence.

Conclusion: When offenders violate conditions of probation – especially if they are initially low risk for reoffending – it would appear that public safety is not enhanced by sending them to prison. Instead, these data would suggest that it would make more sense to examine the reasons for the non-compliance with the original probation order to see if conditions could be modified in a manner that would be more likely to increase public safety without the potentially harmful impact of imprisonment.

Reference: Diaz, Carmen L., E.M. Lowder, M.N. Bohmert, & M. Ying (2024). A Retrospective Study of the Role of Probation Revocation in Future Criminal Justice Involvement. Journal of Criminal Justice, 93, 1-9.

Item 6

Publicly funded improvement of deteriorated neighbourhood vacant land can reduce crime.

“Vacant and blighted urban land is a widespread environmental condition encountered by millions of people each day” (p. 2946). This study examines what happens when a municipality intervenes and makes inexpensive improvements to vacant lots. These improvements involved cleaning them up and planting grass in a way that made them attractive for informal use. The goal of the study was to determine what effect, if any, these improvements had on reported crime and on residents’ views of their neighbourhoods.

Vacant lots in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that were described as having blighted conditions were identified. 110 clusters of vacant lots were identified containing, in total, 541 vacant lots. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of this civic improvement experiment is that the City allowed these clusters of vacant lots each to be randomly assigned to one of three conditions. The main intervention involved removing trash and debris, grading the land, planting new grass and a few trees. A low wooden fence (with multiple ungated entrances) was included in the design. A “basic” upgrade for another group of vacant lots involved cleaning up the debris and mowing whatever grass was there. A third group of lots was left unchanged. The cost of implementing the “main intervention” was about $5 per square metre ($4000 for 20m by 40m lot).

Data on police reported crime as well as data on the perceptions of fear and safety of residents who lived near these vacant lots were collected and analyzed over a 3-year period (1.5 years before and 1.5 years after the changes were made). In all, 445 residents were interviewed before and after the intervention (147-150 per condition). All people who were interviewed within each of the 110 clusters lived within a 0.4 km. radius of one another. Crime events were counted in the immediate vicinity of the lots chosen for this study.

Interventions – both “full” and “basic” – each had the effect of reducing crime, compared to the “no intervention” condition. Specifically, there was less total crime, as well as fewer gun assaults, burglaries and events described by the police as “nuisances” in the areas where interventions had taken place. In neighbourhoods that were below the poverty line, the effects were similar, but more pronounced.

Residents’ views were quite consistent with the crime data. Residents of neighbourhoods that had received the improvements in the vacant land were less likely to report that there was a lot of crime. Compared to those who lived in neighbourhoods in which no intervention had occurred, residents also reported that there was less vandalism. They also reported that they were less likely to avoid going out because of safety concerns and were more likely to spend time relaxing and socializing outside.

It is worth remembering that these were not huge interventions. They typically took about 2 months to complete (in April and May) and the improvements were neither extensive nor expensive.

Conclusion: “Structural dilapidation and blight can be key causes of negative outcomes in terms of people’s safety – both their perceptions of safety and their actual, physical safety. The physical components of neglected and impoverished urban environments can be changed in inexpensive and sustainable ways as a direct treatment strategy for violence and fear in cities…. [These interventions] can be key in spurring people-focused urban connectivity and the reestablishment of vibrant, busy streets” (p 2950-1).

Reference: Branas, Charles C., Eugenia South, Michelle C. Kondo, Bernadette C. Hohl, Philippe Bourgois, Douglas J. Wiebe, and John M. MacDonald (2018). Citywide cluster randomized trial to restore blighted vacant land and its effects on violence, crime, and fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 20, 2018, 115(12), 2946-2951 & supporting information online.

Item 7

The presence of urban greenspace – trees and other vegetation – in urban areas is associated with lower rates of crime, even when controlling for a range of well-established predictors of crime.

Previous research (Criminological Highlights 21(4)#3) suggests that prisons that contain high levels of greenspace (vegetated landcover) are associated with lower rates of prisoner self-harm, less violence targeting other prisoners or prison staff, and higher rates of prisoner well-being. This paper takes these findings outside the prison walls and looks at the relationship between crime and the presence of urban greenspace in Washington, D.C. neighbourhoods (see also Criminological Highlights 21(6)#6).

There are several theories about how urban greenspace (UGS) might be associated with reductions in crime. For example, the presence of UGS might offer attractive gathering space where people would gather, thus increasing guardianship. Alternatively, UGS might be associated with increased social ties and opportunities for interaction in the neighbourhood.

This paper looks at the effects of two forms of UGS – tree canopy coverage and noncanopy vegetation coverage (measured using satellite imagery) – on both violent and property crime in Washington, D.C., a city that is ethnically diverse with a relatively high poverty rate. Measures were obtained for each “census block group” (average population 1,534). Various characteristics of these block groups were measured and controlled statistically. These included poverty rates, the type of employment engaged in by the residents, ethnic heterogeneity and racial makeup, age, presence of businesses selling alcohol or cashing cheques, and violent and property crimes in contiguous block groups.

The census block areas had an average of 31% tree canopy and 13% noncanopy vegetation. Neighbourhoods with higher percents with tree canopy coverage had lower violent and property crimes. High rates of noncanopy vegetation were associated with lower violence rates but were not associated significantly with property crime. Other characteristics of the neighbourhoods that were controlled for – e.g., the presence of businesses selling alcohol, cheque cashing businesses – were, as expected, linked to violent and property crime rates. But the effect of UGS on crime was above and beyond these effects.

The nature of the relationship between tree canopy coverage and violent crime varied across types of neighbourhoods. It held for low and average poverty groups, but not for high poverty neighbourhoods. Similarly, this effect was not found in neighbourhoods with low home ownership. The effects of tree canopy coverage were similar when examining property crime: High rates of tree canopy coverage are not associated with lower property crime rates in high poverty areas. More generally, it may be that “in communities characterized by social disorganization, tree canopy coverage may not reduce crime” (p. 256).

Conclusion: Although these findings are consistent with some earlier studies showing a reduction in crime associated with urban greenspace, these effects “seem to depend, in part, on the type of greenspace, the type of crime, and the socioeconomic and land use characteristics of neighbourhoods” (p. 256). Most notably, UGS may not have any effect on crime in severely disadvantaged communities. It is important, therefore, that “city officials and urban planners should take care to evaluate [UGS programs] rather than assume crime reductions” (p.257).

Reference: Wo, James C. and Ethan M. Rogers (2024). Urban Greenspace and Neighborhood Crime. Criminology, 62, 236-275.

Item 8

When using a “risk assessment” tool to predict recidivism by youths, it is better to use the scale’s actual score than to allow “over-rides” based on the intuitions of those who think they understand the youth.

Predictions of reoffending by youths are used for many purposes, among them to determine what kind of treatment, if any, the youth should receive. In some jurisdictions, risk assessments may be used to aid in the sentencing process.

The challenge is that predictions of reoffending by youths are often wrong. The best available assessment tools are usually better than chance, but not by an enormous margin. If a high score means that a person is likely to reoffend, a typical finding in this area would be similar to what was found in this study: that a randomly chosen person who has reoffended will have a higher score than a randomly chosen person who has not reoffended only around 71% of the time. Given that pure chance is 50%, this improvement over chance, though statistically significant, is not impressive when thinking about predicting for individual cases. A coin that is flipped and comes out heads 71% of the time is clearly ‘biased’ but a prediction of “heads” is far from perfect.

This paper looks at the use and impact of the discretion that probation officers in Ontario (Canada) have to override an actual risk assessment of youths. Youths supervised by Ontario probation officers were assessed for the purpose of matching the intensity of the intervention with the likelihood that a youth would reoffend. In this study, one of the “most established and well-researched” (p. 176) risk assessment tool, the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory was used. It consists of 42 items that are summed to create an overall score. This continuous score is frequently divided into four risk groups. Previous research suggests that the frequency of the use of the “clinical override” varies considerably. However, most of the overrides are in the direction of increasing the apparent “risk” of the youth.

A total of 1259 youths, age 12-19 (average age 16.3 years), were followed for a minimum of a year after they had been assessed. Any conviction within 24 months of being assessed constituted evidence of recidivism. Indigenous youths’ scores described them as having a higher risk of reoffending than non-Indigenous youths. Those whose original offence was sexual in nature had significantly lower risk scores than those whose original offence was non-sexual in nature. 10.8% of the youths received over-rides of the original test score. In every case, the “clinical” (subjectively determined) override was used to increase risk-level classification. Over-rides were more likely for those whose original offence was sexual in nature.

The original statistically created risk score was significantly related to recidivism and was the same magnitude for those who did and did not have their final scores over-ridden. However, when one examines the recidivism predictions for those cases in which there was a risk override, the prediction was almost exactly at chance level. These findings are very similar to risk overrides with many other prediction scales: Empirically based risk assessments are generally superior to clinical judgements. The problem is that those in the field appear to want to be allowed to use their clinical intuition to override statistical predictions even though clinical overrides have repeatedly been shown to be less accurate.

Conclusion: The findings in this study with youths are similar to those of other studies: Clinical overrides are much more likely to be in the direction of increased prediction of risk of reoffending. The reason for this may be simple: “the occurrence of a false positive [a prediction of reoffending that does not occur] is less concerning [to the probation officer] than underestimating the risk of a youth who re-offends” (p. 187). But the consequence of these overrides is important: What started as a modestly accurate prediction ended up being no better than an unbiased coin flip.

Reference: Schmidt, Fred, Amy Killen, Dilys Haner, and Elaine Toombs (2024). Clinical Override Use with the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory. Criminal Justice & Behavior, 51(2), 175-193.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jihyun Kwon, Katharina Maier, and Jane Sprott

Criminological Highlights Vol. 21, No. 5 - August 2024

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 15:22:35 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

1. How can former prisoners mitigate the negative impact of imprisonment on finding employment?

2. How do “tough on crime” judges create more crime than “soft on crime” judges?

3. How can police services address the fear that Black residents have of the police?

4. How might delinquency programs be made more effective?

5. Did COVID-19 create an increase in domestic violence?

6. Are sex offenders especially likely to repeat their offences?

7. How does pretrial detention affect the outcome of criminal cases?

8. How does pretrial detention increase the punitiveness of the criminal justice system?

Article 1

Formerly incarcerated people have difficulty getting paid employment especially when employers can ask about job applicants’ criminal histories. This leads them, especially if they are Black, into entrepreneurship. As entrepreneurs, they are likely to earn more income than they would have as employees. Employment and entrepreneurship are each associated with lower recidivism rates.

There is consistent evidence that “contact with the criminal justice system leads to a reduction in economic opportunities” (p. 92) such as regular employment (Criminological Highlights 6(3)#2), 11(4)#4, 17(2)#7, 16(4)#7, 18(3)#6, 20(5)#3). Failure to become economically self-sufficient is a likely contributor to the link between incarceration and increased recidivism.

This paper examines the possibility that formerly incarcerated individuals may start their own businesses because of the barriers they face in paid employment. Some US states have recently restricted the access available to potential employers to get information about criminal records on job applicants (the so-called “ban-the-box” laws). Because these ban-the-box laws have come into effect at different times in the various states, it was possible to examine the effects on a former prisoner of having a publicly accessible criminal record. The authors looked both at ordinary employment and entrepreneurship activities in periods when employers did and did not have restrictions on getting access to the criminal record of job applicants. The prisoners themselves had no control over whether they were released from prison before or after these laws came into effect. Hence, differences between those who were released during the period when criminal history was and was not accessible had little to do with the characteristics of the prisoners. The study examined paid employment and self-employment that lasted at least four weeks and entrepreneurship involving an incorporated business and/or other employees. Various other factors were controlled statistically. The study used data from an American longitudinal study that followed individuals for 17 years starting from when they were 12-18 years old. Involvement in crime as well as incarceration history were measured regularly as was the nature of employment (and entrepreneurship) after age 18.

People who had been incarcerated were more likely than those who had never been incarcerated to become entrepreneurs (either as self-employed individuals or as incorporated units with/without employees), even after various controls were incorporated into the estimates. However, consistent with previous studies, prior incarceration decreased paid employment, especially for Black individuals.

Entrepreneurship is especially likely to serve as a response to discrimination that Black formerly incarcerated individuals face from employers. Not surprisingly, then, Black individuals who had been incarcerated were especially likely, compared to those who had not been incarcerated, to engage in entrepreneurial activity – especially if their criminal history was available to potential employers. The findings suggest that “Formerly incarcerated individuals are less likely to enter entrepreneurship when ban-the-box policies are implemented in their jurisdictions of residence, suggesting that a key reason that [they] pursue entrepreneurship is to overcome the lack of employment opportunities. [This finding] holds only for formerly incarcerated Black individuals, who experience the greatest labor market discrimination before the implementation of ban-the-box. [The findings thus show that] change in the severity of labor market discrimination affects entrepreneurship rates” (p. 91). Entrepreneurial activity also “helps prevent formerly incarcerated individuals from returning to prison” (p. 129) as does paid employment. In addition, entrepreneurship provides better income to formerly incarcerated individuals compared to paid employment.

Conclusion: A criminal record makes it difficult, especially for Black Americans, to get employment. The authors note that entrepreneurship becomes “an alternative labor market route that formally incarcerated individuals pursue to overcome limitations in the labor market and to achieve economic and social integration” (p. 131). Engagement in this entrepreneurial activity, just like ordinary employment, is, in turn, associated with reduced subsequent involvement with the criminal justice system.

Reference: Hwang, Kylie Jiwon & Damon J. Phillips (2024). Entrepreneurship as a Response to Labor Market Discrimination for Formerly Incarcerated People. American Journal of Sociology, 130(1), 88-146.

Article 2

“Tough-on-crime judges” who sentence offenders to relatively short (one year or less) prison sentences, when non-prison sentences are also an option, influence crime rates. Those offenders who are sentenced by tough-on-crime judges are more likely to reoffend than are those who are given non-custodial sentences by less punitive judges.

A fair amount of research has been published demonstrating that harsh sentences do not reduce reoffending (see, for example, Criminological Highlights special issue on “Issues related to harsh sentences”). A number of these studies (nine are listed by the authors of this paper) compare the effect of random or quasi-random assignment of offenders to judges on recidivism. In general, the findings show imprisonment to have “either no effect or an enhancing effect on future criminal behaviour compared to non-custodial alternatives” (p. 321).

This paper takes advantage of the fact that in courts in the Netherlands, single judges are randomly assigned certain routine cases in which sentences of up to one year can be imposed. In fact, in this study and in other studies where it has been examined, the proportion of low- level offenders who are imprisoned varies dramatically across judges.

Many offenders in many countries receive short sentences of imprisonment. In Canada, for example, in provinces where data are available, about 92% of prison sentences are for 12 months or less.

In this study, recidivism was measured at 1, 3, and 5 years after release. Both the prevalence (the probability of criminal behaviour) and the incidence (number of crimes) were examined as a function of whether those found guilty of relatively low-level offences were sentenced by judges who generally used imprisonment frequently or infrequently.

Being sentenced to prison rather than a non-custodial sanction increased the probability of subsequent criminal behaviour in the first year after release

by 17%. Five years after release, there was still a significant effect: compared to receiving a non-custodial sentence being imprisoned increased the probability of a person engaging in crime by about 7%. Most of those offenders who were imprisoned who do recidivate do so within the first year after release. Those who received a non-custodial sentence take somewhat longer to reoffend (if they do so at all).

The study then examined the effects of imprisonment on the prevalence and incidence of crime for different subsets of offenders. Those being sentenced were divided into two groups – those who had never been imprisoned and those who had some experience of being imprisoned. The effects were generally the same: for both groups: the prevalence and incidence of recidivism were higher for those who were sentenced to prison. All comparisons were significant except for the prevalence of recidivism for repeat offenders 5 years after release. For offenders over 25 years old, the general effect held. However, for young adults (those 18-25 years old) the effect of imprisonment on the prevalence of subsequent crime did not show significant effects. Generally, the results did not apply to those offenders sentenced for the most serious crimes.

Conclusion: It is understandable that we often focus attention on the effects of long prison sentences. Rehabilitative and other programming (e.g., occupational training) tend to be focused on those serving longer sentences. This paper suggests that short prison sentences, compared to non-custodial punishments, can increase the likelihood of future offending. Those advocating the appointment of “tough judges” might want to think about the fact that they may, in effect, be promoting higher crime rates.

Reference: Wermink, Hilde T., A.A.J. Blokland, J. Been, P.M. Schuyt, N. Tollenaar, and R. Apel (2024). Estimating Effects of Short-Term Imprisonment on Crime Using Random Judge Assignments. Justice Quarterly, 41 (3), 317-346.

Article 3

Given the nature of many Black Americans’ interactions with their local police, it is understandable that Black Americans are more afraid of the police than are other members of society. This study demonstrates that fear can be reduced by increasing the amount of ordinary policing that is carried out by non-White and women police officers.

Black Americans – both rich and poor, men and women – have an understandable fear of police officers. Many indicate that they would rather risk being victimized than have unsolicited contact with police officers. Such fear can be counterproductive in that it can deter people from being willing to have contact with the police, as well as reduce the reporting of crimes to the police. In short, fear of police may lead people to avoid situations where they might come in contact with the police.

The especially high fear that Black people have of the police is consistent with data from American police officers themselves. There are large differences in the views of Black and White (American) police officers on such matters as the underlying causes of police killings of Black civilians. In one study, 57% of Black police officers, but only 27% of White police officers indicated that they believed that police killings of Black civilians are signs of broader problems in policing.

In the first study reported here (carried out in spring 2022, two years after the highly publicized killing of George Floyd), American residents (Black and White) on an online survey were asked to indicate which of two police officers portrayed in a picture would make them feel more afraid. The pictures varied on a number of dimensions including the race and sex of the officer along with other features described in a profile associated with the picture (e.g., age, education, being the subject of previous complaints). In a second experiment, respondents were shown pictures of a two-person team of police officers. The officers, again, varied by sex and race. In this second study, respondents were again asked which team would make them feel more afraid.

Overall, Black Americans were substantially more likely than White respondents to state that they were afraid of the police and of crime. Consistent with previous research, Black respondents also reported higher levels of fear of police than did other racial minorities. Indeed most (53%) of the Black respondents reported being afraid or very afraid of being killed by the police, compared to only 14% of White respondents.

Black respondents were, however, significantly less afraid of police officers who were Black or Hispanic/Latino. The race of the police officer did not predict fear among non-Black respondents. All groups of respondents indicated that they were less afraid of being harmed by female police officers than male officers. Similarly, all groups of respondents were less likely to report fear if the police officer was described as wearing a body camera. Black and non-Black respondents reported more fear if the police officer was described as having a prior complaint lodged for being disrespectful or using excessive force or both.

When teams of two officers were of different races or were both minorities, Black respondents expressed lower levels of fear than if both members of the team were White. Black respondents were also less afraid when at least one of the police officers in a team was a woman. For non-Black respondents, the composition of the two-person teams of police officers (race or sex) did not make any difference.

Conclusion: Clearly Black Americans’ fear of the police is associated with the fact that most American police departments are dominated by White men. One way to reduce fear would be to increase the diversification of police departments on racial and sex dimensions. Diversification of police departments is, of course, easier to propose than to implement. However, it would seem that the assignment of Black/minority and women police officers to patrols in Black neighbourhoods could, as well, have a positive impact.

Reference: Pickett, Justin T., Amanda Graham, Justin Nix, and Francis T. Cullen (2023). Officer Diversity May Reduce Black Americans’ Fear of Police. Criminology, 62, 35-63.

Article 4

The design of delinquency prevention programs might be more effective if those developing them were to focus more attention on the intermediate factors that might be affected by the program. A focus on “change levers” that have repeatedly been shown to be related to offending is likely to be more effective than strategies that ignore the mediators that might affect delinquency rates.

“The only direct control of delinquency is incapacitation…” (p. 262), a mechanism that is almost never the focus of programs for youths. “Most delinquency programs, therefore, must work indirectly by changing something that, in turn, affects delinquency….”(p. 262). However, relatively few of these “change levers” have been identified. In contrast, there are an infinite number of interventions that can be done with youths that might or might not affect delinquency.

One problem with many delinquency prevention programs is that they seem to be designed without much consideration of the mediating effect of a particular “change lever” between the program and delinquency. Hence the impact of the program on that change lever is neither considered carefully nor assessed. Change levers have mediational characteristics – outcomes empirically related to delinquency reduction – though not necessarily causally linked to it.

Many communities have a number of delinquency prevention programs that sound hopeful but are seldom adequately assessed. But programs that might have a measurable (and measured) impact on one or more change lever can be designed in such a way that they can be implemented in a specific social situation. Thus, for example, an effective change lever has been shown to be “school attendance.” Thus a program designed in a particular community to increase school attendance could be evaluated initially in terms of “school attendance” as the outcome variable. The program could then be tailor-made, monitored and adjusted as needed, to account for factors known to affect school attendance in that community.

This paper looked at a large collection of studies related to juvenile delinquency programs that were released between 1958 and 2015. Each study that was used in this paper had a measure of delinquency as well as a non-delinquency outcome measure (such as school attendance) that might be related to delinquency. A factor was considered as a potential “change lever” if at least 20 studies could be found that examined the relationship between that “change lever” and a delinquency measure. Each study in the analysis had a comparison group of similar juveniles who did not receive the intervention thought to be related to delinquency.

Five different possible “psychological” change levers were examined. Only one – substance use – was reliably related to delinquency. The only one (of three) interpersonal measure that related reliably to delinquency was “family functioning.” Three school factors – attendance, the use of discipline with nondelinquent behaviour, and attitudes about school and teachers – were related to delinquency. However, early dropout of school, academic achievement, and employment were not related to delinquency.

Conclusion: The number of programs designed to address delinquency, combined with the thin evidence base for their effectiveness, presents a challenge for those who want to focus scarce resources on “evidence-based” programs. “A focus on change levers provides an alternative, and potentially more useful and parsimonious way of characterizing the likelihood that an intervention adopted in practice will be successful [in reducing offending] …. Shifting the focus from lists of recommended programs to a categorization of programs according to the change levers they affect could facilitate the evolution of local programs toward more effective practice” (p. 280). Among other things, such an approach would help identify appropriate youths for a new program.

Reference: Wilson, David B and Mark W. Lipsey (2024). Scaling Up Effective Juvenile Delinquency Programs by Focusing on Change Levers: Evidence from a Large Meta-Analysis. Criminology & Public Policy, 23, 261-286.

Article 5

The COVID-19 effects on domestic violence need to be understood from the perspective of families’ already existing vulnerabilities. Hence “the effects of the pandemic on intimate abuse depends on the social and economic conditions of victims’ lives” (p. 441). Everyone is not affected in the same way.

Data from some studies of domestic violence suggest that increases in domestic violence rates or severity were caused by the COVID pandemic. However, the evidence is not entirely consistent and the reasons for any change are not clear.

This paper goes beyond simple “strain” models that suggest that events like the pandemic simply “overwhelm the resources of the family unit, creating couple conflict and poor regulation of negative emotions” (p. 422). Instead of simply looking at changes in domestic violence rates that coincided with the pandemic, the researcher listened to the accounts of the impact of the pandemic that were offered by poor and marginalized survivors of domestic violence. Most of these survivors “experienced COVID as part of clustered vulnerabilities: the pandemic became another thing in the list of things that made them likely to experience continued abuse and social precarity, compounding problems like housing insecurity and dependence on violent partners” (p. 422). In other words, the impact on any one person depended on that person’s prior situation and vulnerabilities.

In-depth interviews were carried out with 50 survivors of domestic violence in Michigan. Most were interviewed in shelters and, except for the temporary shelter they were in, were homeless. In discussing their experiences with domestic violence during this period (the first 14-17 months of the pandemic), “Many hardly talked about COVID during interviews. Other crises were more pressing” (p. 422). The pandemic, then, was not seen as a simple causal factor that just added one more stress on the couple. However, “COVID did worsen the social contexts in which survivors experienced abuse and sought help” (p. 422).

Most (about 80%) of those interviewed described their experiences of domestic violence during the pandemic in terms that might be called “clustered vulnerabilities” where “survivors’ disadvantages worsened during COVID, and their cluster of vulnerabilities became denser” (p. 423). Hence immediate problems related to such matters as housing, isolation, services, police, health problems or childcare were exacerbated by the pandemic. In many instances, the problems that the survivors had been experiencing prior to the pandemic got worse with the pandemic, but the pandemic itself was not perceived to be a ‘new’ cause of domestic violence. COVID, of course, did, in some instances increase survivors’ dependence on abusive partners. Conversely, for some, the pandemic was seen as a factor that increased their desire to leave the relationship.

An important finding in the study was that “the effects of the pandemic on intimate abuse depend on the social and economic conditions of victim’s lives.... For better-resourced survivors, COVID was an ‘external stressor’ on a relatively stable family unit; for survivors who faced significant instability before the pandemic, COVID did not independently affect relationship dynamics” (p. 441) Rather it simply made a bad situation worse.

Conclusion: By listening to the accounts of actual victims, it became clear that for many survivors of domestic violence, an “acute crisis [such as COVID] exacerbates existing vulnerabilities, especially around housing and systems involvements” (p. 441) Crises such as COVID make these harder to manage: “Crisis... is not so much novel as it is compounding” (p. 441). But a crisis like COVID can change people’s interpretations of abuse. Events like the pandemic are integrated into people’s lives. Hence, the impact of events like a pandemic do not necessarily “add” to the likelihood of domestic violence. The pandemic may have made the existing vulnerabilities that the person was experiencing more serious. Hence it is important to understand that “Effects are not simply additive ad infinitum, but are entangled in complex ways that may produce disadvantage for unexpected outcomes across multiple social arenas” (p. 442).

Reference: Sweet, Paige L. (2024). Clustered Vulnerabilities: The Unequal Effects of COVID-19 on Domestic Violence. American Sociological Review, 89 (3), 421-448.

Article 6

The notion that sex offenders are, compared to other offenders, especially likely to repeat their offences is without empirical support. Furthermore, in the past 50 years, in both the US and Canada, sex offender recidivism rates appear to have dropped even though the dominant societal responses to sex offending have differed in the two countries.

“The belief that sexual recidivism rates are high has been the foundation of more than 80 years of policy- making aiming to prevent sexual offending” (p. 126). Sex offender laws in the US and Canada have varied across time, but largely do not reflect reliable evidence about those convicted of sex offences. Interestingly, however, the laws in both countries appear to focus on re-offending rather than on prevention of sex offences.

The first wave of laws in Canada and the US focused largely on “the notion that indeterminate sentences were necessary to evaluate whether an offender had undergone [sufficient] change…” (p. 130) after being convicted. Canada’s law into the 1970s, for example, allowed people to be designated as “dangerous sexual offenders” if convicted of certain sex offences. They were then sentenced to an indeterminate period of preventive detention instead of a fixed sentence. As it became clear that there were severe limits on the ability of psychiatrists to predict future offending, a shift occurred whereby those convicted of certain sex offences in many US states were required to register as sex offenders. These registries are typically available to the public. There is, however, no “convincing empirical evidence that registration and notification laws helped reduce sexual recidivism” (p. 141). Canada eventually eliminated the category of “dangerous sexual offenders” and established a registry, but it was not available to the public.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that sexual recidivism – measured in various ways and involving follow-up periods that vary in length – was never very high in either the US or Canada, typically between about 20% and 30%. In both countries, however, numerous studies reported that recidivism rates dropped, beginning with studies where the follow-up period began around 1980. Obviously, the length of the follow-up period in these studies is important and part of the decline in recidivism rates may have come from shorter follow-up periods. The parallel trends of the US and Canada, however, are notable in that the approaches in the two countries to sex offenders are quite different. The availability of treatment does not appear to be a likely explanation for the drop in recidivism rates given that the approaches to correctional treatment in the two countries were quite different and the proportion of prisoners receiving actual treatment was never large. Even the types of treatment offered in the two countries appear to have been quite different.

One problem with an approach to “sexual offenders” that seems to assume that they are a relatively homogenous group is that, given the relatively low rate of reoffending by this group, “one-size-fits-all policies aiming to reduce sexual recidivism rates are overwhelmingly applied to non-recidivists who may not need such extreme penal measures” (p. 183).

Conclusion: What is clear from these findings – in both the US and Canada – is that “the public image of the sex offender as a life-course persistent sexual predator does not fit the reality of 555 empirical studies on recidivism” (p. 183) examined as part of this study. The drop in reoffending does not appear to be related to the implementation of sex offender registration and notification laws in either country. Perhaps the focus on preventing sexual offending from reoccurring should be questioned. Given the relatively low rate of reoffending after a criminal conviction, a focus on preventing sexual offending from occurring in the first place may be a more productive approach to a serious problem.

Reference: Lussier, Patrick, Evan McCuish, and Elizabeth L. Jeglic (2023). Against All Odds: The Unexplained Sexual Recidivism Drop in the US and Canada. Crime and Justice, 52, 125-196.

Article 7

Pretrial detention has significant negative effects on the outcome of criminal cases, even when the characteristics of the offence and the criminal history of the accused are controlled for.

With substantial numbers of people being held in pretrial detention in many countries, the impact of pretrial detention is clearly important. In Canada, for example, data for 2022 show that 46% of the total custodial population in the country consisted of people awaiting trial. This paper reviews the impact of pretrial detention on decisions to plead guilty, and conviction and incarceration rates (see also Criminological Highlights 17(2)#7, 17(3)#1, 17(5)#3, 21(3)#7, 21(4)#4 and this issue, #8).

Pretrial detention is clearly a controversial issue with many people, including politicians who often suggest that we need to “tighten up” on pretrial release. Aside from the fact that those in pretrial detention are legally innocent, those detained may well be disadvantaged simply because they have been detained. They may be seen as being more likely to be guilty than those who have been released into the community.

This paper reviews the research on the impact of pretrial detention on those who were subject to it. A total of 898 studies was examined carefully. Most were not included in the present analysis in large part because they did not adequately control for relevant confounding factors. In the end, 57 different studies were included in the analyses in this paper. These studies looked at the effects of detention in many different US jurisdictions in the three decades since the 1990s. Each study controlled for offence type and/or severity as well as the criminal history of the accused person.

Defendants who were detained in custody while awaiting trial were more likely to plead guilty. Given that finding, it is not surprising that they were also more likely to be convicted than those who did not experience pretrial detention. In the analysis of the effect of pretrial detention on conviction, every study that examined this found a significant effect. The largest effects, however, appeared to be whether the accused person ultimately was incarcerated. All 33 studies examining this relationship showed an effect of pretrial detention on subsequent incarceration with 29 of the 33 studies showing a statistically significant effect. The effects of pretrial detention on charge reduction and sentence length were smaller and/or not significant.

There was variation across studies in the size of the effects of pretrial detention on the various outcomes. This variation is hard to interpret since the measures used in the different studies varied in how sensitive they were (e.g., continuous vs. binary measures). The range and the nature of the cases may well have varied across studies.

Conclusion: “These findings support the argument that pretrial detainees are at a disadvantage in their case processing compared to their released counterparts. Detained defendants may struggle to prepare their defense and meet their attorneys, as well as lose their jobs and harm their relationships, making them appear a risk if released on probation. As such, detained defendants may be perceived as more blameworthy and dangerous than released defendants and face these more severe outcomes” (p. 363). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who are detained while awaiting trial are more likely to be found guilty and incarcerated than their counterparts who are released.

Reference: St. Louis, Stacie (2024). The Pretrial Detention Penalty: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Pretrial Detention and Case Outcomes. Justice Quarterly, 41(3), 347-370.

Article 8

By detaining accused people who are awaiting trial rather than releasing them immediately back into the community, judges increase the likelihood of a conviction as well as the likelihood that the accused person will eventually receive a prison sentence.

There is substantial evidence that being detained in custody while awaiting trial has harmful effects on accused people and their families. This study takes advantage of the fact that in New York City, cases are assigned to judges for the purpose of decisions on pretrial detention on what is essentially a random basis. Given that judges vary in their propensity to impose pretrial detention, it is possible to draw strong causal conclusions about the impact of the detention decisions on subsequent decisions in the criminal process.

Previous research (e.g., Criminological Highlights 17(3)#1 and #7 this issue) has shown that the decision to detain an accused person has negative effects on decisions about the case. Detention decisions also are linked to increases in subsequent offending (see Criminological Highlights 21(4)#4). This paper looks at the impact of being assigned to judges who differ dramatically in their pretrial detention decisions. It looked at cases assigned to 63 New York City judges, each of whom had made at least 500 detention decisions in one year. Cases in New York City were assigned by a court official in a manner that workloads were balanced across judges. In other words, the nature of the case did not enter into the decision on which judge should hear the case. Hence there is no reason to believe that, overall, the judges got different types of cases. Essentially it seems reasonable to assume that cases were effectively randomly assigned to judges.

A key initial finding was that judges vary dramatically in their propensities to detain accused people who are awaiting trial. Among these 63 judges, the rates of detention varied from a low of 17.7% to a high of 50.6%. One can, therefore, examine the impact of the judge’s propensity to detain on subsequent criminal justice outcomes.

The findings suggest that the assignment of a case to a judge was an important determinant of the ultimate outcome of the case. Cases that were heard by judges who detained a high proportion of those appearing before them were more likely to result in a guilty plea. Given that about 98% of convictions were secured by a guilty plea, the results were similar when the ultimate outcome of the case (conviction or not) was examined. Finally, being assigned to a judge who had a propensity to detain a large portion of their caseload increased the likelihood that the accused person would, eventually be given an carceral sentence. These findings held for cases involving felonies and misdemeanors as well as for both Black and non-Black accused people.

Conclusion: In theory, decisions on pretrial release are independent of decisions on guilt and sentence. These data suggest that this view is not empirically accurate even though the law may suggest it is. Since most convictions are obtained by way of a guilty plea, these findings can be seen as demonstrating that judicial officials who make pretrial release decisions are, in effect, having a large impact on who is convicted and imprisoned. Hence political figures who suggest that we need to “toughen up” on the pretrial release process are indirectly suggesting that we need to convict and incarcerate more people.

Reference: Koppel, Stephen, Tiffany Bergin, René Ropac, Imani Randolph and Hanna Joseph (2024). Examining the Causal Effect of Pretrial Detention on Case Outcomes: A Judge Fixed Effect Instrumental Variable Approach. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 20, 439-456.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jihyun Kwon, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner.

Criminological Highlights Vol. 21, No. 4 - June 2024

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:28:30 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Item 1

Police officers in Chicago with strong ties with another officer who was injured in the course of their duties are more likely than other similar officers not associated with an injured colleague to be cited for misconduct after these events. This finding was more pronounced when the person suspected of doing harm to the police officer was Black.

Police tend to see their work as inherently dangerous, often leading to an us-versus-them approach to their interactions with people while doing their jobs (Criminological Highlights 21(2)#2). This paper examines the impact, on an officer’s behaviour, of having a close police associate injured as a result of contact with a civilian. Specifically, the study looked at whether having an associate injured increased the likelihood of a police officer being the subject of a civilian complaint or being cited for excessive force.

The paper begins with the hypothesis that threats to the police are often perceived to be coming from Black and Hispanic men in high-crime neighbourhoods. Hence a police officer may be more likely to believe that there is a “War on Cops” (p. 165) if a person close to them experiences harm from a Black civilian. Although there is “some evidence that a small number of [police] officers generate a large number of [citizen] complaints” there seems to be little agreement about what predicts police misconduct other than the fact that “female [police] officers are overall less likely to be involved in contentious situations” (p. 161).

The study uses data (obtained through freedom of information requests) on complaints against active Chicago police officers, and personnel records, etc. for the period 2004 to 2015. The relationships among police officers were defined by whether police officers were ‘partners’ (working together on at least 2 arrests in the previous year) or ‘collaborators’ (1 arrest), or where they were in the same ‘cohort’ (they had trained together). The focus was on whether a given police officer had a partner, collaborator, or cohort member who had been injured by a civilian. Those who had such a contact were compared with officers who did not have a partner, etc., who had been injured. Various control factors (e.g., misconduct history and recent injury to the officer, race, age, and sex) were included.

If a police officer had a partner (but not a ‘collaborator’ or ‘cohort’ member) who had been injured, they were more likely, subsequently, to be cited for misconduct and/or the use of excessive force. This result held even when previous misconduct by the officer and being injured by civilians were controlled for. In other words, the vicarious experience of violence by an officer was associated with misconduct and excessive force even when controls related to the police officer were included. Furthermore, the “[r]esults show the effects of peer injuries on increased misconduct are most striking for injuries attributed to Black suspects” (p. 174). Most of the effect of injuries to partners is accounted for by those incidents with Black suspects.

Conclusion: These results suggest that to fully understand police misbehaviour and use of force with civilians, one has to look beyond the characteristics of the officer. The close contacts that the officer has with others – specifically those who have been injured in their work – appear to be important factors in understanding complaints against an officer for their use of force and other misconduct.

Reference: Zhao, Linda and Andrew V. Papachristos (2024). Threats to Blue Networks: The Effect of Partner Injuries on Police Misconduct. American Sociological Review, 89(1), 159-195.

Item 2

Black Americans’ views of the police are more nuanced than some might think. Although Black Americans are more likely than White Americans to believe that police racism is increasing, the vast majority of Black Americans do not want to reduce the amount of police patrolling in their own neighbourhoods, nor do the majority of Black Americans want spending on the police to be reduced.

Black Americans are considerably more likely than White Americans to report that they are afraid of the police. They are also more likely not to trust or have confidence in the police and to believe that significant changes in policing are needed. This paper examines a finding seemingly inconsistent with these views: that the vast majority of Black Americans do not want to reduce funding of local police nor do they want to reduce police presence in their communities.

One possible explanation for this set of findings is that although Black Americans are afraid of the police, they also are afraid of, and are more likely than Whites to suffer from, crime. This study examined views of policing of Black and Non-Black Americans who were asked to assume either that crime was increasing or that it was decreasing. They were also asked to assume either that the treatment of people in their neighbourhoods would improve or that it would not. As it turned out this “context” information had little, if any, impact on people’s views of police.

Most White (93%) and Black (85%) respondents to a national survey wanted police to spend at least as much time patrolling their neighbourhoods as they currently do. Likewise, most respondents (White: 92% and Black: 84%) wanted police spending in their neighbourhoods to be the same or higher. Those who have high levels of fear of crime (and relatively low levels of fear of the police) are most supportive of police patrols. “When it comes to police patrol, all Black respondents do not speak with one voice” (p. 5).

One possible explanation for the high levels of Black support of current levels of police budgets and police patrols of their neighbourhoods is that Black Americans are more likely than Whites to experience violent victimization: Black Americans were the racial/ethnic group that was most likely to witness gun violence and to experience a shooting near their residence. [These findings are similar to data for Black Canadians who constitute 4.3% of Canada’s total population but, in 2021, constituted 15.2% of homicide victims. Black Canadians are also twice as likely as non-Indigenous, non-racialized Canadians to report that they have little or no confidence in the police.] “Black Americans may prefer to maintain police patrol and spending even when crime declines and even absent significant policing reform because they may assume that there will come a day when criminal offending rates go back up, especially if policing is rolled back. Indeed, evidence exists that Black Americans view policing as a cost-effective way to control crime” (p. 9). At the same time, the data suggest that “policies that reduce Americans’ fear of the police and improve police-civilian relations would bolster civilians’ support for local policing” (p. 9).

Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that although the Black American community has serious concerns about the actions of their local police, they also have serious concerns about the nature of crime in their communities. “Most Americans, irrespective of their race, prefer to maintain, or even increase, local police presence and spending. Among Black Americans, this preference for maintaining or increasing police presence and spending is robust; it is not significantly affected by information about crime trends or policing reforms… The implication is that Black Americans, just like non-Black Americans, are supportive of policing – they want police departments to be well-funded and officers to be out on patrol” (p. 9). Support for the police also would increase if Black Americans’ fear of being mistreated were reduced.

Reference: Balcarová, Linda, J.T. Pickett, A. Graham, S.P. Roche and F.T. Cullen (2024). On the Robustness of Black Americans’ Support for the Police: Evidence from a National Experiment. Journal of Criminal Justice, 92. [Canadian data added by the Criminological Highlights group.]

Item 3

Prisons that are designed such that prisoners can experience higher concentrations of greenspace (vegetated landcover) within the walls of the prison are associated with lower rates of prisoner self-harm, less violence targeting other prisoners or prison staff, and higher rates of prisoner well-being.

Most studies of the conduct and well-being of prisoners focus on the characteristics of the prisoners, programs offered in prisons, the deprivations that prisoners experience, as well as the management styles and daily routines of the prisons. This paper goes beyond these “standard” explanations for behaviour in prisons and looks at the association between the presence of greenspace – ordinary green landcover – within the prison and prisoner well-being, controlling for the more ‘standard’ explanations.

In this study, the percentage of greenspace within prison walls was estimated using data from maps and aerial photographs of prisons in England & Wales. Data were available that allowed the researchers to estimate the proportion of greenspace within the prison walls for almost all prisons (89 to 96 prisons depending on the analysis) in England & Wales. A range of dependent variables was used, including prison records of self-harm and violence involving prisoners as well as some prisoner self-report measures of their well-being. Characteristics of the prisons and prisoners were used as control factors. These included such factors as the age, ethnic diversity of prisoners, the percent of the prisoners who were British, the average sentence length, the security level of the prisons, whether the prison was built in the 19 ^th century, the rate of overcrowding, and the size of the prison.

The prison was the unit of analysis. In other words, the study looked at the effects of the characteristics of each prison on the behaviour and reports of prisoners – averaged across all prisoners in each institution. The results were consistent across measures. Each of the dependent variables – the rate of occurrences of prisoner self-harm, prisoner-on-prisoner violence and violence toward prison staff – was negatively correlated with the amount of vegetated landcover within the prison walls even when other factors were controlled statistically. Greenspace “exercises a significant and dampening effect on both self-harm and violence… supporting the notion that greenspace is important for well-being in the prison system of England & Wales” (p. 310).

In addition to these official measures of well-being, self-reported measures were examined: the percentage of prisoners in each prison who reported mental health and/or emotional problems, a more general measure including self-reported drug habits or misuse of medication in the prison as well as a measure of the proportion of prisoners reporting that they do not feel respected or safe. All measures showed the same general effect: the amount of greenspace in the prison predicted favourable outcomes. There was some evidence that “lower rates of self-harm and violence are more strongly associated with larger amounts of greenspace in prisons with a high percentage of unsentenced prisoners” (p. 314). In addition, the effects appear stronger with young prisoners and in prisons with a high level of overcrowding.

Conclusion: The presence of a higher proportion of greenspace within the walls of prisons “is significantly associated with [lower rates of] self-harm and prison violence even when [controls are included] for the effects of both the characteristics of prison and their populations” (p. 317). These findings suggest that broad characteristics of prisons that are not obviously linked to prisoner characteristics may be important in promoting the mental health and well-being of prisoners who are likely, within a relatively short period of time, to be released back into the community.

Reference: Moran, Dominique, Jacob A. Jordaan, and Phil I. Jones (2024). Greenspace in Prison Improves Well-being Irrespective of Prison/Prisoner Characteristics, with Particular Beneficial Effects for Younger and Unsentenced Prisoners, and in Overcrowded Prisons. European Journal of Criminology, 21(2), 301-325.

Item 4

A bail reform initiative in New York State that resulted in an increase in the number of accused people released into the community without special “bail” conditions had no measurable impact on crime rates in the state.

It often happens that “liberal” pretrial release laws or practices are blamed for crime. When a person awaiting trial in the community is charged with a new offence, or when a high-profile accused is released, there are often cries that pretrial release is a major cause of crime that could easily be avoided if the person had been detained. This paper looks at the impact of a liberalization of New York State pretrial release laws on crime.

The problem in assessing the impact of pretrial release policies on crime is that even if those released have a very low likelihood of committing an offence while on pretrial release, increasing the number of people being released will, by definition, increase – in the short run – the likelihood of one or more of them committing an offence. This focus on the pretrial detention period (or the period during which a person might have been detained) ignores a critically important fact. Compared to release in the community, being detained in custody has been shown to increase, in the long term, the likelihood of a person committing an offence (see Criminological Highlights 17(3)#1, 17(2)#7, 17(5)#3) after they are finally released. Similarly, placing unnecessary conditions on those on pretrial release can have negative long-term impacts (21(3)#7).

In 2019, New York State bail reform legislation modified the law by requiring courts to release accused people on their own recognizance or under non-monetary conditions unless they were charged with certain offences. This list of offences was modified, to some extent, in the years following.

To assess the impact of the change in the law on crime, crime rates for seven serious offences (including 4 violent and 3 property offences) were assessed monthly. Two separate approaches were used to determine the impact of the legal change on crime: (a) an interrupted time series which examined whether there was a measurable discontinuity in crime rates associated with the change in the law for each of these seven offences, and (b) a “synthetic control” approach where a weighted measure of crime rates from other states (in which the law did not change) was compared to New York’s crime rates. The synthetic control was created by giving weights to the crime rates in other states so as to approximate the crime rates prior to the legal change. That way, changes in crime rates in NY State occurring after the legal change could be assessed against this control.

The interrupted time series – which obviously had no “control” comparisons – showed a mixture of findings. When looking at the analyses with the synthetic control, the results showed some minor variability in crime rates across offences when NY State changed its laws. However, these differences were not significant. It is reasonable then to conclude that “the effect of bail reform on crime rate increase is negligible” (p. 393). Hence the findings are consistent with the conclusion that bail reform of this kind does not necessarily lead to more crime. The paper also underlines the difference between looking at reoffending rates by those affected by a legal change and looking at overall crime rates as they would affect society more generally.

Conclusion: It is likely that crime by those on pretrial release in many jurisdictions accounts for only a small portion of total crime. But studies that focus only on crime associated with those on release do not necessarily answer the question that people are interested in: Does a broad policy affect the overall rate of crime? The results of this study suggest that overall crime is not likely to increase measurably if the presumption of release is extended to those who have committed many different offences.

Reference: Wu, Sishi and David McDowall (2024). Does Bail Reform Increase Crime in New York State: Evidence from Interrupted Time-Series Analyses and Synthetic Control Methods. Justice Quarterly, 41(3), 371-399.

Item 5

A program designed to eliminate the consequences of the revocation of probation for minor offenders by automatically substituting very short (e.g., 2 day) prison sentences as soon as possible after the first court hearing has been touted by its founders and others as an effective liberal reform. The only problem is that it doesn’t seem to be reliably better than the practice it replaced.

One problem with a probation sentence is that if a person does not abide by its conditions, they may be jailed for failure to comply with the order even if they would never have been jailed for the original offence. This paper examines an attempt to get around this problem by imposing very short jail sentences early in the process and then releasing the offender without conditions.

Early evidence from a highly cited but unpublished study suggested that making punishment for minor offences “swift, certain and fair” (with a short prison sentence after every violation) led to fewer arrests and fewer days of incarceration than probation as usual. The program was first publicized in 2004 and by 2016 had been implemented in 160 jurisdictions in 31 US states. It was often funded by the federal government and was seen as a way of reducing the overall use of imprisonment. This paper looks at the evidence available from 24 evaluations of these programs.

About a third of these evaluations used a randomized control design. In most of the studies, the sanction was imposed within 7 days but in most cases, the period in jail averaged more than 2 days. The target populations varied, but most involved adults who would otherwise have received probation. Some offenders in some studies (e.g., violent or sex offenders) were excluded from consideration for the program. The effects on recidivism were individually converted to correlation coefficients. The overall results suggested that the “swift, certain and fair” program reduced imprisonment by a tiny amount (r = -.058). Equally worrisome is the fact that there was no significant effect for the 5 studies that used the best designs – those with randomized control groups that received treatment as usual.

Equally important is the finding that most of the variation in the size of the effect on recidivism was due to factors other than whether the person was in the swift-certain-fair group or the treatment-as-usual group. Furthermore, “the extent to which programs adhered to the swift, certain, and/or fair principles had no impact on effect sizes” (p. 60).

This model of holding offenders accountable by way of swift, certain, and fair sanctions is obviously an attractive one. “When initially formulated, …and now, two decades later, this intervention continues to receive government funding and to be implemented in the United States and beyond. Despite the common-sense appeal of the program… the empirical evaluations of this model have been unfavourable” (p. 63).

Conclusion: The results of the 24 evaluations of this program show, at best, an average of a tiny impact on recidivism. But this average includes 5 studies in which an increase in offending and/or imprisonment was associated with assignment to the program. Indeed, even the studies – disproportionately those with less than ideal research designs – that suggest a reduction in recidivism demonstrate that the size of this effect is very small. Given the size of the overall effect and the variation across studies, it is clear that anyone contemplating implementing a program such as this one needs to ensure both that it is implemented adequately, and that the implementation is subjected to an adequate evaluation.

Reference: Pattavina, April, Joshua S. Long, Damon M. Petrich, James M. Byrne, Francis T. Cullen, and Faye S. Taxman (2024). Revisiting the Effectiveness of HOPE/swift-certain-fair supervision programs: A Meta-Analytic Review. Criminology & Public Policy, 23, 45-76.

Item 6

In general, Black Americans are more likely to experience incarceration and to have lower incomes than White Americans. In addition, the longer a Black person spends incarcerated in a given year, the lower their income the next year. This was not the case for Whites. These differential impacts of incarceration on Blacks and Whites contribute to the income gap between Blacks and Whites.

In the US, Whites working full time earn, on average, about $200 a week more than Blacks. This income gap could “influence incarceration by shaping a suspect’s ability to post bond and to hire a private defense attorney” (p. 840) which, in turn, could influence the disposition of subsequent contacts with the criminal justice system. Incarceration also influences the ability of a person to get employment, housing, etc. This paper examines the reciprocal effects of incarceration and income on Black and White Americans.

The study uses data from a longitudinal study of a representative sample of Americans born between 1980 and 1984 who were interviewed regularly until they were about 33 years old. As part of each interview, respondents were asked to report their total income and the number of months in which they experienced one or more days of incarceration. Blacks reported receiving considerably less income and were more likely to be incarcerated than Whites in each of the 14 interviews.

Looking across individuals, it appears that “time spent incarcerated had a stronger influence on future earnings for Blacks when compared to Whites” (p. 854). For Blacks, time spent incarcerated reduced income throughout the period of the study. “Formerly incarcerated Whites do not experience reductions in their income the following year when compared with Whites who were not incarcerated the prior year, suggesting that incarceration directly exacerbates the income gap between Blacks and Whites” (p. 854).

Conclusion: Time spent incarcerated seems to have a larger impact on earnings for Blacks than for Whites. “For every month a Black individual [experienced incarceration during a given year] they appear to earn between $300 and $600 less than non-incarcerated Blacks, an effect that was not observed for Whites” (p. 855). “These findings suggest that racial disparities in incarceration contribute to racial disparities in income in the US, the effects of which likely contribute to racial disparities in other life-course outcomes that have yet to be examined” (p. 855).

Reference: Silver, Ian A., Christopher D’Amato, and John Wooldredge (2024). Exacerbating Inequality over the Life-Course: Examining Race Differences in the Reciprocal Effects between Incarceration and Income. Social Forces, 102, 839-860.

Item 7

Black women achieve higher levels of education than do Black men. About a third of this difference is caused by different levels of involvement in school disciplinary practices and the criminal justice system.

The gender gap in educational attainment is larger in magnitude for Black men and women than it is for people of other races in the US. Black women have earned college degrees at rates higher than Black men since at least the 1940s. Given that they grow up, on average, in similar households and neighbourhoods, it is important to know why this is.

This study looks at data from a large longitudinal survey of 1600 Black children born between 1982 and 1993 in the US. They were at least 4 years old when the first data were collected and at least 25 when educational achievement was assessed. Girls were more likely to receive a high school degree than boys (85% vs.71%). Boys were more likely than girls to have been convicted of a non-traffic criminal offence (24% vs. 7%) and boys were almost twice as likely as girls to have been suspended or expelled from school at some point in their lives (46% vs. 24%). Girls were more likely than boys to have received a 2- or 4-year college degree.

Not surprisingly, the gender gap in graduating from high school is explained in part by differences in achievement in school: girls do better than boys. However, the size of the effect of exclusionary school discipline on educational attainment is roughly the same, and criminal justice exposure accounts for much more of the difference between boys’ and girls’ likelihood of high school graduation. Controlling for other factors, punishment (by the school or criminal justice system) accounts for about a third of the difference between girls’ and boys’ high school achievement. For both boys and girls, being suspended/expelled or having criminal justice exposure reduced the likelihood of graduating from high school. Girls, however, are much less likely than boys to receive these punishments. When looking at the likelihood of earning a 4-year college degree, “gender differences in criminal justice contact explain 49% of the… gender gap” (p. 943). What is especially important about these findings is that they apply even when behaviour problems (reported by the child’s mother on three separate occasions between when the child was 5-6 to 12-13) are controlled for. The difference in educational achievement appears to be substantially a result of society’s response to youths rather than their backgrounds or early behaviour.

Conclusion: “Early observed differences between Black boys and girls have long-lasting implications for their educational pursuits…. Across several key moments in students’ educational trajectories, Black boys and men experience a disadvantage relative to Black girls and women due to comparatively higher levels of experience of exclusionary school discipline and contact with the criminal justice system” (p. 946).

Reference: Thompson, Marissa (2024). Examining the Black Gener Gap in Educational Attainment: The Role of Exclusionary School Discipline & Criminal Justice Contact. Social Forces, 102, 926-951.

Item 8

The effects of homicide go far beyond those immediately associated with the crime. This study demonstrates that young women who lived within about 400 metres of the location of a homicide had an increased likelihood of getting pregnant in the week following that homicide.

It is well established that homicides and other serious violent crimes affect children’s and adolescents’ sleep, attention span, impulse control, school performance and, perhaps, other factors. This paper goes beyond those findings and examines the impact of nearby homicides on young women’s risk of pregnancy.

This study relies on data from 375 women, 18-19 years old, who lived in Flint, Michigan between 2008 and 2012. They were interviewed weekly “about their pregnancy status and pregnancy-related behaviours and desires” (p. 865). For each woman, an assessment was made as to whether a homicide had taken place within about 400 metres of her residence in the previous 7 days. Flint’s homicide rate (per hundred thousand residents) in the middle of the data collection period (2010) was 59.5. This is very high compared to the US homicide rate that year (4.8) or Canada’s (1.6). 23% of the women were exposed to a homicide at least once during the course of the study.

Each week, it was determined whether the respondent had any type of (male) partner and had sexual intercourse during that week. Women were also asked questions about the specific form of contraception they used. For simplicity’s sake these were divided into categories: “long acting reversible” contraceptive devices such as IUDs that did not require frequent or daily attention, and “short-acting contraceptives” such as birth control pills that did.

23% of the women became pregnant during the study. Because interviews were carried out often (weekly) and respondents provided the expected birth date, the researchers were able to estimate when the respondent became pregnant. And because they knew the date of the homicides in Flint, they could determine if the pregnancy occurred within a week after a homicide took place within about 400 metres of where the respondent was living.

Nearby homicides had no impact on the likelihood that a woman had sex that week though homicides were associated with the women reporting an increased desire to have sex. A nearby homicide was not associated with an increased desire on the part of the woman (or her partner) to get pregnant. Nevertheless, the women were less likely to use any form of contraception during the week after a homicide took place near to where they lived. The effect was largely due to a reduction in the regular use of birth control pills (the most commonly used method) at the time of a nearby homicide. Birth control methods that require user effort infrequently were not significantly affected by nearby homicides.

When asked about the fact that they didn’t use contraception at the time of the nearby homicide, the women reported that it was not because they forgot to use it, or couldn’t access it, or their partner did not want them to use it. The women’s explanation was most likely something like they “just didn’t” [use it] or “just because” or “neither of us bothered” or “we didn’t care” or there was “no reason” (p. 891).

Conclusion: Clearly, homicides that occur close to where a person – in this case, a young woman – lives can have life-long consequences for people who have no direct relationship to those involved in the homicides. “The only explanation [the authors] found consistent support for [that might explain the reduced use of contraception] is a cognitive pathway…. that nearby homicides… reduce [a woman’s] contraceptive vigilance” (p. 886). The results “exemplify how [the effect of homicides] can extend from one generation to the next” (p. 888) and can affect, in profound ways, how homicides (which typically occur in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods) can have unpredictable effects on certain groups in society.

Reference: Weitzman, Abigail, Jennifer Barber, Jusin Heinze, Yasamin Kusunoki, and Marc Zimmerman (2023). Exposure to Nearby Homicides and Young Women’s Reproductive Lives during Transition to Adulthood. American Journal of Sociology, 129(3), 856-906.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Jihyun Kwon, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner.

Criminological Highlights Vol. 21, No. 3 - March 2024

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:59:43 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

1. Why are Indigenous youths over-represented in Australia’s criminal justice system?

2. Are judges responsible for the high rate of Indigenous imprisonment in Canada?

3. Are “streetworker” programs an effective way of reducing gang violence?

4. Would crime decrease if prisoners didn’t serve their full sentences?

5. Are programs designed for early release from prison responsible for crime?

6. Are sex offender registries useful?

7. Do court-imposed conditions for those on pretrial release keep people from offending?

8. What needs to be done to improve the effectiveness of community corrections?

Item 1

The over-representation of Indigenous youths in the New South Wales (Australia) justice system is largely a function of the fact that the police treat Indigenous youths differently from non-Indigenous youths. Compared to non-Indigenous youths, Indigenous youths are more likely to be prosecuted rather than cautioned.

Indigenous youths in Australia are much more likely to be imprisoned than are non-Indigenous youths. Although this might appear to be a result of differential judicial decision making, it would be naïve to assume that this difference is solely a function of sentencing decisions (see also Criminological Highlights 21(3)#2). This paper looks at one plausible explanation not involving sentencing: that the police are more likely to charge Indigenous youths than they are non-Indigenous youths.

In New South Wales, Australia, certain youths who are apprehended by the police can be cautioned rather than being charged and sent to court. There is no appeal from such a decision. The consequences of being charged rather than cautioned can, of course, have long term effects. Being charged is likely to increase the likelihood of pretrial detention and being brought to court if the youth is apprehended after this first decision.

The study looked at records of 38,439 youths who had been apprehended by the police in connection with an offence for which they could be eligible for a police caution. In each of the 23 offences that were included in the analyses, Indigenous youths were more likely to be prosecuted than were non-Indigenous youths. More importantly, “after adjusting for age, gender, offence seriousness, area of residence, concurrent offences, prior contact with the criminal justice system and… year, Indigenous status remains a strong predictor of whether a young offender will be prosecuted. The odds of being prosecuted for a caution-eligible offence are 1.83 times higher if the offender is Indigenous than if the offender is non-Indigenous” (p. 263). Indigenous youths of all ages were more likely to be charged than non-Indigenous youths of the same age and this difference was larger as the age of the youths increased (see also Criminological Highlights 18(6)#1).

Unfortunately, the data do not answer the question of why Indigenous youths were more likely than non-Indigenous youths to be charged. One obvious possibility, of course, is that Indigenous youths may be seen as being at higher future risk of offending. It is also possible that Indigenous youths respond differently to being apprehended and detained by the police. There may also be differences in their background and families. But given that “The Indigenous juvenile detention rate in Australia is currently 20 times that of non-Indigenous juveniles” (p. 269), the findings are of concern no matter what the immediate explanation might be.

Data from other studies show that youths charged are more likely to reoffend and be arrested than those treated informally (Criminological Highlights 14(6)#1). Hence, these results would suggest that Indigenous youths’ offending rates are likely to be disproportionately increased by the fact that the police are likely to charge rather than caution Indigenous youths for relatively minor offense early in their lives.

Conclusion: The findings from this paper demonstrate that Indigenous youths in Australia are more likely than non-Indigenous youths to be dealt with formally by the criminal justice system. The decision to charge or process a youth informally is often not examined carefully, in part because both choices are available for many youths and the decision is not appealable. But given the likelihood that this decision will have long term impacts (on offending and subsequent decisions), it should be given substantial attention.

Reference: Weatherburn, Don and Brendan Thomas (2023). The Influence of Indigenous Status on the Issue of Police Cautions. Journal of Criminology, 56(2-3), 253-277.

Item 2

In 2017-2018, Canada imprisoned its Indigenous people at a rate that is not only dramatically higher than the rate for non-Indigenous Canadians but was marginally higher than the overall imprisonment rate in the quintessential mass imprisonment country – the US – for that period. Data from Ontario suggest that the problem of high rates of Indigenous imprisonment starts long before the sentencing process.

Canada’s Criminal Code recognizes the need to address the high rate of Indigenous imprisonment. Unfortunately, focusing this concern only on the sentencing provisions of the law implies that the problem can be adequately addressed at that stage. This paper suggests that there is a need to address the problem in a much broader fashion.

Imprisonment rates – usually expressed in terms of imprisonment counts (or people in prison on an average day) per 100,000 residents – are not routinely available in Canada for Indigenous people. But piecing together bits of data from various one-time-only sources in 2017-2018, it becomes clear that Canada’s Indigenous people are imprisoned at a rate (677 per 100,000 Indigenous residents of Canada) that is slightly higher than the overall US rate (655 prisoners per 100,000 residents). This rate is much higher than the rate for non-Indigenous Canadians (79 per 100,000).

Canada’s Criminal Code instructs judges to consider non-prison sanctions when appropriate for all those being sentenced. But it instructs judges to give special attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders (s. 718.2(e)). This could reasonably be interpreted as implying that the law reflects a belief that sentencing decisions by judges are largely responsible for the high rate of imprisonment of Canada’s Indigenous people.

Looking at data from Ontario (Canada’s largest province), however, challenges this view. First of all, Indigenous people, under the control of the Ontario correctional authorities, have more extensive histories of contact with the correctional system than do non-Indigenous offenders. They are, for example, more likely to have a history of imprisonment, conditional sentences, and probation than non-Indigenous prisoners. In terms of their most recent offences, when one looks at those who recently completed a prison sentence, Indigenous people are considerably more likely to have served the sentence for a violent offence and are more likely to have a history of probation breaches and other administration of justice breaches. However, their sentences – notwithstanding what looks like a more serious criminal justice history – were shorter than the sentences imposed on non-Indigenous prisoners.

Conclusion: These findings would seem to imply that to understand why Canada has so many Indigenous people in its prisons, one should look beyond the sentencing process to offending rates, police scrutiny and discretion as well as prosecutorial discretion. This is not a new suggestion: data from Australia (e.g., Criminological Highlights 21(3)#1, 6(3)#4), 20(5)#2) suggest that when explaining high rates of Indigenous imprisonment there (or in explaining variation in imprisonment across states), one has to look beyond variation in sentencing. Similarly, a Canadian paper on the serving of sentences for second degree murder suggested that Canadian judges were less harsh in setting parole ineligibility periods for Indigenous offenders compared to non-Indigenous offenders. But whatever “benefit” judges gave to Indigenous offenders was undercut by more severe treatment by federal correctional and/or parole authorities (Criminological Highlights 20(2)#4): Their parole ineligibility periods were shorter but, as noted by the Auditor General of Canada , Correctional Service Canada is less likely to afford them the timely access to programs that would convince the parole authorities to release them.

Reference: Sprott, Jane B., Cheryl Marie Webster and Anthony N. Doob (2024). Criminal Justice Reform and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous People in Canada. In Campbell, Kathryn and Stephanie Wellman Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Canada. (Routledge).

Item 3

The idea that gang violence can be reduced by having neighbourhood-based “gang outreach workers” or “streetworkers” working directly with gang members in the community is an attractive alternative to traditional criminal justice approaches to community violence since, in theory, it is dealing with the “source” of the problem. The only problem is that research over 60 years has failed to demonstrate positive effects.

Starting in the 19 ^th century in the US, street gangs began to be seen as natural products of the social conditions in which gang members lived. The characterization of street violence and the explanations for it changed over time such that by the late 1990s, street violence was often described as a “public health issue” (p. 762) requiring social intervention. These approaches contrasted dramatically with the alternative that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s: law enforcement approaches resulting, typically, in incarceration. In contrast to a focus on law enforcement, the idea was that streetworkers would “take the programs to the gangs” (p. 762) and would stop gang violence before it started.

The specific focus of streetworker programs varied across time and place. Early programs focused on new residents of large cities. As time went on, interest developed in addressing the challenges faced in racially segregated areas of cities. Later, the programs were often linked to the War on Poverty in the US. By the end of the 20 ^th century, some programs focused on keeping youths from joining gangs, as law enforcement approaches became popular responses to dealing with those already involved in violence. But the idea throughout this history was that streetworkers would work directly with youths in the community.

The explicit goals of these programs also shifted somewhat. The earlier programs focused broadly on delinquency. Later programs tended to focus on gun violence. Hence the type of studies that were carried out on their effectiveness also varied (e.g., from what was happening to targeted individuals or groups to the amount of (gun) violence in a community).

The early studies of streetworker programs make it “clear that such programs do not decrease – and can even increase – delinquency” (p. 771) (see Criminological Highlights 5(4)#1). More recent papers report mixed results. This paper, however, suggests that the more recent papers may overstate the value of these streetworker programs. The current paper presents a detailed analysis of a Boston, Massachusetts, program designed to reduce violence. Interventions involving street outreach, mediation, and the provision of social services with 20 gangs were carried out. Each gang had its own streetworker who also had access to detailed data on what was happening in that gang’s neighbourhood. Most gang members had contact with the streetworker. The gangs receiving these interventions were not chosen randomly. However, comparison gangs were identified and matched with the treatment gangs in a number of independent ways to ensure that the results were not a result of a single flawed approach to identifying a comparable comparison gang.

There was no evidence that the streetworker program used in this intervention had any effect on reducing violence. The results were similar across different methods of analysis. Given that the program was implemented effectively, the failure of the program to reduce violence cannot be attributed to a failure to deliver the program.

Conclusion: Clearly, streetworker programs like the one described in this study cannot be expected to reduce violence in the short term. However, programs like these may provide a mechanism “to reach and engage those left behind by nearly all nonpunitive social institutions” (p. 790). To the extent that streetworker programs can be reoriented to “bring the most harmed and marginalized [residents] into supportive relationships with their communities” (p. 790), there may be hope that they will have a positive impact on the communities in which they operate. It is equally clear, however, that any such program needs to be evaluated carefully during its implementation and operation. Success cannot be assumed.

Reference: Hureau, David M, Anthony A. Braga, Tracey Lloyd & Christopher Winship (2023). Streetwork at the Crossroads: An Evaluation of a Street Gang Outreach Intervention and Holistic Appraisal of the Research Evidence. Criminology, 61, 758-794.

Item 4

Prisoners often do not serve their full prison sentences as imposed by the court. Does the ‘actual’ amount of time an offender spends in prison affect post-release recidivism? A set of legislative changes in Sweden demonstrates that time in prison and recidivism rates are unrelated.

There are a number of competing theories about the relationship between the amount of time served in prison and subsequent offending. First is the possibility that long sentences interrupt a criminal career. Second, a long sentence might increase the deterrent impact of the sentence and third, a long sentence might lead to increased likelihood of receiving rehabilitative treatment. Alternatively, longer sentences might increase the likelihood of acquiring skills supporting offending. Or prisoners could increase their criminal contacts, and long sentences could raise the likelihood of labelling and stigmatization.

This paper examines what the actual effects are of serving sentences of different lengths (See also Criminological Highlights 21(3)#5). It takes advantage of three changes in Swedish law (in 1983, 1993, and 1999) each of which changed the amount of time that a person, sentenced to a fixed period of time, would actually serve in prison. Each of the three changes affected the likely release date of those being sentenced. The first change decreased the amount of time that would be served; the latter two changes increased it. Because these were abruptly imposed changes, it was plausible to use offenders who were sentenced in the “pre-reform” period as a comparison group.

A total of 3002 offenders who were imprisoned in Sweden for the first time one year before or one year after each of the three reforms were tracked for ten years after their expected release date. Reconviction and reincarceration were both examined. Various controls were included in the analyses including sentence length, age, prior convictions and the frequency of various types of crime, as well as the number of prison days imposed on the offender. A number of different analytic strategies were used in order to ensure that the findings were not associated with a particular form of analysis. Before and after each of the three reforms, the overall sentencing pattern was very similar, suggesting that changes in the release rules did not affect sentencing.

Changes in the rules relating to release from prison resulting in differences in the amount of time spent actually in prison for a given sentence length did not have any consistent impact on the likelihood of being reconvicted for an offence or reincarcerated. “Utilizing large-scale administrative data containing all convictions for Swedish cohorts born after 1957, we find little evidence that increasing or decreasing the length of incarceration has any specific preventive effect on post-release offending” (p. 991).

Conclusion: “From an international point of view, Swedish prisons have one of the highest per inmate expenditures. This is in part due to the small-scale prisons, a low staff-to-inmate ratio, and the extensive rehabilitation programs” (p. 992). Nevertheless, there was no evidence that spending more time in such prisons affected – through rehabilitation or any other mechanism – the likelihood that a person would reoffend or be reincarcerated. “The overall crime-control benefits of increasing incarceration time for first-time incarcerated offenders may be questioned” (p. 993).

Reference: Al Weswasi, Enes, Fredrik Sivertsson, and Olof Bäckman (2023). Does Sentence Length Affect the Risk for Criminal Recidivism? A Quasi-Experimental Study of Three Policy Reforms in Sweden. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 19, 971-999.

Item 5

Reducing the length of time that offenders sentenced to prison actually spend in prison can be done with no effect on rearrest, reconviction, or reincarceration.

Punishment by way of imprisonment is expensive and has been shown to have a number of negative impacts on society. It also has little, if any, effect in reducing crime (see Criminological Highlights “special issues” on The Effects of Imprisonment and Issues Related to Harsh Sentences .)

This paper examines Oregon’s “Short-term transitional leave” (STTL) program where prisoners, after serving at least 6 months in prison, can be released for up to 90 days (originally 30 days) before the end of their sentences for the purpose of aiding the prisoner to transition to housing, employment, and relationships with their families. The goal of the study was to determine if the program affected rearrest, reconviction or reincarceration within three years of their actual release. Technical violations were also tracked.

Only about 22% of prisoners were granted STTL. In order to create a comparison group from the remaining 78% of prisoners, “propensity score matching” was used to match each of 4,898 prisoners who were granted STTL with a prisoner who was not released early but looked very much the same as a prisoner who was granted STTL. In this study, they were matched on 117 variables, including demographic variables, current offence types, various aspects of their incarceration (e.g., disciplinary reports, length of stay), criminal history, and their “criminogenic needs.” Because there were so many prisoners who did not receive STTL, it was possible to create a comparison group that, on these variables, looked very similar to those who received STTL.

Those who received and those who did not receive STTL looked very similar on three critical outcome measures during the three years following release: rearrest (50.6% and 49.0%, respectively), reconviction (40.7% vs. 40%, respectively) and reincarceration (20.8% and 20.1%, respectively). (See also Criminological Highlights 21(3)#4). None of these differences was statistically significant, notwithstanding the very large sample size. However, there were statistically significantly more technical (supervision) violations in the STTL group than in the comparison group (27.5% and 22.7%, respectively). The difference between the STTL and comparison group in the number of technical violations increased as the STTL times got longer. It is likely that the reason for the difference between the groups on technical violations was that prisoners released on STTL were subject to more intensive supervision such as more check-ins and home visits by supervisors.

Conclusion: The results of the study suggest that releasing adults from incarceration sooner than their prescribed sentence can be done without creating any increase in offending. The increase in technical (supervisory) violations obviously has no effect on public safety and is, it would appear, under the control of the correctional authorities. The cost savings from the reduced use of imprisonment compared to community supervision is, in most jurisdictions, considerable.

Reference: Leymon, Mark G., Christopher M. Campbell & Kris Henning (2024). Oregon’s Transitional Leave Program and Recidivism. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 51(1), 43-65.

Item 6

Sex offender registries are an attractive way for legislators to look good by acting as if they are protecting ordinary citizens from a small group of people – sex offenders. The implication is that all sex offenders are especially dangerous, and that “registration” will reduce offending. The problem with this approach is that it is not supported by empirical evidence. After about 10 years of offence-free living, sex offenders are no more likely to commit a sex offence than are people without a record of sex offending.

“Individuals with a history of sexual offending are often perceived as presenting an enduring risk for sexual recidivism” (p.2) leading to special procedures – e.g., sex offender registries – that are justified on the basis that they will protect society from these especially dangerous people. The problem is that the underlying theory – once a sex offender, always a sex offender – is not supported by the evidence (e.g., Criminological Highlights collection Some Recent Research on Sex Offenders ). This paper goes one step further than most of the research in this area by comparing the lifetime likelihood that anyone will commit a sex offence to the likelihood that a person convicted of a sex offence will commit another offence.

Not surprisingly, a person who has recently been convicted of a sex offence is more likely to commit a new sex offence than is someone who has never been convicted of such an offence. But the likelihood that a convicted sex offender will reoffend decreases dramatically over time. However, it never reaches zero. It should be remembered that two other relevant groups also have non-zero probabilities of committing sex offences: (a) those convicted of other offences, not including sex offences, and (b) those who have no criminal record. Each of these groups has a probability greater than zero of committing a sex offence.

This paper looks at sex re-offending rates of those convicted of sexual crimes in British Columbia in 2006 and 2011 as well as the cumulative rate of conviction for males with no criminal records. Looking at the general population of British Columbia males, it appears that about 1.5% of males would be convicted of a sex offence sometime in their lives. Looking at those with a record of at least one non-sexual offence (but no sex offences), we see that “a nonsexual criminal conviction can be considered to increase the likelihood of a future sexual offence by a factor of 2.5 (from 1.5% to 3.8%)” (p. 10). Not surprisingly, however, those who were at one time convicted of at least one sex offence have a considerably higher rate of sexual offence reoffending (about 4.6% after 4.5 years). However, after being convicted of a sex offence, “most [people with a history of sex offending] would be indistinguishable from the population base rate after 10 years of sexual offence free [living] in the community…. A significant proportion of individuals on sex offender registries in Canada and other countries would be no more likely to sexually reoffend than the general male population.” (p. 12).

Conclusion: “It is difficult to see how having [the wide range of sex offenders currently on sex offender registries] serves any public protection function, despite strong public support for such measures” (p. 12). There are substantial costs for those on the registries (e.g., restrictions which may hinder peaceful reintegration). The imposition of these restrictions is based on the notion that such individuals are highly likely to commit new sex offences, when in fact their risks are not substantially higher than the risk of sex offending in the general population. Neither, however, is zero. Nevertheless, “Within 10 years [of a sex offence conviction] the residual risk of most individuals with a sexual offence history will resemble that of the general population” (p. 14). Long term, or indefinite, restrictions on their lives do not appear to be an effective way of protecting the public.

Reference: Lee, Seung C., Andrew E. Brankley, and R. Karl Hanson (2023). There Is No Such Thing as Zero Risk of Sexual Offending. Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice, 65, 1-31.

Item 7

Adding conditions to an accused person’s pretrial release after that person was charged with a federal offence in the US “generally had no significant relationship with reductions in the likelihood of pretrial crime or missed court appearances” (p. 1868-9).

The decision to release or detain an accused person in custody after they are charged is typically supposed to reflect the risk that they will not appear in court as required or the risk that they will commit a new offence. Some people are obviously more likely to be good candidates for release than others. The question that this paper addresses is whether adding conditions of release affects the likelihood – above and beyond their risk score – that the accused will fail to appear in court as required and/or commit a new offence.

Conditions imposed on those released prior to trial often bear no relationship to the offence (Criminological Highlights 13(5)#5), are experienced as punishment (16(6)#4), can easily lead to new charges of failure to comply with the conditions of release (12(5)#3), and do not reduce crime (15(3)#1).

In this study the re-offending rates of 223,260 people charged with US federal offences and released into the community were examined. Accused people’s “risk” of violating the conditions of release were assessed with a scale developed for this purpose. The scale had modest accuracy in predicting bail violations. The effect of the number of conditions imposed on an accused person was examined independent of their score on the “risk scale”. Other factors such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, charges, etc., were controlled statistically.

Overall, judicial officers making decisions on bail imposed an average of nine special conditions on each accused person. Not surprisingly, these judicial officers seemed to work on the assumption that increasing the number of conditions would reduce risk: More conditions were imposed when risk was assessed to be moderate or high compared to cases where risk was assessed to be low. Equally unsurprising was the fact that many conditions (an average of 10 or more) were likely to be imposed on serious offences (sex offences, drugs, weapons/firearms offences) than when the most serious charge was a property or technical/ public order offence (an average of 4.8 – 7.5 conditions).

The effect of the number of conditions – above and beyond the ‘risk score’ – on three measures was examined: pretrial arrest for any offence, failure to appear, and the pretrial revocation of release. In all cases, the accused person’s risk score predicted, to some extent, the outcome: those with high-risk scores were more likely, not surprisingly, to have poor outcomes. But the impact of conditions – above and beyond the risk score – was negligible. When there was a small effect – for example in the case of pretrial revocation – it would appear that the number of conditions was associated with increased odds of revocation. This isn’t terribly surprising, given that adding conditions to a release order provides more opportunities for revocation.

Conclusion: The findings make it clear that adding conditions to a pretrial release order can increase slightly the probability of revocations for technical violations but generally has no effect on rearrests for a new offence or failure to appear (p. 1866). From an efficiency and fairness perspective, then, it would appear that conditions should normally be imposed very selectively and only in those circumstances where there are compelling reasons for the condition to be imposed on the particular suspect before the court.

Reference: Cohen, Thomas H. and William Hicks, Jr. (2023) The Imposition of Pretrial Conditions on Released Federal Defendants. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 50(12), 1852-1873.

Item 8

Training programs for community correctional staff can – but do not always – affect the nature of the interaction between those serving sentences and those supervising them. In addition, effective programs can – but do not always – reduce reoffending. For the training of community correctional staff to be effective, it needs to be intensive, continuing, and monitored.

Criminal courts in Canada are much more likely to impose probation than they are to impose prison sentences. In Ontario, for example, custody was the most severe sentence in 26% of sentences handed down; probation was the most severe component of the sentences in 66% of cases. In addition, of course, many sentences include probation after a relatively short sentence of imprisonment. Similarly, in the US, more people are serving community sentences than are currently incarcerated (Paper#1-587).

A critical issue, then, is what community correctional programs should consist of. These two papers suggest that probation officers’ supervision time is best spent targeting medium- and high-risk probationers’ criminogenic needs, especially pro-criminal attitudes. The main goal should be “to help clients to replace their pro-criminal thoughts with prosocial thoughts and consequently act more pro-socially” (#2-p. 43).

These two review papers come to similar conclusions. Training community corrections officers to focus their interactions with their clients on correctional principles can be effective. There is little point in focusing on those with low risk to reoffend. Similarly, it is important “that the goals of treatment should be to modify the criminogenic needs or dynamic risk factors” and to focus on cognitive-behavioural interventions (#2-p.40). This may sound straightforward, but it means that communities will occasionally experience reoffending by a low-risk client who has not received much attention. It also means that there should be a move away from rewarding community corrections officers for surveillance and control since the value of such efforts appears to be minimal. However, the shift to a more structured interaction between a community correctional officer and client is neither easy nor, necessarily, long lasting: “Implementation should not proceed until a monitoring and evaluation system is established” (#2-p.52).

Given the problems of implementation described in these papers (see also Criminological Highlights 19(4)#2) and the relatively low level of correctional assets invested in community correctional programs, it is not surprising that the impact of community programs on client recidivism is often non-existent or unimpressive. Looking across evaluation research involving high quality studies, there was no significant effect on rearrest, reconviction, or technical violations (#2, p. 601-602), though there was some indication of effectiveness in some (but not all) studies. The focus in these studies is obviously on correctional issues, rather than on other ways in which the correctional officer might be able to help the client.

Conclusion: It is clear that training of community corrections officers focused on risk-need-responsivity principles can affect the interaction between the client and the correctional officer. However, it is not the case that a simple one-time training program can be effective at reducing reoffending in the long term. Constant monitoring and evaluation appear to be necessary to ensure that community correctional resources are used effectively.

References: Labrecque, Ryan M., Jill Viglione, and Michael Caudy (2023). The Impact of Community Supervision Officer Training Programs on Officer and Client Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Justice Quarterly, 40, 587-611 (#1). Bonta, James (2023). Training Community Supervision Officers in the Risk-Need-Responsivity Model of Offender Rehabilitation: A Review and Implications. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 62, 39-58 (#2).

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Audrey Macklin, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner.

Criminological Highlights Vol. 21, No. 2 - December 2023

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 19:54:52 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Item 1

The timing and persistence of prison growth in the United States since the 1970s can be understood by looking at the manner in which media outlets in the US circulated narratives portraying Blacks as being responsible for violent crime. The media effect itself was intimately intertwined with changes in the US homicide rate.

One of history’s most dramatic criminal justice changes is the increase in imprisonment rates that took place in the US between the mid-1970s and the first decade of the 21 ^st century. This paper examines the hypothesis that this growth was related to racial threat: “that the criminal justice system operates to suppress the competitive power of large minority groups” (p. 561) – in this case Black Americans.

Media stories present threat narratives “that define which groups are threatening and the type of threat posed…. [These] shape threat perceptions, exert pressure on institutional and political actors, and adapt to [changes such as] sustained increase in serious offending… And, when media discourse portrays racial minorities as posing a criminal threat, social control increases as well” (p. 562). Criminal threat narratives can lead majority groups to support imprisonment and can “increase lawmakers’ willingness to pursue punitive policies… [designed to] align with the images of public opinion and crime that circulate media discourse” (p. 565). We have seen similar findings with respect to fear of crime (Criminological Highlights 20(1)#2) .

Unlike many papers that examine only the period during which US imprisonment rates increased dramatically, this paper examines a much longer period (1926-2016) in order to understand the role of crime and threat in quite different historical periods. It examines over one million news articles published in 4,177 outlets between 1926 and 2016. These stories related to crime, employment, voting and race.

The articles were coded to determine whether Black people were portrayed “as holding substantial economic or political influence or [were described as] being associated with crime… in a negative, fearful or hostile light” (p. 568). Because of the size of the task, a subset of the articles was first coded by three people (who showed very high agreement in their coding). Subsequently, algorithmic processing of the full data set was carried out after determining that the human and machine coders showed very high levels of agreement.

The main dependent variable of interest was the national incarceration rate. Various other measures (e.g., prison admissions by race, a measure of drug law enforcement, the percent of the population that was Black, homicide rate) were also examined.

Criminal threat narratives in the media rose between 1963 and 1988, coinciding with increases in the homicide rate. There was a close relationship between criminal threat narratives and change in the incarceration rate (r = 0.64), but no relationship over time between changes in the incarceration rate and the rate of political or economic threat narratives in the media. The homicide rate is also related to the long-term increases in the incarceration rate. Analyses suggest that “roughly half of the effect of homicide rates on incarceration can be attributed to criminal threat narratives” (p. 575).

Conclusion: The findings suggest that to understand the manner in which mass imprisonment policies developed, one has to examine the manner in which the group who was disproportionately subjected to mass imprisonment in the US – Black Americans – was portrayed in media stories. Crime threat – but not political or economic threat – appears to be critical in understanding the growth of imprisonment in the final third of the 20 ^th century in the US. Furthermore, the impact of serious crime – operationalized in terms of the homicide rate – on imprisonment was not only direct, but also was intimately intertwined with the view that Black Americans posed a threat to majority Americans in the area of crime.

Reference: Duxbury, Scott W. (2023). A Threatening Tone: Homicide, Racial Threat Narratives, and the Historical Growth of Incarceration in the United States, 1926-2016. Social Forces, 102, 561-585.

Item 2

How do the police characterize their relationship with ordinary citizens? It would appear that many police officers and police organizations focus on the ‘danger narrative’ based on “an ‘us-versus-them’ ideology that envisions ‘them’ – all persons whom the police are observing, investigating, detaining – as a lethal danger to ‘us’ – law enforcement personnel” (p. 473).

In the past 50 years in the US, the rate of deaths among police officers has decreased dramatically. This decrease appears to be independent of the violent crime rate in the country. Some (often single year) comparisons have been used to suggest that there has been a recent spike in violence against US police officers. However, there is substantial year-to-year variability in this area and these comparisons appear to have carefully chosen comparison years so as to result in a specific finding. Similarly, in Canada, the number of on-duty deaths of police officers has declined since the 1960s.

Many ordinary interactions – including traffic stops in areas perceived to be “high crime” – are seen by the police as inherently dangerous, even though objectively the likelihood of police victimization is very low. An additional problem, of course, is that anticipating danger may lead to behaviour on the part of police officers that leads to an escalation of risk to both parties. “When police, because of a perceived inability to establish their authority, feel threatened by a civilian, they may increase their efforts to dominate, resulting in a response by the civilian that is perceived as even more defiant” (p. 507). “Both police and Black men are primed to experience ‘racial anxiety’ in their interactions, increasing the likelihood of a violent encounter” (p. 510)

This paper suggests that the danger narrative of policing “dominates police self-image and professional protocols and has been codified and reinforced by the courts” (p. 478). About half of recruitment videos from large US police departments display drawn firearms. Many feature camouflage-clad officers with assault rifles. “Officers are trained to be hypervigilant…” and officers are taught to assume they are “under constant threat of attack” (p. 488).

Courts have often accepted the danger narrative in assessing police actions. For example, the US Supreme Court “admonished lower courts not to second-guess officers’ judgments with the benefit of hindsight, establishing the ‘objective reasonableness standard’ for considering claims against officers for excessive force. The ‘reasonable officer’ standard incorporates professional police norms and departmental training practices” (p. 498). Since the “reasonable officer” standard is, therefore, defined by the manner in which police officers are trained, the “danger narrative” guides the understanding of what constitutes reasonable behaviour on the part of a police officer. One study found that courts dealing with lawsuits alleging excessive use of force by the police defer to police departments’ policies to define what is “reasonable.” The “danger narrative” concerning police interactions with civilians then convinces officers of the danger of citizens’ ordinary behaviour and, as a result, justifies decisions such as the shooting of citizens.

Conclusion: “Ultimately, us-versus-them policing negatively impacts individuals cast as ‘them’ as well as those cast as ‘us.’ This oppositional approach to policing is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: it destroys trust, precludes relationship building, and increases the risk of violence to police and those policed” (p. 517). “Police can play a decisive role in creating and reducing risk…” (p. 518). But such an approach needs to start with recruitment and training. More generally, shifting away from the danger narrative requires everyone to realize that an unfortunate outcome “is rarely the result of one person’s mistake. Rather, multiple small errors combine and are exacerbated by underlying weaknesses in the system” (p. 529-530).

Reference: Eisenberg, Avlana K. (2023). Policing the Danger Narrative. The Journal of Criminal law & Criminology, 113(3), 473-540.

Item 3

Generalizations about whether it is good policy to have police serving the role of “school resource officers” cannot usefully be made. There are too many dimensions on which their deployment varies and too many different goals and groups who are affected by them to come to simple conclusions.

“The presence of police officers in schools has become commonplace in recent decades” (p. 318), but what these school resource officers (SROs) do in the schools varies considerably. This paper examines the available research on school resource officers and notes that “much of what is documented in this area comes from small scale, localized studies of persons associated with schools that contain SROs” (p. 334).

“The role that an SRO plays largely depends on the officer, the school district, and their shared goals” (p. 320). However, in this review of 31 studies of perceptions and attitudes related to SROs, most SROs themselves defined their primary duty as being law enforcement and ensuring the safety of students. It is important to note that students in these studies often believed that SROs increased school safety and helped them feel safe. For example, in a study of SROs in schools in Edmonton , Alberta (Canada), not included in this review, it was found that “Regardless of race, sexual orientation and disability status, most students reported that their SRO made them feel safe at school.” Teachers, as well, saw SROs as contributing to school safety. At the same time, in some schools, students did express concern about the manner in which SROs enforced rules.

One feature of SRO programs mentioned in a number of studies covered by this review was that people perceived there to be an advantage of having an SRO physically present in the school and available if there were problems. Hence it was suggested that “it may be necessary for officers to be assigned to a specific school (or a small number of schools) where they can maintain a more consistent relationship with the student and faculty bodies” (p. 333). It may be that having a relationship with specific SROs reduces the likelihood both of discriminatory behaviour on the part of the SROs and of the SRO being seen as discriminating against certain groups. In the Edmonton study, for example, which included “interviews and surveys with over 11,000 students, 4,000 parents and 650 teachers”, it was found that “Regardless of race, sexual orientation and self-reported disability status, students and parents were much more likely to report positive experiences with their SRO (approximately 45 per cent of all respondents) than negative experiences (approximately 7 per cent of all respondents). Positive experiences included feelings of safety, assistance with victimization incidents, assistance with personal problems, informal conflict resolution, mentorship, legal education, and innovative strategies for discipline and reform.” That said, however, it is important to put the positive experiences in context. The Edmonton study also found that “Black and Indigenous students were somewhat more likely to support suspending the program than respondents from other racial backgrounds [and] were also more likely to report negative experiences with SROs, including allegations of oversurveillance, targeting and unfair disciplinary decisions.”

These papers did not examine whether there were changes in the frequency of incidents of serious violence that could be attributed to the SRO program. Nor did they look at whether the SRO program changed the likelihood of youths being charged with offences that would lead to suspensions and/or criminal charges.

Conclusion: In the end, these two studies demonstrated that if SROs programs are implemented in a community “We need to develop an evidence-based understanding of the best ways in which to incorporate these personnel in a way that does not harm students” (p. 334). Almost certainly, this means that the actual implementation in the local setting should be evaluated as an integral part of the implementation plan to ensure that the program is serving the functions it was designed to serve with minimal harmful side effects. Evidence-free assertions on any side of this debate are not helpful.

References: Almanza, Matthew, Makayla Mason and Chris Melde (2023). Perceptions of School Resource Officers. Criminal Justice Review 48(3), 318-338. Samuels-Wortley, Kanika et al. “Police in schools has long been a topic of debate. In Alberta, at least, the students have spoken.” Globe & Mail, 1 September 2003.

Item 4

Being suspended from school increases the likelihood that a youth will be arrested. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be suspended than are White students, and one of the most important harms from this decision – subsequent arrest – is most likely to accrue to Black and Hispanic students.

There is substantial evidence that being suspended from school increases the likelihood that a student will subsequently commit offences and/or be arrested (Criminological Highlights 15(6)#1, 16(6)#1, 18(6)#3). This paper demonstrates that the impact of suspension on arrest is more serious for Black and Hispanic students than it is for White students.

“One of the most pervasive stereotypes in American culture is the stereotype linking Blackness to criminality” (p. 626). There are also data suggesting that teachers are more likely to suspect that Black students will misbehave. Similar data exist with respect to Hispanic students. Given that the association between race/ethnicity and crime, this study examines whether the harmful impact of school suspension – and implicit labelling of the suspended student as a “criminal” – is likely to lead to more serious consequences for Black and Hispanic students than it is for White students.

The study uses data from a large longitudinal survey of American students born in the early 1980s. It examined data from 6 waves of data collected between 1997 and 2002 when, typically, the students were at the age when they were finishing or had finished high school. The main dependent variable was whether the youth had been arrested as a function of being suspended from school. Various factors were controlled statistically (e.g., whether the youth was from an inner city, self-report criminal offending, alcohol and drug use, socioeconomic background, etc.).

Not surprisingly, students who had been suspended had a considerably increased likelihood of being arrested compared to those who had not been suspended. However, “The impact of suspension has different consequences for arrest across racial/ethnic groups; Black and Hispanic students are more likely to experience an arrest in the following year compared to White students” (p. 638). For both Black and Hispanic students, being suspended from school increased substantially the probability of arrest. For White students, there was no such effect on the probability of arrest and in some tests, suspension may have decreased the likelihood of arrest (p. 640).

Conclusion: It is possible that “Because suspension can be understood as congruent with racist stereotypes about Black and Hispanic students but stereotype incongruent with those pertaining to White students, the labelling process and secondary sanctioning may operate [in a different manner] for students by student race/ethnicity” (p. 646). One of the most pervasive social problems in the U.S. for the past several decades has been the racial disproportionality in criminal legal system involvement. Although many drivers for this disproportionality exist, this study’s findings suggest that the use of school suspension is likely to be one driver” (p. 648). Given that suspension does not make schools safer, it is hard to think of a justification for the practice, given its negative impact on students who are likely already disadvantaged.

Reference: Fisher, Benjamin W. and Alex O. Widdowson (2023) Racial and Ethnic Differences in the Consequences of School Suspension for Arrest. Criminology, 61, 662-653.

Item 5

Politics and policing are linked: White American police officers who favour the Republican party are more likely than White officers who favour the Democrats to search Black motorists whom they have stopped for an apparent driving infraction.

Policing and politics are intertwined. It is not unheard of for police officers to enter politics in the US or in Canada. And, in many jurisdictions, views about how the criminal justice system should operate vary across political parties. Given that police officers exercise an enormous amount of discretion in their interactions with citizens, it would not be surprising to find that their decisions on whom to investigate are correlated with their political orientation.

“Racial disparities in policing are well documented and extraordinarily persistent” (p. 637). In traffic stops there are often two separate decisions: whether to pull a motorist over for an apparent violation and whether to search the vehicle and/or driver following that stop. Racial disparities have been found at both of these decision points.

This paper examines the association between partisan identity – whether the police officer identifies as Republican or Democrat – and the officer’s decisions in the context of a traffic stop. It uses data on over 5 million traffic stops between 2012 and 2020 by the Florida Highway Patrol. The police data included, among other things, three key variables: whether the stop led to a search and the race of the person stopped and the race of the officer. The party affiliation of the police officer involved in each stop (i.e., whether the officer was a registered Republican or Democrat or was Independent/other) was obtained from Florida voter registration data. Incidents were examined that involved Black, Hispanic, and White officers and motorists. Police officers were more likely to identify as Republicans than did most residents of Florida.

The decision to stop a motorist was unrelated to the party affiliation of the police officer. Overall, searches of motorists occurred relatively rarely. However, Black motorists were more likely to be searched than were White motorists. In addition, the disparity in the likelihood of a Black vs. a White motorist being searched was considerably larger for Republican police officers, whereas police officers who identify as Democratic were equally likely to search Hispanic and White motorists whom they had stopped. Republican police officers, however, were more likely to search Hispanic motorists whom they had stopped. Black and Hispanic police officers, on the other hand, appeared to decide on whether to search a motorist in a manner that was unrelated to their party affiliation.

When other control factors were included (e.g., the time of day of the stop, the county, the purpose of the stop), the results were consistent. “White Republican officers exhibit a larger Black/White racial disparity than White Democrats across racial and economic contexts and in counties with high and low crime rates” (p. 670). However, “After Trump’s election in 2016, White officers exhibited a substantial increase in their likelihood of searching Black motorists relative to White motorists” (p. 672). More detailed analyses demonstrated that this effect was due to changes in the likelihood that White officers would search Black motorists; and it was the result of a different propensity to search Black motorists among police officers who were hired after 2016.

Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that political party affiliation is related to front line decisions by police officers that affect Black and White motorists. Typically, we think of party politics and criminal justice in terms of how competing legislative agendas change criminal justice institutions and how these changes affect racial disparities. This study demonstrates that party politics affects behaviour directly at the street level.

Reference: Donahue, Samuel Thomas (2023). The Politics of Police. American Sociological Review, 88(4), 656-680.

Item 6

People with criminal records experience special obstacles when looking for rental housing. They are screened out of the rental market even before they have a chance to describe what their offences were and when they were convicted.

Previous research has linked eviction from one’s home and homelessness with offending (e.g., Criminological Highlights 20(4)#4, 1(2)#6). This paper examines the relationship between having a criminal record and the ability to find housing. The link is important for at least two separate reasons: people who already have been punished for their crimes are, in effect, receiving an additional punishment. But in addition, lack of stable housing is likely to be linked to reoffending.

In many cities, there is a shortage of affordable rental housing. Many large property management companies routinely do background checks on applicants for rental housing. Hence it is likely that landlords often have access to information about an applicant’s involvement with the law. Given that in the US it is estimated that 8.1% of the adult population has a felony record, the potential impact of a record on acquiring affordable housing could be substantial.

In 2018-2019, each of 924 landlords who had advertised a vacant apartment, received, as part of this study, two emails from people who expressed interest in renting the apartment. In one of the emails, the writer indicated that he had a criminal record and asked whether he would still qualify to rent the apartment. The other email was identical except that it did not mention criminal record. Race (Black, Hispanic, White) and gender of the rental applicant were manipulated through variation in the applicant’s name in the email. The main dependent variable was whether the landlord responded positively to the inquiry (as opposed to saying that the apartment was no longer available or not responding at all to the email).

For all 6 combinations of race and gender, those with no criminal record were more likely to receive a positive response from the landlord than were those without a criminal record (61% positive responses vs. 49%, pooled across race and gender). But in addition, “the effect of the criminal record does not vary significantly by the race or gender of the applicant” (p. 717). Independent of these findings, however, Black and Hispanic men were significantly less likely to receive a positive response from the landlord than were White men.

Neighbourhoods were classified as “gentrifying” if, in recent years, they showed increases in both the proportion of adult residents with a bachelor’s degree and in property values. The findings demonstrate that the effect of criminal record on the likelihood of receiving a positive response from the landlord was greater in the gentrifying neighbourhoods than in the non-gentrifying neighbourhoods.

Other data suggest that “criminal record matters most [in reducing the likelihood that an applicant will receive a positive response from a landlord] where levels of disadvantage in the neighbourhood are declining and opportunities for economic prosperity are increasing for housing providers” (p. 719). Furthermore, the [effect of the criminal record in blocking access to housing] “is larger in neighbourhoods with a shrinking Black population and smaller in neighbourhoods with a growing Black population” (p. 720).

Conclusion: This paper shows that a criminal record makes it difficult for people to get rental housing, just as previous research has shown that having a criminal record reduces the likelihood of being considered for employment. These findings demonstrate that crime-free re-integration into society is, in part, directly under the control of the community that creates these barriers. Lack of housing and lack of employment are each related to reoffending. It is not easy to overcome the stigma of a criminal record. But clearly it is in society’s interest to explore ways in which these criminogenic barriers can be eliminated.

Reference: DeMarco, Laura M. (2023). Criminal record stigma, race, and neighbourhood inequality. Criminology, 61, 705-730.

Item 7

Employment policies that prohibit the use of criminal records may not accomplish what they are designed to do. In fact, they may make it more difficult for certain groups of people (e.g., black men) to get jobs even if they do not have criminal records.

Because so many Americans – especially those from racial minorities – have criminal records, there have been numerous attempts, at the state level, to regulate the use of criminal records in deciding on whether someone should be hired. The state laws that govern the legal use of criminal records vary considerably in terms of their scope: the offences that are covered, whether they address convictions only and not arrests, and the employment positions that are regulated.

Concern has been expressed, however, that these policies “can inadvertently exacerbate racial disparities by decreasing the likelihood that employers will hire young men from racial minorities” (p. 1124). The concern is that employers may “discriminate against groups deemed likely to have records – namely black men – as a proxy for criminal history” (p. 1126). This paper examines the association between state level policies on the use of criminal records by employers and the employment of men with and without criminal records.

Data from a large longitudinal study of disproportionately disadvantaged families with children born in 20 US cities between 1998 and 2000 were used in the study. As part of the original study, data on fathers’ involvement in the criminal justice system were collected as well as their involvement in paid work. State policies related to barriers to employment for individuals with criminal records were assessed and an index was created to describe the degree to which criminal record information could be used in employment decisions. States varied considerably in how protective they were, ranging from states in which there were no restrictions on the use of criminal records to states that had restrictions on the use of records in 6 different areas. At the time they were interviewed, these fathers lived in 46 different states.

The overall results demonstrated that living in a state that had policies in place to protect people from discrimination because of their criminal record was negatively associated with employment for black fathers both with and without criminal records. For white fathers, the polices made little difference. For black fathers, however, having a record and living in one of the states with policies designed to protect job applicants from having their criminal history used to their disadvantage was associated with a considerably lower likelihood of being employed. These findings reflect broader racial disparities. All black fathers were less likely to report having a job if they lived in a state with more employment discrimination protections in place, including those with no history of criminal justice contact. In fact, black fathers living in states without regulations on the use of criminal records were just about as likely to be employed as white fathers. In states where records were supposed to be protected, however, both black fathers with criminal records and their counterparts with no criminal justice history reported substantially lower levels of employment.

Conclusion: “These findings… contribute to a growing body of research warning that policies regulating the use of records without addressing underlying issues of racism in the criminal justice system and labour market may be ineffectual or even exacerbate existing disparities…. Putting employment policies on the books may be insufficient to overcome existing patterns of discrimination” (p. 1139).

Reference: Emory, Allison Dwyer (2023). Protective State Policies and the Employment of Fathers with Criminal Records. Social Problems, 70, 1123-1143.

Item 8

Attempts to control the use of imprisonment through policy changes targeting prosecutorial discretion are inherently unstable: Prosecutors often have at their discretion “uniquely powerful charging and plea-bargaining tools” (p. 1312) that can be used to target politically vulnerable groups.

The traditional view of the prosecutor is that of a “law enforcer, advocating on behalf of the state for conviction” (p. 1313). More recently it is recognized that prosecutors “wield significant power via charging and plea-bargaining tactics to lock in sanction outcomes prior to formal sentencing” (p. 1313). This is very clear in the case of the decisions to prosecute cases with mandatory minimum penalties.

In Canada, the availability of prosecutorial power is also evident in the decision on whether to proceed by way of summary conviction or indictment in cases in which the law provides this choice to the prosecutor. Typically not only is the maximum available prison sentence considerably longer in cases proceeded on by way of indictment (compared to by way of summary conviction) but so is the length, if any, of a mandatory minimum sentence.

This study looks at the way in which US federal prosecutorial discretion in two district courts changed between the early 2010s and the early Trump era (2017-2019), focusing largely on immigration and drug trafficking cases. Prosecutors and defence counsel were interviewed. In addition, data on the processing of federal cases were examined.

Neither of these districts was on the southwestern US border (where immigration laws may be especially important) and there were no important changes in the formal law during the study period. Typically, in the first part of the 2010s, immigrant cases where the accused did not have a serious record ended up with simple deportation. In the Trump era, however, the portion of those with little or no criminal record who were charged with immigration offences increased. In one district, the proportion of those without serious criminal records increased from 13% in 2015 to 33% in 2018. In the second district, similar increases were found. Illegal immigrants who used false identities to get or maintain jobs were much more likely, in the Trump era, to be charged with offences carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Similarly, charging practices changed dramatically with drug offences such that the proportion of drug defendants facing mandatory minimum penalties increased substantially.

During the Trump era, “frontline prosecutors used the statutory tools at their disposal to implement the regressive war-on-crime [procedures that were favoured by Trump’s Attorneys General]” (p. 1328). Under the previous (Obama) administration, prosecutors, in these same locations, had reduced the use of these punitive procedures.

Conclusion: It is often the case that groups that favour or oppose the use of imprisonment for many offences (e.g., drug and immigration offences) will focus on what the formal law appears to require. This study “highlights the key role frontline prosecutors play in maintaining mass incarceration” [in the U.S.] (p. 1329). Each of the two districts that was studied became “more restrained in the how they prosecuted drug offences [during the Obama period but] that restraint quickly disappeared with the change of administration” (p. 1329). Long term change, then, is not likely to be easy to accomplish if the orientation of prosecutors is a direct function of which political party is in power.

Reference: Lynch, Mona (2023) Prosecutors as Punishers: A Case Study of Trump-era Practices. Punishment & Society, 25(5), 1312-1333.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Audrey Macklin, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner.

Criminological Highlights Vol. 21, No. 1 - September 2023

t.king@mail.utoronto.ca (Tyler King) — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:36:05 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

Article 1

People believe that the level of moral behaviour in their communities is declining even though systematically collected data show convincingly that people do not see a change in the behaviour of those around them with whom they interact. This belief is widespread (across countries) and across time. For politicians the belief in the decline provides simple justification for the need for policies such as “tough on crime” measures.

Why do people believe that their fellow citizens are less moral than they once were? One possibility is that there is an actual decline, though one wonders why we haven’t hit rock bottom since concern about the decline has been with us for more than 2000 years. Alternatively, it may be a misperception based on an illusion that people around the world are susceptible to.

This study first examined data from 177 survey items that people in the U.S. (n=200,772) had been asked over a 70-year period. These included questions such as “Do you think that over the last few decades our society has become less honest and ethical…” (p. 782). On 84% of these items, the majority of Americans in the various surveys thought that there had been a decline. The perception of decline was not related to the year in which the survey was carried out (1949-2019). People were, however, more likely to report a decline if asked about a long period of time.

In another study, survey results from people in 59 countries who had been asked similar questions (between 1996 and 2007) showed the same result: Most people saw a decline. People all over the world believe that morality has declined. Older people perceived more moral decline during their lives simply because they were thinking about a longer period of time. Interestingly, however, when data were examined to see if people perceived there to be a moral decline in the years before they were born – they saw none. In other words, they believed that people were as honest, nice and good in the year that the respondent was born as they were 20 years before the respondent’s birth. “Participants believed that moral decline began at about roughly the same time they appeared on Earth” (p. 787), whatever year that happened to be. People attributed moral decline to decline within individuals and to the belief that younger people were more likely to embrace immorality.

Generally, it seems that people are especially likely to attend to negative information about people in general (e.g., whether they once committed a criminal offence). Furthermore, the mass media often focus on negative events (e.g., violent crimes in public places) and seldom put these events in context (e.g., whether they are unusual). Decreases in crime may not get the same amount of attention as crime increases. When thinking about the past, however, positive events are more likely than negative events to be recalled. The past looks moral compared to the present.

But when looking at people’s own personal experiences (how they themselves reported they had been treated), the results were quite different. The researchers found 107 questions about people’s own experiences that had been asked at least twice in surveys administered at least 10 years apart between 1965 and 2020. People’s reports of current morality were, in fact, stable over time – both in the US and in other countries. In other words, when asked about the morality of people in their personal worlds – “the people with whom you currently interact, in person or otherwise, in your everyday life… friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, neighbours, etc.” (p. 786) – people saw no decline in the previous 15 years even though they reported general decline.

Conclusion: The data show that the misperception that there has been a moral decline in society is widespread. This misperception is not caused by people’s personal experience with the behaviour of others. With large numbers of people in western countries believing that addressing the moral decline of society should be a high priority, we run the risk of political leaders capitalizing on the public’s misperception that dramatic negative change has taken place and moving toward policies (e.g., increased imprisonment) that are not going to improve society.

Reference: Mastroianni, Adam M. & Daniel T. Gilbert (2023). The Illusion of Moral Decline. Nature, 618, 782-797.

Article 2

Living near a firearms dealer puts ordinary citizens at risk of being homicide victims, especially if that dealer has been shown to have violated (US) federal firearms regulations.

Previous research has shown that making firearms hard to obtain will reduce the likelihood of deaths and accidents involving firearms. This paper looks into an approach to limiting accessibility to firearms, i.e. by limiting citizens’ easy access to licensed firearms dealers and by enforcing existing laws meant to control access to firearms.

Research has shown that many firearms involved in crime were obtained close to the location in which the crime took place. Generally speaking, if a region has a high rate of firearms ownership, it is likely to have a high rate of firearms crime. Obviously, many firearms may have been obtained illegally, but some of this illegal ownership can be the result of a legal purchase from a dealer for the purpose of turning the firearm over to someone for whom ownership, for various reasons, may be prohibited.

This study focused on one county in Ohio (population: 1.32 million) that had 183 licensed firearms dealers. The location of these dealers and the results of the federal government’s inspections of their operation were available. Each neighbourhood within this one county was characterized according to their overall disadvantage (% in poverty, % unemployed, etc.), as well as racial composition. There were 343 homicides during the 2-year study period. It was estimated that about 73% of all homicides involved firearms. There were on average 5.1 licensed firearms dealers within 2 miles of the centre of each of the 282 neighbourhoods (census tracts). 37% of the census tracts had at least one licensed dealer. A conservative measure of the number of dealers who had serious violations was also included in the study. The presence of serious violators of firearms sales regulations was not more likely to be found in neighbourhoods with many compliant dealers.

Homicides were more likely to take place in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and neighbourhoods with high concentrations of Black and Hispanic citizens. However, above and beyond these factors, neighbourhoods with nearby firearms dealers were more likely to have high homicide rates. In other words, disadvantaged neighbourhoods with nearby firearms dealers largely described those neighbourhoods that had high homicide rates. Homicide rates were also especially high in neighbourhoods in which there was a dealer who had been found to be non-compliant (in an important way) with the laws governing firearms sales.

Conclusion: “Proximity to both federally licensed firearms dealers in general and especially to negligent dealers was associated with an increased incidence of homicide. [In addition] a higher number of dealers in disadvantaged neighbourhoods were associated with a higher incidence of homicide regardless of known compliance status…. Taken together, the results demonstrate that both spatial and regulatory contexts matter when considering the relationship between gun dealers and local violent crime” (p. 335). Governments can control the ease with which guns can be purchased (e.g., the proximity of citizens to firearms dealers) and the rules governing those purchases. Hence by controlling firearms, governments can, if they wish, exercise some control over homicide rates.

Reference: Stansfield, Richard, Daniel Semenza, Jie Xu, and Elizabeth Griffiths (2023). Licensed Firearms Dealers, Legal Compliance, and Local Homicide: A Case Study. Criminology & Public Policy, 22, 323-345.

Article 3

Children of mothers who have experienced incarceration experience more school-based involvement by their primary caregiver (the mother or, often, a grandmother). It would appear that these primary caregivers are trying to compensate for the fact that the child’s mother has been taken away.

There are many studies showing that the incarceration of fathers has negative consequences for their children (see Criminological Highlights Special Issue on The Effects of Imprisonment: Specific Deterrence and Collateral Effects ). In contrast, this paper examines the effects of the imprisonment of a child’s mother on a specific aspect of the child’s upbringing: the involvement of the primary caregiver (PCG) in their child’s school.

It is broadly accepted that there are values to children of parental involvement in their education. Few fathers who are incarcerated considered themselves to be the PCG for their children, whereas most (70%) of incarcerated women with children identified as their children’s PCG. This paper, therefore, focuses on incarcerated women and their children.

The study uses two sets of data: A US survey that oversampled unmarried mothers, interviewing them shortly after their child’s birth and following them through the time that their child was in primary school, and detailed interviews with 42 formerly incarcerated mothers. In the survey, involvement in the school was assessed with 6 questions related to such things as attending events being held at the school for parents, and attending meetings related to their children.

Not surprisingly, children of ever- vs. never-incarcerated mothers experienced many additional forms of disadvantage. Their household income was lower. Their mothers were more likely to report substance abuse and/or depression, and were more likely to have had contact with Child Protective Services (CPS). Children of incarcerated mothers were more likely to be living with a PCG who was not their biological mother. Given these facts, it was important to compare PCGs who were comparable on these and other variables.

Controlling for paternal incarceration, demographic differences, and maternal challenges, it was found that the children of mothers who had been incarcerated had increased likelihood that their PCG would be involved in their schooling (whether or not the primary caregiver was the child’s biological mother). This involvement of the PCG in school activities was not due to disciplinary or behavioural problems of the child. The interview data suggested strongly that the involvement of formerly incarcerated mothers in the schooling of their children was linked to mothers’ desire to compensate for their absence in prison and to mothers’ hopes for social mobility of their children. Interventions by CPS were an ever-present concern and one reason that the PCG was often the mother’s mother. In the interviews it became clear that “Proving oneself as a mother in the eyes of one’s child and family was a repeated theme…” (p. 504).

Conclusion: Being incarcerated redefined what it meant to be a mother. Being involved in the child’s education was one way in which these disadvantaged mothers could attempt to compensate for the deficits experienced by their children. “Importantly, the primary audience of school involvement was not the school itself but children first and foremost, along with the alternative caregivers with whom relationships had been strained by maternal incarceration…. Mothers also understood their children as a source of pride and self-worth and viewed their children’s educational attainment as a barometer of their parenting…” (p. 508).

Reference: Branigan, Amelia R., Rachel Ellis, Wade C. Jacobsen, Anna R. Haskins (2023). System Management and Compensatory Parenting: Educational Involvement After Maternal Incarceration. Criminology, 61, 482-517.

Article 4

Black defendants in US federal courts are more likely to receive detention recommendations than are White defendants. The racial disparity in probation officers’ recommendations operates largely as a result of one factor: the criminal history of the accused.

The use of pretrial detention is a concern for at least two simple reasons: it can be harmful to an accused who has not been convicted of an offence and it is, inherently, a punishment that is imposed by a court on a legally innocent person.

Although ultimately pretrial detention decisions are made by judges, other people typically give advice or suggestions to the judge. In US federal courts probation officers are required to provide information and recommendations to the judge. They are instructed to consider both the offence and the defendant’s criminal record in their recommendations as well as more social factors, such as community ties. In addition to descriptions of the accused on various specific measures, the probation officers complete a pretrial risk assessment (PTRA) measure which is given to the judge.

This paper compares the recommendations made by 3123 probation officers in 84 federal districts on the likelihood of a recommendation for pretrial detention for Black and White (non-Hispanic) defendants. Overall, Blacks were 34% more likely to receive a recommendation for detention.

Racial disparities that disadvantage Black defendants were the smallest in districts that tended to detain lots of people (of either race) and where the PTRA suggested that the defendant was high risk. These obviously are cases in which there would appear to be little discretion for the probation officer: a recommendation for detention was “natural” if people were generally detained in that district and the accused person was rated as being of high risk.

However, in both the districts with high and low detention rates, Blacks with low criminal history scores were more likely to be disadvantaged by the recommendations of probation officers. For those with serious criminal records, Blacks and Whites tended to be treated in a more similar fashion. “Racial disparities generally are greater when the situation provides greater room for discretion. These ‘gray area’ cases require officers to exercise personal judgement to make a detention recommendation and, therefore, may provide greater room for personally mediated disparities” (p. 251). However, about 60% of the racial disparities could be explained by criminal history alone.

But in addition, “a simple combination of defendants’ criminal history (a policy-centric factor) and socio-economic status (a policy-peripheral factor) explains nearly as much of the racial disparity in officers’ detention recommendations as the best summary of policy-centric factors” (p. 254). The criminal history of the accused person appeared to be a central factor in the probation officer’s recommendation.

Conclusion: In sum, there is evidence of racial disparity in recommendations regarding pretrial detention, especially in the ‘gray area’ cases. This disparity appears to operate “through policy-centric factors rather than personally mediated bias” (p. 254). The focus of the decision appears largely to be the criminal history of Black accused people. If, ultimately, the goal is to reduce the racial disparity in recommendations concerning pretrial detention, this might be done by restricting the weight given to criminal history to ensure that its effect does not go beyond what might predict serious offending and failure to appear.

Reference: Skeem, Jennifer, Lina Montoya and Christopher Lowenkamp (2023). Understanding Racial Disparities in Pretrial Detention Recommendations to Shape Policy Reform. Criminology & Public Policy, 22, 233-262.

Article 5

Misdemeanor arrests in the U.S. dropped dramatically between 1997 and 2018. The decline is related most closely to lower numbers of police officers per capita and lower police expenditures.

Misdemeanor arrests increased in American cities between 1980 and 1997 and then decreased by 45% between 1997 and 2018. Although some of this decline could have been a result of changing values and laws related to marijuana use, the decline in “quality of life” offences (e.g., loitering, disorderly conduct, public drunkenness) was also dramatic, peaking in the early 1980s and declining 77% between then and 2018.

A number of possible explanations exist for this decline including the implementation of various forms of community policing models. Police have a great deal of discretion on whether to arrest people for misdemeanors, especially since many contacts between police and citizens related to misdemeanors are not the result of reports to the police. This paper examines the relationship of the drop in misdemeanor arrests to changes in police strength, measured by the number of officers and police expenditures per 1000 residents. Data were obtained for 940 U.S. cities between 1990 and 2016. Hence the analyses look at the impact of variation in staffing levels and expenditures on policing across time (within cities) and across cities.

The paper looks at three measures of low-level (misdemeanor) arrests: the rate, the percent of all arrests that involved misdemeanors, and the rate of “quality of life” arrests. The results were very similar for the three measures. Various controls were also included: the violent crime rate (as an indicator of the amount of serious crime in each city), race, economic disadvantage, the percent of young men and foreign born in the city.

The number of police officers and the amount of police expenditures per 1000 residents predicted all three outcome measures. As these measures of police strength decreased, misdemeanor arrests (and quality of life arrests) also decreased.

For about 40% of the cities, a measure of the implementation of community policing was available. It consisted of an index created from measures of 5 separate dimensions of what typically is considered community policing (e.g., consistent patrol beats for officers, encouragement of officers to assess and solve problems). The presence of community policing had no impact on changes in the outcome measures (misdemeanor or quality of life arrests).

“When cities shrank their police staff or their police spending, they saw associated declines in low level arrest rates” (p. 342). Police strength did not change dramatically during this period, suggesting that even small changes can affect what happens to those susceptible to arrest for minor matters. As a New York City police commissioner once suggested, “When you hire more officers, they make more arrests” (p. 342). Police, once hired, understandably want to show that they are productive; discretionary arrests are a mechanism to do this. And there is more discretion for minor matters (misdemeanors) than there is for more serious offences.

There was little evidence to suggest that ordinary citizens were at risk from lower rates of misdemeanor arrests: “Cities that saw large [overall] crime reductions experienced larger declines in both misdemeanor and quality of life arrest rates” (p. 343).

Conclusion: The rate of low-level arrests for minor matters is under policy control. Increased police strength and police expenditures would appear to be likely to result in an increase in the rate of arrests for minor matters. Even though arrests (and convictions) for minor matters do not necessarily lead to severe criminal justice outcomes, the effects on the employment, finances, school performance, immigration status, etc., of the person being arrested can be dramatic. Furthermore, as other research has shown, “For young people, especially Black adolescents, a single arrest increases the likelihood of a subsequent re-offence” (p. 332).

Reference: Beck, Brendan, Eaven Holder, Abigail Novak, & Jacob Kaplan (2023). The Material of Policing: Budgets, Personnel and the United States’ Misdemeanor Arrest Decline. British Journal of Criminology, 63, 330-347.

Article 6

Hispanics charged with criminal offences are more likely to be convicted and imprisoned if they have darker coloured skin.

Previous research has shown that Black accused people with darker skin colour are more likely than those with lighter skin tones to be treated harshly by the criminal justice system (see Criminological Highlights 16(3)#1, 18(3)#4). This paper extends these findings to Hispanics and examines whether the same finding holds for Hispanics in the U.S.

In this study, mugshots of male and female adults with Hispanic names who had been arrested in Miami-Dade county, Florida, were rated on a 7-point scale (very light to very dark). Raters, who did not have the names or the case characteristics of the defendants, were able to do this very reliably. Cases that went to trial were excluded from the study. Of the remaining cases, about 40% were convicted (by way of a guilty plea) and, overall, about 7% were incarcerated.

Various demographic factors were used as control factors including sex, whether the person was an immigrant, age, poverty and criminal justice factors (criminal record, number and nature of the charges). The study used data (and controlled for) the police service involved in the case: 3 large police services plus a number of smaller ones that were pooled into one category.

The arresting police had characterized each person, on the arrest form, as either Black or White. In order to be able to examine the data for males and females separately and for those described by the police as Black/White, samples of about 1630 individuals from each of these four groups (male and female who were either Hispanic or white) were examined.

Both the probability of conviction and the probability of incarceration (of those convicted) increased with the darkness of the defendant’s skin colour. For both those described by the police as Black and those described as being White, those darker in colour tended to receive harsher treatment.

The effect of skin colour on the criminal justice outcome appeared to be linear. The lightest skinned defendants (those rated 1 on a 7 point scale) had a probability of being convicted of 36%. This increased with every point of rated skin colour to 53% for those with a rated skin colour of 7. Looking only at those convicted, those with the lightest skin colour (rated as “1”) had a probability of incarceration of 5%. Those with the darkest skin colour rating (rated as “7”) had a probability of incarceration of 25%.

Conclusion: Once again, it appears that in the criminal justice system – at least in Florida – the actual colour of a person’s skin makes a difference in terms of how punishing the treatment will be from the criminal justice system. Specifically, those defendants rated by independent raters as having darker skin were more likely to be convicted and were more likely to be incarcerated than those with lighter coloured skin. This effect holds when various relevant factors (offence, criminal history, etc.) are controlled.

Reference: Lanuza, Yader R., Nick Petersen, and Marisa Omori (2023). Colorism in Punishment among Hispanics in the Criminal Justice System. Social Problems, 70, 275-296.

Article 7

Climate change may change the pattern of crime.

In the early part of the 19 ^th century, it was suggested that there was a strong association between warm weather and crimes against persons. This paper looks at the relationship between one of the most important aspects of climate change – temperature volatility – and crime. Hence it examines not long term changes in crime, but changes in crime associated with unusual temperatures on particular days. More specifically, the study examines unusual seasonal temperatures in 28 large US cities and relates their occurrence, on a given day, to changes in the rates of robbery, aggravated assault, and homicide during a 7-year period (2015-2021).

Generally speaking, violent crime (in the US) tends to be higher in the summer than in other seasons, though the findings are not entirely consistent. There are obvious theories as to why violent crime rates might be higher in the summer, yet there are few data that might be considered to be ‘tests’ of these theories. The routine activity hypothesis, for example, suggests that certain weather events – e.g., pleasant weather that puts people together outside or in public places – may provide opportunities for interactions that might not otherwise take place. And these interactions may provide an opportunity for crime to take place.

The study looks at the 30-day rolling average temperature for each day in each of the 28 cities and identifies those days that are two standard deviations above (and below) the rolling average temperature. In other words, it looks for those days that have very unusually high (or low) temperatures for that immediate period. 2.5% of the days had unusually warm temperatures and 4.3% of the days had unusually cool temperatures. Obviously, what a ‘high temperature’ (or low temperature) anomaly looked like – and what season they took place in -- varied with the city. Essentially, the idea was to look at what the crime rate was for these three violent crimes (robbery, aggravated assault, homicide) on days when the weather was unusually hot or cold.

Looking across all seven years (and ignoring the season) violent crime rates were significantly higher on anomalously hot days. For example, an unusually warm day was associated with a 9.4% increase in aggravated assaults (compared to the surrounding days). On anomalously cold days there was an approximately 10% lower rate than the rate on the surrounding days. Crime rates for these three crimes were also higher when the 30-day average temperature was higher (i.e., in the summer).

The effect of unusual temperature increases appeared to be most important during the winter months (defined as January-March) for robbery and homicide (but not for aggravated assault). Unusually cold days in the winter were associated with lower rates of robbery.

Conclusion: The data suggest that “urban assaults, robberies, and homicides are meaningfully associated with the temperature volatility predicted to become more common as climate change accelerates” (p. 7). This effect is independent of general seasonal variation in crime rates in these cities. The mechanism that might account for these effects is at this point unknown. However, the data suggest not only that the ‘warming’ effect of climate change could have an effect on crime, but also the volatility of the day-to-day weather will have an independent effect on violent crime rates.

Reference: Thomas, Christopher & Kevin T. Wolff (2023). Weird Winter Weather in the Anthropocene: How Volatile Temperatures Shape Violent Crime. Journal of Criminal Justice, 87, 1-15.

Article 8

The use of body-worn cameras by the police does not improve residents’ views of the local police or residents’ assessments of their own interactions with the police.

A survey carried out in New York City in 2016 suggested that most residents favoured the use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by the police and hoped that their use would improve police-community relations. Previous research, however, has found that citizens from various minority groups are more skeptical than whites that the use of BWCs will contribute to holding the police accountable for their behaviour. This study examines whether BWCs improve ordinary citizens’ perceptions of the police.

Forty New York City police precincts with high numbers of complaints against the police were identified. Pairs of precincts were matched on various characteristics (demographic measures of the citizen, crime rates, police activities) and then, within each of the 20 pairs, one precinct was randomly assigned to have BWCs deployed by the police officers assigned to that precinct. Police officers in the other precinct in each pair did not use BWCs. In the experimental precincts, uniformed police officers and those working anti-crime assignments used BWCs from 3 PM to midnight each day. Other research suggests that police wearing the BWCs were more likely to file reports about stops and that complaints against officers wearing BWCs were less frequent than they were in precincts in which the police did not wear BWCs.

The evaluation in this study was carried out by surveying a representative sample of adults in each of the 40 precincts both before and after the implementation of the BWCs. Adults 18-34 years old were oversampled to ensure that there were sufficient respondents who had experienced interactions with the police. About 3000 people were interviewed at each time period.

Respondents answered, on 4- or 5-point scales, questions concerning such matters as their perceptions of and trust in their neighbourhood police, whether they had been treated well during any police stop (car, pedestrian) in the previous 12 months, and whether they had generally been treated well by the police in any matter in which they were seeking police assistance.

Because the study had measures prior to the implementation of BWCs, any changes that might have taken place in the precincts in which BWCs were implemented could be compared to changes that might have taken place (for any reason) in the control precincts.

The results were very consistent: there were no changes between the pre- and post-intervention periods that were statistically significantly different from changes in the control areas. Said differently, residents’ perceptions of the police did not change as a result of the deployment of BWCs.

Conclusion: In this study, not everyone who was surveyed (before or after the deployment of BWCs in the experimental precincts) had experienced contact with the police. Nevertheless, the results suggest that “BWCs are unlikely to lead to short-term changes in public perceptions of the police” (p. 303). Whether the same results would be found in locations in which police have considerable contact with members of the public is yet to be determined.

Reference: Braga, Anthony A., John M. MacDonald & Lisa M. Barao (2023). Do Body-worn Cameras Improve Community Perceptions of the Police? Results from a Controlled Experimental Evaluation. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 19, 279-310.

This issue of Criminological Highlights was prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Sara Fruchtman, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Audrey Macklin, Roxy Shlapak, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner.

Criminological Highlights Vol. 20, No. 6 - June 2023

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 19:20:46 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

1. Does the language used to describe those returning to the community from prison matter?

2. Can changing schools reduce crime?

3. What challenges still need to be addressed after a police service is made more diverse?

4. What makes victim compensation especially attractive to politicians?

5. Are classification instruments useful when classifying Indigenous prisoners?

6. How are first names important determinants of the sentencing of Black offenders?

7. Do judges follow the law?

8. When youths are arrested, are they the only ones who are punished?

Article 1

The language used to describe people returning to the community from prison is important if one wants to encourage public support for their reintegration into the community.

For people being released from prison into the community, there are sometimes legal restrictions placed on their ability to be full citizens. In addition, there are a variety of ways in which those transitioning from prison to the community find themselves stigmatized in the community. This paper examines the impact of the terms used to describe ‘returning citizens’ on the public’s level of support for reintegration measures.

Different terms are sometimes used to identify those moving from prison into the community. Some of this language focuses on ‘crime first’ terminology (e.g., “ex-convict”) and some focuses more on the person (e.g., “person who was formerly incarcerated” or “returning citizen”). In this study, respondents to an online survey were shown a picture of someone described as “struggling with homelessness” who was Black or White, or their race was obscured because they were not facing the camera. They also were described in one of three ways: (1) as an ex-convict, (2) as a person who was formerly incarcerated, or (3) as a returning citizen. For all three conditions, this description was followed by the identical phrase: “someone who has recently been released from jail or prison after serving their sentence and is returning to society.”

Respondents were asked 19 questions related to re-entry programs and policies on such issues as whether they should be allowed to receive government assistance, whether there should be special mental health services for them, and whether there should be special employment programs and educational programs for them. Because respondents were randomly assigned to one of the “language” and race conditions, we can assume that the different groups of respondents were equivalent.

More favourable views toward the person and toward policies that would help those returning to the community from prisons were found when the terminology “returning citizen” was used rather than when the person was described as an “ex-convict.” A “person formerly incarcerated” was in the middle, and was seen as significantly more deserving of services and supportive policies compared to those described as “ex-convicts”. In addition, those who were asked to give their views of a “returning citizen” were significantly more likely to be willing to have contact with them (e.g., by having them live next door). Generally, respondents were more positive about the “returning citizen” than they were about “ex-convicts” even though the only difference was the terminology used to describe them. In other words, people seem to accept the idea that people can peacefully return to the community. But describing them in “crime first” language undercuts support for those returning to the community from prison.

Conclusion: Language is important. The Ontario Provincial Police, who move detained people between prison and courts before their guilt or innocence is decided, do so in vans identified as “Offender Transport” notwithstanding the fact that available data would suggest that each year thousands of those in these vans will not be found guilty. This study suggests that such language undercuts the willingness of ordinary citizens to interact with those who have had contact with the justice system. And it reduces the support of ordinary citizens for providing help and programs to aid in the reintegration of people who have had contact with the justice system. Language matters.

Reference: Jackl, Hilary M. (2023). The Effects of Language on the Stigmatization and Exclusion of Returning Citizens: Results from a Survey Experiment. Punishment & Society, 25(2), 471-499.

Article 2

Youths typically become increasingly likely to be involved in crime as they transition into high school. However, this increase is smaller if they end up in a physically separate school with a mix of students from both their own middle school and other schools in the school district. Disruption of established patterns can, sometimes, reduce the likelihood of involvement in crime.

For most youths, crime is a social activity. But for many youths, the transition from Grade 8 to Grade 9 involves disruption of their social lives. This is most obvious when a youth’s high school is both physically separate from their previous school and includes youths from a variety of different previous schools.

Where the high school is physically separate from the earlier school and the students in it are a mix of familiar and unfamiliar peers, students’ social lives change. This study takes advantage of a simple fact: the nature of the change with the move to high school varies in a manner not in the control of the student. This study followed students from Grade 6 to Grade 12 who lived in small towns and rural communities in two US states. Typically, therefore, youths had no choice as to where they went to high school. In some towns, there was no shift in location. In others there was a shift to a new school, some of which enrolled students from more than one middle school.

Prior to the transition from Grade 8 to Grade 9, students who subsequently transitioned to a new school did not differ in important ways from those who remained in the same school location when they moved to Grade 9. However, “when students experience a school transition from 8 ^th to 9 ^th grade, their delinquent behaviour decreases relative to students who do not make this structural change” (p. 53). Not surprisingly, the change in the delinquency rate of a youth’s friends and the change in the amount of unstructured socializing each predicted the change in delinquency that took place as the youth transitioned into Grade 9. Said differently, it would appear that at least part of the reason that transitioning to a new school reduced a youth’s delinquency is that both their friends and the amount of unstructured socializing were more likely to change when the youth changed schools. The largest effects of the transition to high school, not surprisingly, occurred in circumstances in which youths transitioned to a physically separate high school that had students from more than one middle school.

Conclusion: In this study, delinquency increased between Grade 8 and Grade 10, but declined slightly thereafter. Hence the transition to high school was happening when delinquency was increasing. But above and beyond individual characteristics of the students (e.g., gender, risk-taking, etc.) the environment in which the youths found themselves – in the same school or a different school – had an impact on their rates of delinquency. These effects suggest that a shift in schools may mean that youths form different social relationships and friendship patterns. These changes may affect friendships as well as academic interests and performance, but they also seem to result in lower levels of delinquency throughout high school.

Reference: Freelin, Brittany N., Cassie McMillan, Diane Felmlee, and D. Wayne Osgood (2023). Changing Contexts: A Quasi-Experiment Examining Adolescent Delinquency and the Transition to High School. Criminology, 61, 40-73.

Article 3

The increased diversity of Canadian police services in recent decades addresses only part of the issue of having a police service that reflects those it serves: Many white male police officers currently believe that their police services have gone too far in their efforts to become more diverse.

Diversity in the makeup of police services has been seen as one mechanism to increase public trust in the police. However, there is concern that the dominant group in Canadian policing – white men – are not content with the changes that have occurred. This paper examines the reactions of Canadian police to the attempts to diversify the organization in which they work.

Canadian police services are predominately white (88%) and male (78%), though obviously this varies considerably across police services. However, “organizational studies confirm that numerically increasing diversity without attention to cultural and structural change will not achieve acceptance and inclusion” (p. 352).

This study reports the results of 116 interviews and 727 online survey responses of Canadian police officers. It does not claim to have a representative sample, but the size and consistency of the findings are probably sufficient to identify a problem that needs to be addressed.

Many police officers (close to half of the survey respondents) agreed with the statements “I feel my police service has gone too far in its push for diversity” and “My police service promotes people to fill diversity spots, not based on merit.” Agreement with these two statements was, not surprisingly, highest within the group who described themselves as white males. Women and racialized police officers were less likely to agree. However, a non-trivial portion of women and racialized police officers also agreed with statements like these.

This is not to suggest that all (white male) police officers opposed diversifying their own forces or the leadership of their force: “There were some white men in leadership who were supportive of diverse leadership, but they were aware of the undercurrent of resentment by others around them. As one ‘middle management’ white male suggested, ‘There is a recognition of… the general push to promote more diverse members. But that doesn’t mean that underneath the surface there’s not a major problem…. You won’t hear it in the station outright… but if you go out with those guys and they get drinking and talking, it all comes out and it’s ugly’ ” (p. 360).

Conclusion: “Increasing diversity in policing has become a popular reform narrative to improve public trust, police efficacy and marginalized officers’ workplace experiences. This study [concludes] that numerical representation alone has not, and will not, reform the institution in a timely and meaningful way” (p. 364). It demonstrates that even if reasonable representation of women and racialized minorities in a police service were to be achieved, there is likely to be resistance and hostility from within the existing force concerning the manner in which this representation was achieved and what it means for promotion within the institution. “The deeply embedded, often unconscious, everyday processes of institutionalized racism and sexism are larger than any one officer’s attitudes and behaviours” (p. 364).

Reference: Bikos, Lesley J. (2023). Taking the Temperature: An Intersectional Examination of Diversity Acceptance in Canadian Police Services. British Journal of Criminology, 63, 348-366.

Article 4

Conservative American politicians abandoned their opposition to financial support for victims of crime when it was proposed that the money come from those found guilty of crimes. Could it be that they had more interest in increasing the punitiveness of criminal sanctions than they did in the needs of victims?

This paper suggests that victim compensation in the US is an example of the proposition that support for some policies is “based on the political and moral meanings attached to particular policy financing tools.” These tools are not neutral. Instead, they hinge “not only on the moral worthiness of who benefits from a policy, but also on the moral unworthiness of who pays” (p. 1159, emphasis in original).

The idea that there should be compensation for victims of crime first became an issue in the US in the 1960s. Traditional restitution didn’t work because offenders might not have been apprehended. In addition, even if they were apprehended, offenders typically had few resources. The original liberal idea was that the state had a responsibility to protect people from crime and had failed; hence compensation made sense. Alternatively, it was seen as a form of social insurance. Conservatives rejected both logics. But later, in the 1980s, when federal conservatives tied the financing of victim compensation entirely to fines paid by those found guilty of crime, compensation fit the conservative slogan “The criminal – not the taxpayer – will pay….” (p. 1160).

For those whose ideology is uncomfortable with benefits to anyone being paid from tax money, offender funding of victim compensation, like “tax expenditures” (where companies benefit from targeted tax reductions rather than direct transfer of money from the government to the company), has huge advantages: they are not seen as another government funded program.

States in the US (starting with high income, high crime, liberal states) created victim compensation programs in the 1960s. Some state laws had provisions where the state could try to recoup their costs from those found guilty of the offence. Others used fines (as a way of suggesting public money was not being spent). Later (in the 1970s) explicit “surcharges” were added so that compensation was seen as coming from criminals. And finally, later, some states charged those serving sentences in the community with fees that were to be used for the compensation of victims. Some states that had started with discretionary payments or surcharges moved to mandatory surcharges. Over time, the source of funds expanded such that payments by those found guilty were uncoupled from any harm that offenders might have done to anyone. [This, with a few exceptions, is the situation in Canada.] In other words, victims generally were to be compensated by making all those found guilty pay even if they had no victim who needed compensation, suggesting that “victim compensation” is more about “offender punishment” than concern about victims.

The Republican dominated US federal government favoured victim compensation in the early 1980s. A plan to divert funds from taxes on the sale of handguns went nowhere. In 1984, Republican politicians decided to describe victim compensation as a choice between “taxing criminals or taxing innocent taxpayers” (p. 1187). But behind this was another issue. In much of the discussion, the beneficiaries were seen as racially and ethnically diverse, but “criminals” were often seen or thought to be from “distinctly racialized social categories” (p. 1190).

Conclusion: In the US, the political meaning of legislation whose purpose was ostensibly to compensate victims of crime was linked to punishing offenders. Conservative federal politicians who had initially opposed victim compensation because they saw it as too expensive and not an appropriate role for government, supported it as soon as it became a way of punishing those who had offended. Hence compensation for victims became just one more way of increasing punishments in the criminal justice system. It logically follows that those found guilty of crimes where there was no victim (e.g., a theft where the property was recovered) should also pay into a fund for victims: They, too, were seen as deserving of (more) punishment.

Reference: Levine, Jeremy R. and Kelly L. Russell (2023). Crime Pays the Victim: Criminal Fines, the State, and Victim Compensation Law, 1964-1984. American Journal of Sociology, 128(4), 1158-1205.

Article 5

A meta-analysis demonstrates that the “classification” instrument Static-99R used by many correctional authorities (including Correctional Services Canada) is less accurate in assessing Indigenous prisoners than it is when used for white prisoners. Shouldn’t this be a source of concern?

There is now sufficient information to conclude that instruments meant to predict future offending or other misbehaviour can easily disadvantage groups such as Indigenous prisoners (see Criminological Highlights 17(2)#1, 17(6)#7, 20(3)#3). But more generally, if these instruments are relied on for important decisions concerning those being imprisoned, they should have a high level of accuracy. A high level of accuracy means something more than just being better than flipping a coin.

The Static-99R is used by many correctional systems to assess sexual recidivism risk. This paper examines its accuracy for various groups. The fact that scales like this were developed using largely white samples does not necessarily mean that they don’t have predictive value for other groups. On the other hand, given that the social and cultural background of groups like Indigenous Canadians differs from that of white Canadians, careful analysis of the value of an instrument like the Static-99R is important.

There were 10 studies that could be found in which the accuracy of the Static-99R scale for predicting sexual recidivism for Indigenous people could be estimated and 9 studies where the accuracy for white people could be estimated. For neither group was the prediction very accurate, though, in general, the accuracy was higher for whites. One way of presenting the accuracy is a measure referred to as AUC which essentially is an index indicating, using this example, the likelihood that a randomly chosen person who recidivated had a score that was higher than a randomly chosen person who did not recidivate. If the scale was perfectly accurate, the AUC would be 1.0 (all recidivists would have higher scores than all of those who did not recidivate). If it didn’t predict at all then the AUC would be 0.5 (a “50-50” chance that the score of the reoffending person would be higher than that of the non-recidivist). Results from the different studies that made up this review can be combined in different ways, but using one standard approach, the AUC for whites was .682 and for Indigenous people was .635.

Neither of these assessments of the scale is very impressive even though they are “statistically significantly” better than chance. In addition, Indigenous people scored higher overall on the scale, reflecting, no doubt, differences in their situations in society more generally. This finding suggests that, on average, if the same “cutoff” were to be used for white and Indigenous prisoners, the Indigenous prisoner would almost automatically “look worse.” But in addition, there is another problem this paper mentions, but could not examine. The scales were developed largely using white samples. Hence it is likely that each item on the scale has at least some predictive value for those in comparable white groups. However, for Indigenous prisoners, this may not be the case. That would mean that an Indigenous prisoner who was near an important threshold (e.g., the threshold of being recommended for parole) but who was scored on a question in a particular way, even if that had no predictive value for Indigenous prisoners, might lose out on a favourable recommendation for parole because of a characteristic that says nothing about their likelihood of reoffending.

Conclusion: The fact that predictive scales like this one have, at best, mediocre predictive value for Indigenous prisoners does not answer the question about whether they should be used or not. If the choice is using a mediocre scale or a completely subjective judgement from a correctional employee, it is likely that the scale will be better, or at a minimum, less arbitrary. The more general question that might come from studies like this one is whether the amount of punishment we inflict on people should be determined by predictions that have been demonstrated to be inadequate.

Reference: Ahmed, Simran, Seung C. Lee and L. Maaike Helmus (2023). Predictive Accuracy of Static-99-R Across Different Racial/Ethnic Groups: A Meta-Analysis. Law and Human Behavior, 47(1), 275-291.

Article 6

Black men in Florida with stereotypically Black names get sentenced more harshly than comparable Black men with first names that are not associated with being Black. This holds even after controlling for legally relevant features of the case.

There are reasons to believe that first names are sometimes used as a way of identifying the strength of a person’s identification with a racial-ethnic group in society. Hence if people believe that Blacks are more likely to be involved in crime, and a stereotypically Black name is seen as an indicator of identification with that group, it may be that people with stereotypically Black first names will be punished more harshly than those with more “White” sounding first names.

This paper started by looking at sentencing records for 298 young Black men sentenced in Florida. Details of their background and offences were available and used as controls. The first names of these men were rated by 79 online American volunteers on how stereotypically Black and White each name was. A separate set of online volunteers rated each name on how likely they thought that “others” would see a person with this name as a violent criminal, as well as how likeable they thought a person with this name would be. Another sample of online volunteers rated an actual picture of each of the Black men who had been sentenced on how much the features of the person who had been sentenced looked like those of an African-American man.

Controlling for all the legally relevant variables, those men being sentenced with first names that were seen as being stereotypically Black (e.g. Jamal) got harsher sentences from the court than those who had White sounding first names (e.g., James). But in addition, when other rated characteristics of the defendant were controlled for (e.g., likeability, perceived social class of the first name, and Afrocentricity of the prisoner’s features), those with stereotypical Black sounding first names still got harsher sentences.

In a second study, an online sample of largely White volunteers were asked to make sentencing recommendations for 10 people. All of those being “sentenced” were Black. Half of the people “being sentenced” were identified with first names that were stereotypically Black; the others were identified with first names that were stereotypically White. Participants recommended harsher sentences for those who were identified as having stereotypically Black names.

Conclusion: It appears that White Americans are much more likely to associate crime (and in particular violence) with African-Americans who have stereotypically Black names. Ordinary citizens recommend, and judges in Florida impose, harsher sentences for people with stereotypically Black first names than they did for people with White-sounding first names. “This bias was not explained by other qualities of the defendants (such as their physical appearance or criminal record, the specifics of the case… or even other aspects of their names…. Rather [the] results link stereotypical Black names to the representation of a violent criminal” (p. 177-8).

Reference: Kenthirarajah, Dushiyanthini, Nicholas P. Camp, Gregory M. Walton, Aaron C. Kay, and Geoffrey L. Cohen (2023). Does “Jamal” Receive a Harsher Sentence than “James”? First-Name Bias in the Criminal Sentencing of Black Men. Law and Human Behaviour, 47(1), 169-181.

Article 7

When judges oppose a change in the law, they may find ways of ignoring it. Finding ways to monitor, review, and ensure that judges comply with changes in the law may not be easy.

In 2020, the New York state legislature passed laws designed to reduce pretrial detention and also to provide timely access for defence counsel to material relevant to the case being tried that was being held by the prosecutor (discovery). After the law had been passed, the opposition to these new provisions became organized. In this summary of the full study, we will focus primarily on the first issue: the reform of bail laws. The issues related to the discovery law were similar.

The problems addressed by the changes in the bail laws were not new. They had been described in 2013 by the then Chief Judge of the NY Court of Appeals. Changes in the law were introduced and passed during an unusual political period when the Democrats controlled the two legislative bodies and the governorship. The cash bail system had been in place for many years and there was clear evidence that judges were setting cash bail amounts that were unnecessarily high. There was experimental evidence that most accused would show up for trial without having to post bail. But the law as administered was detaining people who didn’t need to be detained and pretrial detention populations were large.

Though there had not been much vocal opposition before the law was changed, immediately after its coming into effect substantial opposition was expressed by the police, prosecutors, and many politicians. Prior to the change “judges had nearly unfettered power to set bail [amounts]” (p. 133). The changes that were made forbid the use of cash bail for certain minor offences and required judges to use the least restrictive means possible to ensure appearance in court. In other words, these reforms “achieve their objectives through the reduction of judicial discretion” (p. 131-2).

New York judges were not pleased to lose powers they once had, even if it had been shown that these powers were not serving the public interest. Referring to the new law, one judge, who apparently must have missed the classes in law school in which the importance of judges showing respect for the law was taught, described the new law in very simple terms in open court: “The law is stupid.” He then stated that to follow it “went against all common sense and wisdom” (p. 135). Even in some cases in which the prosecutors recommended supervised release, judges set cash bail even though release on cash bail was not allowed. Some news articles about such cases described the judge who violated the law as being “heroic.” Breaking the law was supported by NYC’s mayor. Judges detained many more people than were recommended by assessment tools.

The reasons for judicial non-compliance with the law are complex. Data on the effect of the law were not made available. Support for the law was not provided by judicial officials. Compliance with the law was not encouraged by senior judicial leaders. One Chief Administrative judge publicly criticized the changes saying that its removal of judicial discretion for certain outcomes in certain cases was “breathtaking” (p. 146). An administrative procedure was established that allowed certain detentions of accused people to take place without a full hearing even though it was not contemplated by the law. Judges had an interest in being seen as tough: Judges in NY “have been removed, have lost elections or have been placed in undesirable positions for being too lenient” (p. 166). “Judges in NY are attuned to the political will for reform” (p. 167) and if the political will is against change, judges may refuse to follow the law.

Conclusion: Obviously the specific reasons for judicial non-compliance with the law are going to vary with the issue and the jurisdiction. However, what is important about the findings described in this paper is that non-compliance by judges can easily occur. “In court cultures like NY, reforms work when judges are either responding to the political will, like legislators, or when they feel that they are insulated from that will enough to be truly independent to do what is fair and right under the law” (p. 167). Judicial opposition to legal change needs to be considered in many instances where a legislature has passed laws that judges may not like.

Petrigh, Angelo (2023). Judicial Resistance to New York’s 2020 Criminal Legal Reforms. The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 113(1), 109-174.

Article 8

In rural communities, having friends who have been arrested increases the likelihood of being arrested by the police above and beyond standard predictors of criminal involvement.

It is well known that youths often commit crimes in groups, not so much as “criminal gangs” but just as a group of youths who hang out together and may commit crimes together. Given that we know that people who have been in trouble are, generally, seen in a negative light (see Criminological Highlights 20(2)#8), it would not be surprising if the arrest of a youth’s friends had negative impacts on that youth.

If a youth has a close friend who is arrested, that youth may be especially likely to be the subject of surveillance by the police and others. A separate question, however, is whether, after the friendship ends, the increased likelihood of police arrest is maintained. This paper uses data from 28 school districts in small and medium sized towns (up to about 45,000 residents) in Iowa and Pennsylvania in which youths were questioned each year from Grade 6 through Grade 12.

Each youth, at each point in time, was asked about arrests in the previous year. The study looks only at the youth’s first arrest. The primary independent variable is whether the youth had a friend arrested in the year immediately prior to the one that was the focus. Youths were asked to name up to two “best friends” and five “close friends” (p 363). Various control factors were part of the study including self-defined reported delinquency by the offender, their friends’ self-reported delinquency, and the youth’s substance use. The study examined these effects only for youths who had never been arrested. Hence a youth arrested in Year N, was dropped from analyses for Year N+1 and thereafter.

Not surprisingly, without any controls, if a youth had friends who had been arrested by the police, the youth was more likely to be arrested. When self-reported delinquency by the youth and their friends, and the youth’s substance use were controlled for, friends’ arrests still predicted the likelihood of the youth being arrested. Similarly, when the various control factors were included, those with friends who had been arrested were still more likely to be arrested.

The effect of once having friends who were arrested by the police on one’s own likelihood of arrest was still maintained if the youth dropped these people as friends. Interestingly, “compared with youth who have not had friends arrested, no significant difference in the likelihood of arrest occurs between youths who did and did not drop their arrested friends” (p. 371). The main results of the study were the same when the study examined separately the impact on likelihood of arrest by one’s “best friends” and “close friends.”

Conclusion: The results, then, were very consistent: “Even when controlling for other [factors] that predict one’s likelihood arrest including delinquency, substance use, demographic characteristics…, a friend’s arrest was still significantly and positively related to the likelihood of arrest the next year” (p 373). The effect of a friend’s arrest continued even if the youth dropped this person as a friend. High rates of policing of youths leading to high rates of arrests of these youths had, therefore, effects not only on these youths, but also on those who saw them as friends. If a youth has friends who have been arrested, the youth is more likely themselves to be arrested.

Reference: Tinney, Erin (2023) The “Stickiness” of Stigma: Guilt by Association After a Friend’s Arrest. Criminology, 61(2), 354-383.

Criminological Highlights is prepared by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Olivia Berkovits, Sara Fruchtman, Maria Jung, Tyler King, Audrey Macklin, Roxy Shlapak, Jane Sprott, and Danielle Van Wagner.

Criminological Highlights Vol. 20, No. 5 - March 2023

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 18:36:42 GMT

This issue of Criminological Highlights addresses the following questions:

1. How do the characteristics of a neighbourhood shape the perceptions that young people have about criminal offending?

2. Why do we need to look beyond the decisions of judges to understand imprisonment rates?

3. How do barriers to employment contribute to higher recidivism rates for racialized prisoners returning to the community?

4. Why are some victims of sexual assault not believed?

5. How do guns kill people even if the gun isn’t present when a person is shot?

6. How do criminal record checks keep people from being employed before there is any contact between the employer and the job applicant?

7. Why do Black youths receive harsher discipline at school even if their behaviour is no different from that of White youths?

8. Are long prison stays effective in reducing crime?

Article 1

When asked about the risks and rewards from offending, the responses that young people give are dependent, to some extent, on the characteristics of their neighbourhoods. Concentrated neighbourhood disadvantage in one’s neighbourhood makes crime look more attractive.

The perceived risks, costs, and rewards of offending obviously vary across individuals. One of the factors that may affect these determinants of offending is the degree of structural disadvantage within the neighbourhood. This paper suggests that “individuals from highly disadvantaged communities may be more tolerant of the risks and costs associated with crime when compared with individuals from less disadvantaged areas” (p. 613).

The study uses data from the “Pathways to Desistance Study” – a longitudinal study of youths from two US cities who had been convicted of a criminal offence. They were followed from adolescence into young adulthood. Respondents were asked to estimate the likelihood that they would be caught and arrested for 7 different types of crime, whether they would experience various ‘social costs’ (e.g., losing respect from friends) or whether they would gain ‘social rewards’ (e.g., respect) if they engaged in crime, and whether there would be intrinsic rewards to them (e.g., fun) for committing certain crimes. Concentrated disadvantage was assessed using estimates such as the proportion of residents in the respondents’ neighbourhood who were living in poverty, or were unemployed, etc. Neighbourhood disorder was estimated using respondents’ assessments of such problems as graffiti, fighting in public, or people using needles to take drugs. Finally, respondents’ access to legitimate opportunities were assessed using their assessments of their peers’ access to schooling, jobs, etc.

Not surprisingly, concentrated disadvantage was related to perceptions of lower arrest risk and lower informal costs associated with arrest. It was also associated with higher informal social rewards from crime. Those who believed they had access to legitimate opportunities perceived there to be higher arrest risk and social costs from engaging with crime. More generally, “when individuals perceive [there to be] more opportunities for success, they are apt to be deterred by threats of arrest and the informal consequences attached to crime” (p. 626).

Perhaps the most important finding is that “concentrated disadvantage reduces the subjective risks and costs of crime and increases the associated rewards of crime indirectly by increasing perceptions of limited opportunities and perceived disorder within one’s neighbourhood” (p. 627). This would suggest that one reason for apparently higher rates of crime in neighbourhoods with high rates of concentrated disadvantage is that people in such neighbourhoods are “more tolerant of the risks and costs associated with crime and place greater weight on the social and intrinsic rewards that go along with offending” (p. 629).

These findings held even after various factors – age, sex, race, parental socio- economic status, family structure, intelligence, etc. – were controlled for.

Conclusion: The findings highlight the importance of a young person’s neighbourhood in understanding the manner in which factors such as the perceived risk and benefits of crime affect the likelihood that they will engage in crime. Choices made by people to engage in, or desist from, engaging in crime, then, are intimately linked to the nature of the neighbourhood in which they live. Thus it can be argued that “rational choice theories [of crime] in fact can be thought of as highly compatible with sociological theories of crime that stress the role of external factors in the etiology of criminal behaviour” (p. 632).

Reference: Thomas, Kyle J., Eric P. Baumer, and Thomas A. Loughran (2022). Structural Predictors of Choice: Testing a Multilevel Rational Choice Theory of Crime. Criminology, 60, 606-636.

Article 2

Variation in imprisonment rates across jurisdictions relate to more than sentencing decisions. Earlier criminal justice decisions – e.g., whether some behaviour results in a charge – may be even more important than judicial decisions in determining imprisonment rates.

Since judges typically have the last word on which people go to prison, it is understandable that they are often seen as being largely or solely responsible for imprisonment rates. After all, if they hadn’t imposed a prison sentence, the offender wouldn’t go to prison. There is substantial evidence, however, that this is a serious over-simplification of how imprisonment rates are determined.

Previous Australian research has demonstrated that a substantial increase in imprisonment in one Australian state had little to do with changes in sentencing. For example, previous criminal justice contact tends to increase the likelihood of imprisonment in subsequent cases. Earlier prosecutorial decisions can be critical determinants of a prison sentence. Many of these ‘non-sentencing’ factors are important in understanding the high rate of imprisonment of Indigenous people in Australia ( Criminological Highlights 19 (3)#4, 16 (4)#3, 6 (#3)#4).

Building on earlier work, this paper demonstrates that the vast differences in imprisonment rates in one Australian state (Victoria) vs. other Australian states has less to do with the proportion of those whose cases resulted in a prison sentence than it does with the rate at which cases were processed in the courts of each Australian state. The number of court cases is likely a function of offence rates as well as the policies that are in place related to how the state responds to those offences. For some offences – public order offences, for example – the effects may be indirect. In the state of Victoria, for example, there were, relatively speaking, fewer public order cases in court than in other states. Because few people, in any state, were sent to prison for these offences, this offence is unlikely to have had an important direct effect on imprisonment rate differences. But because a conviction will almost certainly increase the likelihood of imprisonment in future cases, increased use of courts in response to minor offences that do not directly result in imprisonment can have long term impacts on imprisonment rates.

This study’s findings can help us understand similar issues elsewhere. In the 3 Canadian prairie provinces, for example, imprisonment rates dropped substantially between 2019/20 and 2020/21, presumably related to the onset of Covid. In Manitoba and Alberta, the decreases were almost the same (39% and 40%, respectively). But in Manitoba the court appearance rate dropped 36% compared to Alberta’s decrease of only 15%. Alberta’s decrease in imprisonment rate was due to a large decrease in the sentences of imprisonment for those cases completed in court after the onset of Covid (a decrease of 29%). Manitoba experienced only a modest decrease in sentences of imprisonment (6%). Looking solely at sentencing decisions by judges gives an inadequate picture of the whole process.

Similar differences are found in comparisons across Australian states. New South Wales has about 22% more prisoners being sentenced to prison (per 100K adults) than Victoria. However, the proportion of completed cases that result in a prison sentence is about 6.5% lower in New South Wales than in Victoria. NSW achieves its higher “prison sentence rate” because more cases are being completed in court.

Conclusion: We often attribute high (or low) imprisonment rates in a jurisdiction to what happens in courts. In some instances, judges are seen as the “cause” of high or low imprisonment rates. In other instances, criminal justice policies (e.g., mandatory minimum penalties) are identified as the cause. This paper – using comparisons across Australian states – reminds us that the criminal justice system as a whole contributes to imprisonment rates and that differences across or within jurisdictions in imprisonment rates may be the result of decisions outside of the courts.

Reference: Weatherburn, Don (2022). Interjurisdictional Differences in Australian Imprisonment Rates: Sentencing or Arrest Rates? Journal of Criminology, 55 (4), 621-635.

Article 3

For former prisoners who are returning to the community after imprisonment, employment is an important factor in reducing the likelihood of further offending. The relationship between post- prison employment and recidivism does not vary by race. However, racialized former prisoners are more likely to experience barriers to employment; hence they are less likely to experience the benefits of employment.

This paper looks at the relationship between employment and recidivism for prisoners returning to the community after a period of time in prison. Its purpose was to try to disentangle the race effects in order to see if previous findings suggesting that race was important as a determinant of recidivism could be explained by looking at a related relationship: race and employment.

Records for prisoners released in Ohio in late 2003 were tracked for over 8 years. Legal employment information was obtained through the unemployment insurance system. These data also allowed researchers to obtain pre-imprisonment work history for the sample. The main outcome measure was whether the person was re-incarcerated for a new crime (excluding re-incarceration because of a violation of the conditions of release). Various factors were controlled including sociodemographic variables (e.g., education, mental health issues, unemployment rate of the community in which the released prisoner was released), and a detailed “criminal history risk score” that included the number, type, and timing of previous criminal justice contacts.

The results show, not surprisingly, that former prisoners who have employment after release from prison are less likely to recidivate. This is true for both Black and White former prisoners and for those with or without a work history prior to incarceration. The analyses suggest that engagement with employment – whether consistent or inconsistent – is likely to reduce recidivism.

For Black citizens returning to the community after incarceration, employment is just as protective against recidivism as it is for White citizens. In addition, “having a work history enhances the effect of post-prison employment on recidivism, irrespective of whether [the employment] is inconsistent or consistent” (p. 659). It appears that “just getting into the labour market can be protective....” (p. 659).

Other studies have demonstrated “the labour market disadvantages faced by African Americans, and the recognition that the employment history may be driving the relationship between employment and recidivism” (p. 659). This paper found “no evidence that race moderates the relationship between post-prison employment and recidivism. Thus, to the extent that employment disparities by race contribute to racial disparities in recidivism, they seem more likely to stem from differences in labour market participation which result in part from barriers to the labour market (including disparities in likelihood of a work history)” (p. 659).

Conclusion: In disentangling the relationships among prior employment and employment after release from prison and recidivism for Black and White former prisoners, this paper suggests that much of the differences between Black and White recidivism rates may relate to issues of racial discrimination in gaining employment. “Recent work history – also more difficult to achieve for Blacks – also appears to enhance the effect of employment on recidivism, irrespective of race” (p. 659). Put simply, “Employment among returning citizens clearly impacts their ability to avoid returning to prison” (p. 662).

Reference: Kolbeck, Simon G., Paul E. Bellair, and Steven Lopez (2022). Race, Work History, and the Employment, Recidivism Relationship. Criminology, 60, 637-666.

Article 4

A recent experiment, carried out within a survey of US residents, demonstrates that people hold stereotypic views about who can be believed to be a “true” victim of sexual assault. Three factors still appear to be very important determinants of the perceived credibility of sexual assault victims: that they report the offence to the police and others immediately after the offence, and that they have a corroborating witness.

Independent assessments of the prevalence of sexual assault allegations suggest that very few are, in fact, false. This study attempts to find out why many people are skeptical about the truth of statements from victims who say that they were sexually assaulted.

There are many reasons why non-stranger sexual assaults are not immediately reported to the police or others. People may have concerns about retaliation; they may expect unsympathetic responses from others; they may have concerns about how reporting these events can affect one’s reputation. Although there is some evidence to suggest that many police officers discount the credibility of delayed reports of sexual assault, this study takes these concerns one step further and looks into the manner in which delays in reporting sexual assaults may affect the assessments of the credibility of the victim by ordinary members of the public.

Using an online survey panel of 963 Americans, respondents were given a description of a hypothetical story of a female intern being sexually assaulted by a “famous male TV host.” The basic facts were the same in all vignettes. However, there were four variables that varied across vignettes. (1) In half the vignettes, it was mentioned that there was a witness; in the other half, there was no mention of a witness. (2) The event was reported to the police ‘soon afterwards’ vs. the victim did not report it to the police. (3) The victim was aware of other victims of the same host vs. she knew of no other victims. (4)The victim informed the media about the assault soon afterwards, but the media did not immediately follow up on the story vs. the media were not informed quickly about the assault.

People were randomly assigned to one of the two levels of each of these four variables creating 16 groups (2x2x2x2=16). Each person got the same basic facts about the sexual assault. The 16 different groups varied according to which of these descriptions a person received. Because participants in the experiment were randomly assigned (and because the other facts in the vignette were identical), it can be safely assumed that any differences across groups were caused by the experimentally imposed different conditions.

The results showed that the rated credibility of the victim was higher if she immediately reported the event to the police, if she had reported it to the media soon after the assault, and if there were other witnesses to the event. The existence of other sexual assault victims of this same man did not appear to be important. Above and beyond these effects, women were more likely than men to trust the victim. Furthermore, political conservatives were less likely to believe the victim.

Conclusion: “The results show that the respondents [to the experiment] hold stereotypic views about trustworthy sexual assault victims.... If the victim has reported the offence to the police, disclosed the offence to the public immediately after it happens, or has a corroborating witness, respondents perceive the victim to be more credible” (p. 3164). It would appear that increased success in the prosecutions of sexual assaults could come in two ways: by encouraging early disclosure of the offences or by encouraging change in the manner in which members of the general public assess the credibility of victims.

Reference: Shi, Luzi (2022). Public Opinion About #MeToo Victims and Offenders: A Nationwide Experiment. Violence Against Women, 28 (12-13), 3154-3173.

Article 5

The number of fatal shootings of community members by members of their local police is likely to be high if the police organization operates in an area where many ordinary community members own guns. The presence of guns in a community leads to police shootings of community members, even if those guns weren’t present at the time of the shooting.

Previous research has suggested that the number of police shootings of local citizens in a community is related to the fear that officers feel concerning their own and the public’s personal safety. An unanswered question, however, is how local cues affect officers’ assessment of their own personal risk. This study examines the impact of the density of guns in the local community on the number of police shootings of civilians.

The relative presence or absence of firearms in a local community may be, for police officers, a key indicator of how dangerous an interaction with a citizen could be. Aside from anything else, “Fear of firearms is... emphasized throughout the training of new [police] recruits and represents a central aspect of police culture” (p. 1219).

This study examines the density of incidents in which a civilian was shot and killed by an on-duty police officer working in an official capacity. Various characteristics of the police agency and the community in which the police operate were obtained in addition to the number of fatal police shootings. Specifically, the study examined relationship of gun use in crime in the community and the violent crime rate on the rate of fatal police shootings of civilians in the county. But the study also examined the importance, in understanding the likelihood of police shooting a civilian, of certain characteristics of the police agency (e.g., percent female officers, whether use of force reports were collected, etc.). For the local county, the relative level of gun ownership was estimated from the proportion of suicides committed with a firearm (a “well-established proxy for household gun ownership”, p. 1223).

The results show a clear effect of household gun ownership as a predictor of the number of fatal police shootings, using 758 policing agencies covering 408 counties. In addition, the violent crime arrest rate predicted fatal police killings. These two factors were significant predictors of police shootings of civilians taking into account 8 characteristics of the police agencies and 7 characteristics of the county.

Interestingly, the structural disadvantage of the county – measured using 6 factors including the proportion of people living below the poverty line, proportion of people unemployed, proportion of single female headed families with children, proportion of households receiving supplemental income – did not predict fatal police shootings. “It may be that violent crime and gun ownership represent more direct and immediate cues of dangerousness to police officers than concentrated disadvantage” (p. 1229).

Conclusion: The fact that fatal police shootings were more likely to occur in counties with high violent crime rates and counties with high household firearm ownership suggests that, at least to some extent, fatal police shootings of civilians relate to informally assessed police perceptions of the dangerousness of the local community in which they work. It may be, then, that “policies to reduce fatal police shootings should focus on the broader environmental contexts in which police-community interactions occur” (p. 1230).

Reference: Sheppard, Keller G., Gregory M. Zimmerman, and Emma E. Fridel (2022). Examining the Relevance of Contextual Gun Ownership on Fatal Police Shootings. Justice Quarterly, 39 (6), 1214-1236.

Article 6

Employers whose job applications include questions about the existence of a criminal record or who state that background checks might be carried out on job applicants discourage those with criminal records from applying for the position. This self- selection demonstrates that the cost of an irrelevant criminal record is substantial even before employers consider someone for a job.

Previous research ( See the Criminological Highlights collection on Pardons ) has demonstrated that employers are significantly less willing to consider a person with a criminal record for a job than they are someone who apparently has no record. This paper goes back one critical step and investigates whether people with criminal records simply don’t apply for jobs if they think that their record will be taken into consideration.

Many employers carry out criminal records checks on job applicants or require job applicants to submit evidence about whether or not they have criminal records. Currently there are attempts to reduce the use of criminal records in the employment process. It is argued that it is not an effective method of selecting employees for many jobs since that information may predict nothing useful about the applicant’s ability to do the job.

It is also known that a criminal record has an especially negative impact on Black men. In one study it was calculated that White men in the US with a felony record would have to apply for 17 positions to have a 95% likelihood of getting one callback for an interview; a similarly placed Black man would have to apply for 59 positions to achieve the same likelihood of a callback.

This study examined the job seeking behaviour of adults with criminal records in central Ohio. Participants in the study were given four different job advertisements (retail, construction, restaurant, and office workers). For each of the 303 respondents, each of the advertisements was paired with a different criminal record condition: (1) No information about background checks was listed; (2) an indication that a criminal background check would be carried out; (3) a question concerning whether the applicant had been convicted of a felony, or (4) a question on whether the applicant had been convicted of any crime.

The results show that most applicants (92.4%) would apply for the job if no question about criminal record was asked. The three ‘criminal record’ conditions did not differ and had, on average, a much lower application rate: 75.8%. The results were very similar for Black and White job applicants. And the results were similar across the four different types of jobs.

Many of the study participants were interviewed as part of the study. They frequently mentioned that they believed their chances of getting a job where the employer asked about criminal record was very low. Many also mentioned that they felt “burned out” applying for jobs they perceived they didn’t stand a chance of getting. Finally, they saw organizations asking about criminal records as being “particularly unfriendly occupations or industries” (p. 574).

Conclusion: It is clear that people with criminal records, perhaps because they know employers often won’t even consider hiring applicants with criminal records, self-select out of jobs where employers ask applicants about criminal records. It did not seem to matter whether applicants anticipated being asked about their records or they anticipated background checks: “they felt that employers had no interest in hiring someone with a criminal record... and that the numerous unsuccessful attempts to gain legitimate employment amount to wasted time” (p. 580) if the employer was going to consider the applicant’s criminal record. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is sometimes hard to motivate people with criminal records to look for jobs.

Reference: Vuolo, Mike, Lesley E. Schneider, and Eric G. LaPlant (2022). Employment Application Criminal Record Questions and Willingness to Apply: A Mixed Method Study of Self-Selection. American Journal of Sociology, 128 (2), 552-592.

Article 7

Identical misbehaviour on the part of Black/Latino boys compared to White boys in American schools is responded to very differently. Black or Latino boys engaging in classroom misbehaviour that is identical to that of a White boy are treated more harshly. And boys of all races are judged more harshly if they misbehave in schools with large minority populations.

In many settings – e.g., police interactions with people on the street – there is substantial information that who a person is (e.g., whether they are Black / Latinx vs. White) and where they are (e.g., the racial/ethnic composition of the neighbourhood) affects the treatment that people are given.

This study examines the extent to which “student race/ethnicity shapes teachers’ perceptions of blameworthiness for identical misbehaviour” (p. 1009) in a school setting and to what extent the race / ethnicity composition of a school’s student population creates “differences in teacher’s perceptions of blameworthiness for identical misbehaviour....” (p. 1009). The challenge of ensuring that the behaviour being judged was identical across racial groups was overcome by creating video clips for the study (of less than a minute in length) in which a Black, a Latino, or a White boy was shown misbehaving. Specifically, the boy was shown slamming a door, throwing paper, or texting during a test. At least three boys of each race were used to ensure that any differences across clips could be attributed to race/ ethnicity rather than idiosyncratic differences in the actors.

Each of 1,339 teachers who worked in 295 different middle and high schools were shown a single video clip depicting one of these boys misbehaving in one of the three ways. The researcher categorized each school according to the proportion of Black/Latinx students enrolled in it. Teachers were asked to “describe the behaviour of the student in the video” (p. 1019). The teacher’s description of the blameworthiness of the student was then assessed by independent raters. Teachers were also asked whether they would refer the student to the principal’s office.

Black boys were rated as being significantly more blameworthy than White boys, even though their actual behaviour was identical. Latino boys, showing the same actual behaviour, were seen as being more blameworthy than White boys, but less blameworthy than Black boys. In addition, being Black increased the likelihood that youths would be referred to the principal’s office (with Latino youths being between these groups). For schools with relatively high Black/Latinx enrollment, teacher ratings of student blameworthiness for identical misbehaviour were higher.

Conclusion: Overall the data show that Black boys in middle and high schools who misbehave in relatively minor ways are likely to be judged more unfavorably than are White boys who demonstrate identical misbehaviour. But in addition, boys (of any race/ethnicity) in schools with the highest proportion of minority youths enrolled in them will also be judged more negatively. In other words, differential perceptions of student behaviour appear to be a function not only of the race/ethnicity of the student, but also of the racial/ethnic makeup of the school. Assessments of students’ behaviour and suspensions from school relate to much more than just the behaviour of the student.

Reference: Owens, Jayanti (2022). Double Jeopardy: Teacher Biases, Racialized Organizations, and the Production of Racial/ Ethnic Disparities in School Discipline. American Sociological Review, 87 (6), 1007-1048.

Article 8

Long prison sentences for non-violent offenders are no more effective than shorter sentences in reducing recidivism. Given the various fiscal costs to society and social costs to the offender, as well as the costs to those associated with offenders, it would appear that a shift to shorter prison sentences would free up funds for crime prevention activities that might actually prevent crime. Shorter sentences would not put public safety at risk.

There are a substantial number of studies suggesting that imprisonment does not reduce crime. In fact, it may increase subsequent offending. (See, for example, t he Criminological Highlights collection The effects of Imprisonment ). This paper examines a highly related issue: Is length of stay in prison associated with differences in recidivism rates?

Generally speaking, the major challenge of a study designed to determine whether some variable of interest (in this case, the length of stay in prison) has any effect on an outcome of interest (in this case, recidivism) is that those prisoners with long stays are almost certainly going to be different from prisoners with short stays. Using various statistical approaches, this study used information from people who were serving prison sentences in Oregon prisons for property, drug, or driving offences. In addition, various controls for variables known to affect recidivism were included in the statistical models. These included gender, race, age, age at first arrest, indicators of prior arrests for each of 9 offence categories, previous release revocations, previous custody sentences, and a measure of risk of reoffending.

Time spent in prison was examined using 12 different categories of months served (e.g., 12 or less, 13, 14-17, 18... ‘50 months or more’). Then for each category of “months served in prison”, the probability of rearrest and probability of reincarceration were calculated.

There were no consistent effects showing an advantage (i.e., lower reoffending rates) for longer sentences. The effects on reincarceration were very similar. More generally, the results of this study are consistent with other studies that show “there is little link between the length of time someone is in prison and their future criminal activity” (p. 9).

Conclusion: The “central finding [of the study] is that using Oregon prisons to change behaviour through the length of stay [in prison] does not yield consistent, appreciable, recidivism reduction” (p. 10). More generally, it is argued that it would be useful to “assess the relative benefit of the length of prison stay against its impacts on public safety” (p. 10).

Reference: Leymon, Mark G., Christopher M. Campbell, Kris Henning, and Brian C. Renauer (2022). The Impacts of Length of Prison Stay on Recidivism of Non-Violent Offenders. Journal of Criminal Justice, 82, 1-12.