AbstractWhy has the probability of going to prison after a felony conviction increased since the early 1980s? Social scientists often try to answer this question through macro‐level research that is aimed at examining correlations between prison admissions and crime rates or sociopolitical characteristics of states. That type of macro‐level inquiry, however, does not allow for a close examination of how characteristics of offenders changed over time, and whether such changes are consequential for understanding trends in the use of imprisonment. In the current study, I take a different approach—one in which case‐level data are observed over a lengthy time span—to investigate why the likelihood of going to prison for a given crime persistently increased for several decades. The results of analyses of more than 350,000 felony cases sentenced in Minnesota during a 33‐year period show that the probability of a defendant receiving a prison sentence increased from 1981 to 2013, as would be expected. The primary reason for the rising probability of imprisonment was the significant increase in the average offender's criminal record, which more than doubled during the observation period.
This research examines the association between economic insecurity and imprisonment rates in the United States. Building on Garland's thesis about punishment and late modernity, it is hypothesized that rising economic insecurity in a population is associated with an increase in the imprisonment rate. This hypothesis is tested with state-level data for the years 1986–2013. Results indicate a robust association between changes in economic insecurity, measured as the percentage of households in a state losing a quarter or more of their income in a single year, and changes in imprisonment rates. This finding suggests that economic insecurity is not only relevant for explaining large-scale shifts in penal philosophy and practice, as prior sociological theory has argued. It also explains some of the year-to-year variation in imprisonment rates and points to another way in which inequality is associated with punishment.
In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the twentieth century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Despite this global trend towards accountability, American collective memory appears distinct in that it tends to glorify the nation s past, celebrating triumphs while eliding darker episodes in its history. In American Memories, sociologists Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King rigorously examine how the United States remembers its own and others atrocities and how institutional responses to such crimes, including trials and tribunals, may help shape memories and perhaps impede future violence. American Memories uses historical and media accounts, court records, and survey research to examine a number of atrocities from the nation s past, including the massacres of civilians by U.S. military in My Lai, Vietnam, and Haditha, Iraq. The book shows that when states initiate responses to such violence via criminal trials, tribunals, or reconciliation hearings they lay important groundwork for how such atrocities are viewed in the future. Trials can serve to delegitimize violence even by a nation s military by creating a public record of grave offenses. But the law is filtered by and must also compete with other institutions, such as the media and historical texts, in shaping American memory. Savelsberg and King show, for example, how the My Lai slayings of women, children, and elderly men by U.S. soldiers have been largely eliminated from or misrepresented in American textbooks, and the army s reputation survived the episode untarnished. The American media nevertheless evoked the killings at My Lai in response to the murder of twenty-four civilian Iraqis in Haditha, during the war in Iraq. Since only one conviction was obtained for the My Lai massacre, and convictions for the killings in Haditha seem increasingly unlikely, Savelsberg and King argue that Haditha in the near past is now bound inextricably to My Lai in the distant past. With virtually no criminal convictions, and none of higher ranks for either massacre, both events will continue t ...
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In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the twentieth century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Despite this global trend towards accountability, American collective memory appears distinct in that it tends to glorify the nation s past, celebrating triumphs while eliding darker episodes in its history. In American Memories, sociologists Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King rigorously examine how the United States remembers its own and others atrocities and how institutional responses to such crimes, including trials and tribunals, may help shape memories and perhaps impede future violence. American Memories uses historical and media accounts, court records, and survey research to examine a number of atrocities from the nation s past, including the massacres of civilians by U.S. military in My Lai, Vietnam, and Haditha, Iraq. The book shows that when states initiate responses to such violence via criminal trials, tribunals, or reconciliation hearings they lay important groundwork for how such atrocities are viewed in the future. Trials can serve to delegitimize violence even by a nation s military by creating a public record of grave offenses. But the law is filtered by and must also compete with other institutions, such as the media and historical texts, in shaping American memory. Savelsberg and King show, for example, how the My Lai slayings of women, children, and elderly men by U.S. soldiers have been largely eliminated from or misrepresented in American textbooks, and the army s reputation survived the episode untarnished. The American media nevertheless evoked the killings at My Lai in response to the murder of twenty-four civilian Iraqis in Haditha, during the war in Iraq. Since only one conviction was obtained for the My Lai massacre, and convictions for the killings in Haditha seem increasingly unlikely, Savelsberg and King argue that Haditha in the near past is now bound inextricably to My Lai in the distant past. With virtually no criminal convictions, and none of higher ranks for either massacre, both events will continue to be misrepresented in American memory. In contrast, the book examines American representations of atrocities committed by foreign powers during the Balkan wars, which entailed the prosecution of ranking military and political leaders. The authors analyze news accounts of the war s events and show how articles based on diplomatic sources initially cast Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in a less negative light, but court-based accounts increasingly portrayed Milosevic as a criminal, solidifying his image for the public record ... -- Book Description.
We investigate the associations among physical appearance, threat perceptions, and criminal punishment. Psychological ideas about impression formation are integrated with criminological perspectives on sentencing to generate and test unique hypotheses about the associations among defendant facial characteristics, subjective evaluations of threatening appearance, and judicial imprisonment decisions. We analyze newly collected data that link booking photos, criminal histories, and sentencing information for more than 1,100 convicted felony defendants. Our findings indicate that Black defendants are perceived to be more threatening in appearance. Other facial characteristics, such as physical attractiveness, baby‐faced appearance, facial scars, and visible tattoos, also influence perceptions of threat, as do criminal history scores. Furthermore, some physical appearance characteristics are significantly related to imprisonment decisions, even after controlling for other relevant case characteristics. These and other findings are discussed as they relate to psychological research on impression formation, criminological theories of court actor decision‐making, and sociological work on race and punishment.
This research explains the temporal clustering of hate crimes. It is hypothesized that many hate crimes are retaliatory in nature and tend to increase, sometimes dramatically, in the aftermath of an antecedent event that results in one group harboring a grievance against another. Three types of events are used to test and refine the argument: 1) contentious criminal trials involving interracial crimes, 2) lethal terrorist attacks, and 3) appellate court decisions concerning same‐sex marriage. The results from time‐series analyses indicate that contentious trial verdicts and lethal domestic terrorist attacks precede spikes in racially or religiously motivated hate crimes, whereas less evidence is found for antigay hate crimes after appellate court rulings that grant rights to same‐sex partners. The model put forth in this article complements prior work by explaining in part the timing of hate crime clusters.
Although it has been suggested that engaging in criminal behavior diminishes young adults' marriageability, few studies have examined the effect of criminal offending on marital timing. This analysis uses longitudinal data from 1,641 respondents to the National Youth Survey to examine this relationship. Discrete-time event-history models show that, among young men, criminal behavior is inversely associated with the risk of marriage, net of established determinants of marital timing. However, rather than reflecting criminal offenders' reduced value as marriage partners, much of this association is because of offenders' lesser desire to marry. No association between criminal behavior and marital timing is observed for young women, and racial differences in criminal offending cannot account for the pronounced racial difference in marital timing.
The considerable difference between Bulgaria and Romania with regards to Jews and anti-Semitism makes for an intriguing case study, and the available evidence thus far appears to challenge prominent theories of European anti-Semitism. Why did Bulgaria protect its Jews despite its alliance with Nazi Germany during WWII, while anti-Semitism flourished in Romania? Were these countries equally as distinct with regards to anti-Semitism prior to the rise of European fascism? If so, how great was the difference in popular anti-Semitism in the two countries, and how might the differences be explained? In this article, the authors attempt to address the latter two questions by examining Bulgarian and Romanian anti-Semitism prior to WWII. They seek to show that popular anti-Semitism in Bulgaria was noticeably scant between 1899 and 1939 while rather extensive in Romania during the same period, attempt to illustrate where existing theories of anti-Semitism have trouble explaining the cases of Bulgaria and Romania, and propose an eclectic theory to account for societal variation in anti-Semitism.
