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AbstractResearch on race and policing increasingly draws upon data collected by police officers to estimate racial disparities in police contact. Many of these data sets, however, rely on officer perception of a stopped person's race, which may be inconsistent with how those individuals self‐identify. Furthermore, researchers frequently benchmark contact data where race is perceived by police officers against census and survey data where race is self‐identified. We argue that discordance between how individuals self‐identify and how they are classified by officers can bias estimates of racial disparities. Using a unique data set, which allows us to compare officers' racial classification of stopped persons with those same persons' racial self‐identification, we characterize rates of racial misclassification in administrative police records. We find evidence of racial misclassification in police records, especially among Hispanic and Asians/Pacific Islanders. We find that officer classification of Hispanics as (non‐Hispanic) White is the most common form of racial misclassification in our sample and that its substantive consequences are significant. Specifically, we find that officer classification of Hispanics as White may lead analysts to incorrectly conclude that Hispanics are no more likely than Whites to be cited by police.

AbstractCriminology lacks sufficient data for many types of crime that are of great concern to society. This lack of data poses significant problems for determining whether resources are adequate for responding to these crimes or whether programmatic, legislative, or target‐hardening efforts to prevent or reduce their occurrence are effective. Inadequate data about crime also produces a selective and incomplete narrative about crime that makes it easier for political and vested interests to exploit public concerns about crime for their own ends. In this address, I discuss what is needed to resolve these gaps and the ways in which criminologists can support a significant expansion of the crime data infrastructure. Such work is necessary to help ensure the future relevance of criminological research.

AbstractExponential growth in order maintenance policing and associated misdemeanor sanctions have led to disproportionate consequences for people of color. Using data from qualitative interviews with individuals in the metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, region, the current study documents the racialized and monetized nature of police contact. This work extends extant scholarship by considering how minor contact with the police shapes individual avoidance behaviors and activity spaces, places where people work and live. We consider how the combination of monetary sanctions, warrants, incarceration, and overpolicing in the region affects avoidance behaviors, particularly for people of color. Our findings suggest that the frequently unpredictable nature of police contacts and the parochial and often profit‐focused structure of policing organizations in the region leads individuals to modify the ways in which they move through the region and, for some, to isolate. Narratives reflect the need for constant calibration of behaviors and decisions, as well as the legacy that police contact and monetary sanctions can have on everyday routines.

AbstractLaub and Sampson (2003) and Paternoster and Bushway (2009) offered opposing explanations of desistance from crime. Yet, extant research has failed to test the key theoretical differences that distinguish these perspectives: 1) the temporal ordering of internal changes in identity/values and life transitions and 2) the impact of values/life transitions on offending conditional on key predictors from the opposing theory (e.g., whether marriage contributes to desistance among individuals who already hold prosocial values). We assess competing claims using data from the Pathways to Desistance. We find that within‐person changes in prosocial value orientations are significantly related to within‐person changes in one's likelihood of entering into serious romantic relationships and becoming employed. Conversely, life transitions are unrelated to changes in one's values. The results derived from fixed‐effects Poisson models indicate high or increasing prosocial value orientations help explain offending patterns among those who enter into serious romantic relationships/get employed and help explain changes in offending among those who do not experience structural "turning points." Marriage/cohabitation is unrelated to within‐person changes in offending, whereas the impact of employment has an inconsistent relationship. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

AbstractExtreme forms of custody represent the boundary points of state power. The configuration of the most restrictive corners of prison systems, and what goes on within them, is highly instructive in exposing the objectives, limits, and implications of state coercion at its most severe. Based on data collected in England & Wales and Norway, this article has two main aims. The first is to explore the degree to which "deep‐end" confinement differs between jurisdictions with different penal philosophies. The second is to understand how the most extreme form of confinement in each jurisdiction differs from the more typical carceral experiences within each system and its overall penal ethos. Empirically, then, the article seeks to shine light into the deepest dominions of both prison systems, illuminating the experiential texture of extreme forms of imprisonment. It concludes by asking what can be inferred about Nordic exceptionalism, and about deep‐end confinement more generally, by analyzing these domains.

AbstractWhat transpires in a dispute, even a violent dispute, is affected by the tendency for adversaries to engage in "limited offending." We focus on one restraint: the tendency of men to limit their aggression in their disputes with women. Analyses are based on an incident‐level survey about interpersonal disputes administered to 503 men who are incarcerated and 220 men who had never been incarcerated. Using multinomial and logistic regression models, we examined the extent to which an adversary's gender predicted dispute‐related behaviors. The evidence suggests that the chivalry norm has pervasive effects on the behavior of men during their disputes with women. Men are more likely to engage in remedial actions (e.g., apologies) when their adversary is a woman, as opposed to another man. In addition, men are less likely to make violent threats and engage in physical attacks when their adversary is a woman, even after they have themselves been physically attacked. When men are violent, they are less likely to injure a woman than a man. However, the chivalry norm does not inhibit verbal aggression in these disputes: men are just as likely to engage in verbal attacks and nonviolent threats when the adversary is a woman.

AbstractA lack of formal accountability in the aftermath of police violence against communities of color has long fueled public demands for increased police oversight. Yet, little is known about how interorganizational relationships affect citizen complaint investigations once citizen review boards (CRBs) are established. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival sources about the Syracuse Citizen Review Board in New York State, I show how CRBs operate as bureaucratic agencies that ostensibly address police misconduct, yet are managed by municipal power relations that neutralize the agency's ability to actualize change. Specifically, I find that a CRB's embeddedness within a municipality's interorganizational field creates a site of contestation to ensure public legitimation of police despite community concern. To show how the aims of citizen oversight can be upended within the structural and practical politics of local government, I introduce the concept of a police legitimacy regime: a set of (in)formal policies, organizations, and actors that protect and promote the legitimacy of state police power. In Syracuse, police protection happens at the expense of residents' demands for police reform, and I conclude by outlining the implications of this research for other communities seeking citizen‐led approaches to police accountability.

AbstractThe findings from prior research indicate that positive credentials, or documentation of prosocial accomplishments, can vary in strength and perceived value in mitigating aversions to hiring individuals with criminal records. In the current study, we examine why certain types of positive credentials may be more influential in reducing stigma than others. Using data from a nationwide survey of American adults (N = 3,476), we combine a mediation analysis with content‐coding of open‐ended responses to identify key themes and patterns in decision processes. The results indicate the factors examined here—employee dependability, trustworthiness, recidivism risk, and workplace crime—explain a large proportion of the total effect across credentials and are the strongest for reference letters. Trustworthiness is the most influential mediator across credentials, whereas general recidivism risk is consistently the lowest. An analysis of open‐ended responses provides further context and insight into these patterns. Although policy strategies often target risk reduction on the employer's end, credentials that also relay information about skills, character, and the timeline of recent life events are especially influential.

AbstractRecent studies have found that race, work history, postprison employment, and recidivism are intertwined, suggesting that race and work history may shape the employment–recidivism relationship in nuanced, yet underexplored ways. Additionally, the literature has yet to settle on what kinds of employment patterns matter most for recidivism. These issues are especially important to resolve given contemporary concerns about mass incarceration and racial disparities among citizens returning from prison. To investigate these questions, we analyze administrative prison records, unemployment insurance (UI) quarterly data, and a recidivism follow‐up documenting multiple failures for approximately eight years. Frailty models, which address unobserved heterogeneity among those prone to multiple recidivism events, reveal that establishing a recent work history unlocks the protective effect of employment, and that the relationship between postprison employment and recidivism does not vary by race. We also find that being sporadically employed is as protective as being more consistently employed. Our findings imply that employment contributes to racial disparities in recidivism via racialized barriers to labor market participation rather than via differential effects. Our results further suggest that addressing barriers to employment, especially for those with no work history and those facing racialized barriers to labor market entry, could significantly reduce recidivism.

AbstractA top priority of prison authorities is maintaining a safe and orderly institutional environment. Gangs are believed to impede this objective, warranting bespoke policies and practices. Drawing on the process‐based model of regulation, we depart from orthodox explanations for the gang–misconduct link and argue that gang affiliates are treated less fairly than nongang affiliates owing to suppression‐oriented administrative policies and harsher day‐to‐day interactions with officers, which, in turn, impact compliance. We use administrative and survey data sources based on a sample of 802 male prisoners and generalized structural equation modeling to examine whether procedural justice and legal orientations mediate the association between official classification of gang affiliation and self‐reported misconduct. Our findings reveal partial support for the process‐based model: procedural justice and legitimacy are poorer among gang than among nongang respondents but do not mediate the gang–misconduct link. The traditional pathway between procedural justice, legitimacy, and obligation to obey was observed, none of which were related to misconduct, standing in sharp contrast to the expectations of the process‐based model. These findings suggest that factors other than procedural justice and legal orientations may be more relevant for rule violations among gangs, specifically, and within correctional environments, generally.

AbstractHarsh prison conditions have been widely examined for their effects on the mental health of incarcerated people, but few studies have examined whether mental health status exposes individuals to harsh treatment in the penal system. With prisoners confined to their cells for up to 23 hours each day, often being denied visitors or phone calls, solitary confinement is an important case for studying harsh treatment in prisons. Routinely used as punishment for prison infractions, solitary confinement may be subject to the same forces that criminalize the mentally ill in community settings. Analyzing a large administrative data set showing admissions to solitary confinement in state prison, we find high rates of punitive isolation among those with serious mental illness. Disparities by mental health status result from the cumulative effects of prison misconduct charges and disciplinary hearings. We estimate that those with serious mental illness spend three times longer in solitary confinement than similar incarcerated people with no mental health problems. The evidence suggests the stigma of dangerousness follows people into prison, and the criminalization of mental illness accompanies greater severity of incarceration.

AbstractAlthough women have made dramatic gains toward equality with men over the past century, this progress has occurred alongside tremendous growth in U.S. incarceration rates. Extending prior research on sex differences in offending, we turn our attention to punishment by exploring how gender equality in education, work, and politics is associated with disparities in annual prison admissions. Using pooled cross‐sectional data for U.S. states from 1983 to 2010, we conduct a series of fixed‐effects regressions to estimate the ratio of female‐to‐male annual prison admission rates, as well as sex‐specific rates, disaggregated by violent, property, and drug crimes. We find partial support for the ameliorative hypothesis, which predicts that increasing gender equality will decrease female incarceration rates relative to male rates. For one of our three measures of gender equality—the sex gap in educational attainment—we find that greater equality is associated with a widening of the sex gap in incarceration rates, particularly for property offenses. We explore the implications of these findings in relation to existing theories of gender, crime, and punishment.