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Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than those of white arrestees.

A growing literature documents deleterious consequences of incarceration for mental health. Although salient, incarceration is only one form of criminal justice contact and, accordingly, focusing on incarceration may mask the extent to which the criminal justice system influences mental health. Using insights from the stress process paradigm, along with nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we examine criminal justice contact—defined as arrest, conviction, and incarceration—and mental health. First, fixed-effects models, which adjust for stable unobserved and time-varying observed characteristics, show that arrest is deleteriously associated with mental health, and arrest accounts for nearly half of the association between incarceration and poor mental health, although certain types of incarceration appear more consequential than others. Second, the associations are similar across race and ethnicity; this, combined with racial/ethnic disparities in contact, indicates that criminal justice interactions exacerbate minority health inequalities. Third, the associations between criminal justice contact, especially arrest and incarceration, and mental health are particularly large among respondents residing in contextually disadvantaged areas during adolescence. Taken together, the results suggest that the consequences of criminal justice contact for mental health have a far greater reach than previously considered.

The degree and scope of criminal justice surveillance increased dramatically in the United States over the past four decades. Recent qualitative research suggests the rise in surveillance may be met with a concomitant increase in efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no quantitative empirical test of this theory. In this article, I introduce the concept of \"system avoidance,\" whereby individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system avoid surveilling institutions that keep formal records. Using data from Add Health (n = 15,170) and the NLSY97 (n = 8,894), I find that individuals who have been stopped by police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions, than their counterparts who have not had criminal justice contact. By contrast, individuals with criminal justice contact are no less likely to participate in civic or religious institutions. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately distributed, this study suggests system avoidance is a potential mechanism through which the criminal justice system contributes to social stratification: it severs an already marginalized subpopulation from institutions that are pivotal to desistance from crime and their own integration into broader society.

Objectives A survey of empirical research concerning the determinants of an individual's perceptions of the risk of formal sanctions as a consequence of criminal behavior. The specific questions considered are: (1) How accurate is people's knowledge about criminal sanctions? (2) How do people acquire and modify their subjective probabilities of punishment risk? (3) How do individuals act on their risk perceptions in specific criminal contexts? Methods Three broad classes of extant studies are reviewed. The first is the relationship between objective sanctions, sanction enforcement, and risk perceptions—research that includes calibration studies and correlational studies. The second is the relationship between punishment experiences (personal and vicarious) and change in risk perceptions, in particular, research that relies on formal models of Bayesian learning. The third is the responsiveness of would-be offenders to immediate environmental cues—a varied empirical tradition that encompasses vignette research, offender interviews, process tracing, and laboratory studies. Results First, research concerning the accuracy of risk perceptions suggests that the average citizen does a reasonable job of knowing what criminal penalties are statutorily allowed, but does a quite poor job of estimating the probability and magnitude of the penalties. On the other hand, studies which inquire about more common offenses (alcohol and marijuana use) from more crime-prone populations (young people, offenders) reveal that perceptions are consistently better calibrated to actual punishments. Second, research on perceptual updating indicates that personal experiences and, to a lesser degree, vicarious experiences with crime and punishment are salient determinants of changes in risk perceptions. Specifically, individuals who commit crime and successfully avoid arrest tend to lower their subjective probability of apprehension. Third, research on the situational context of crime decision making reveals that risk perceptions are highly malleable to proximal influences which include, but are not limited to, objective sanction risk.

Official sanctioning of students by the criminal justice system is a long-hypothesized source of educational disadvantage, but its explanatory status remains unresolved. Few studies of the educational consequences of a criminal record account for alternative explanations such as low self-control, lack of parental supervision, deviant peers, and neighborhood disadvantage. Moreover, virtually no research on the effect of a criminal record has examined the \"black box\" of mediating mechanisms or the consequence of arrest for postsecondary educational attainment. Analyzing longitudinal data with multiple and independent assessments of theoretically relevant domains, the authors estimate the direct effect of arrest on later high school dropout and college enrollment for adolescents with otherwise equivalent neighborhood, school, family, peer, and individual characteristics as well as similar frequency of criminal offending. The authors present evidence that arrest has a substantively large and robust impact on dropping out of high school among Chicago public school students. They also find a significant gap in four-year college enrollment between arrested and otherwise similar youth without a criminal record. The authors also assess intervening mechanisms hypothesized to explain the process by which arrest disrupts the schooling process and, in turn, produces collateral educational damage. The results imply that institutional responses and disruptions in students' educational trajectories, rather than social-psychological factors, are responsible for the arrest-education link.

Drawing on the theory of representative bureaucracy, specifically the theory of symbolic representation, we examine whether or not gender representativeness in a police department's domestic violence unit influences how citizens judge the agency's performance, trustworthiness, and fairness. To examine this question, we use an online survey experiment in which we vary the representation of female police officers in a hypothetical domestic violence unit as well as the agency's performance. Results suggest that gender representation does indeed influence the perceived job performance, trustworthiness, and fairness of the agency, as does the agency's performance. Thus, this study suggests that the symbolic representativeness of the police does causally influence how citizens view and judge a law enforcement agency, and thus in turn perhaps their willingness to cooperate in the coproduction of public safety outcomes.

This paper examines the relationship between the minimum high school dropout age and juvenile arrest rates by exploiting state-level variation in dropout age laws. County-level arrest data for the period 1980 to 2008 and difference-in-difference-in-difference-type empirical strategy are used to compare the arrest rates over time of various age groups within counties that differ by their state's minimum dropout age. The evidence suggests that minimum dropout age requirements have a significant and negative effect on property and violent crime arrest rates for individuals 16 to 18 years old. The results are consistent with an incapacitation effect of schooling.

Although recent increases in imprisonment are concentrated in poor Black communities, we know little about how daily life within these neighborhoods is affected. Almost all ethnographic work in poor minority neighborhoods was written before the expansion of the criminal justice system, and the bulk of research on \"mass imprisonment\" relies on survey data, field experiments, or interviews, conceptualizing its impact in terms of current or former felons and their families. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Philadelphia, this article shifts the focus from imprisonment and criminal records to the increase in policing and supervision in poor Black neighborhoods, and what this has meant for a growing status group of wanted people. For many young men, avoiding jail has become a daily preoccupation: they have warrants out for minor infractions, like failing to pay court fees or breaking curfew, and will be detained if they are identified. Such threat of imprisonment transforms social relations by undermining already tenuous attachments to family, work, and community. But young men also rely on their precarious legal standing to explain failures that would have occurred anyway, while girlfriends and neighbors exploit their wanted status as an instrument of social control. I discuss the implications of my ethnographic observations relative to prior treatments of the poor and policing, and with regard to broader sociological questions about punishment and surveillance in the modern era.

In the mid-1990s New York City inaugurated its era of mass misdemeanors by pioneering policing tactics featuring intensive enforcement against low-level offenses as part of its quality-of-life and urban crime control strategy. These tactics have since spread across the country and around the globe. But the New York City experiment embarrasses our traditional understanding of how an expansion of criminal enforcement should work: as misdemeanor arrests climbed dramatically as part of an intentional law enforcement strategy, the rate of criminal conviction fell sharply. Using extensive, original data from a multiyear study, this Article exposes an underappreciated model of criminal administration in New York City's processing of mass misdemeanors, one that makes sense of this trend. Misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned what I call the adjudicative model of criminal law administration–concerned with adjudicating specific cases–and instead operates under what I call the managerial concemodel–rned with managing people through engagement with the criminal justice system over time. The adjudicative model holds that courts stand between the proscriptions of substantive criminal law and the hard treatment of punishment by employing the criminal process to select the right people for punishment and to determine the proper amount. The managerial model does not depend on punishing individual instances of lawbreaking, but rather on using the criminal process to sort and regulate the populations targeted with these policing tactics over time. These findings challenge the \"assembly-line\" account so often associated with lower criminal courts, showing that misdemeanor courts engage in a tremendous amount of discretionary differentiation in the treatment of the people who flow through their operations. However, the basis of this differentiation is not what we would expect from the traditional adjudicative model of criminal law, namely guilt and blameworthiness.

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality skills from an experimental evaluation of the influential Perry Preschool program to analyze the channels through which the program boosted both male and female participant outcomes. Experimentally induced changes in personality skills explain a sizable portion of adult treatment effects.