Explore the vast range of titles available.

The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who serve their sentences on probation or in jail. This article develops state-level estimates based on demographic life tables and extends previous national estimates of the number of people with felony convictions to 2010. We estimate that 3 % of the total U.S. adult population and 15 % of the African American adult male population has ever been to prison; people with felony convictions account for 8 % of all adults and 33 % of the African American adult male population. We discuss the far-reaching consequences of the spatial concentration and immense growth of these groups since 1980.

This paper adds to the empirical evidence that criminal records are a barrier to employment. Using data from 2,655 online applications sent on behalf of fictitious male applicants, we show that employers are 60 percent more likely to call applicants that do not have a felony conviction. We further investigate whether this effect varies based on applicant race (black versus white), crime type (drug versus property crime), industry (restaurants versus retail), jurisdiction (New Jersey versus New York City), local crime rate, and local racial composition. Although magnitudes vary somewhat, in every subsample the conviction effect is large, significant, and negative.

This article provides the first causal estimates on the popular, cost-saving practice of diversion in the criminal justice system, an intervention that provides offenders with a second chance to avoid a criminal record. We exploit two natural experiments in Harris County, Texas where first-time felony defendants faced abrupt changes in the probability of diversion. Using administrative data and regression discontinuity methods, we find robust evidence across both experiments that diversion cuts reoffending rates in half and grows quarterly employment rates by nearly 50% over 10 years. The change in trajectory persists even 20 years out and is concentrated among young black men. An investigation of mechanisms strongly suggests that stigma associated with a felony conviction plays a key role in generating these results. Other possible mechanisms including changes in incarceration, other universal adjustments in policy or practice, and differences in criminal processing are ruled out empirically.

Objectives I examine housing instability among individuals with a felony conviction but no incarceration history relative to formerly incarcerated individuals as a means of separating the effect of felon status from that of incarceration per se—a distinction often neglected in prior research. I consider mechanisms and whether this relationship varies based on gender, race/ethnicity, time since conviction, and type of offense. Methods I use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data and restricted comparison group, individual fixed effects, and sibling fixed effects models to examine residential mobility and temporary housing residence during early adulthood. Results I find robust evidence that never-incarcerated individuals with felony convictions experience elevated risk of housing instability and residential mobility, even after adjusting for important mediators like financial resources and relationships. The evidence that incarceration has an additional, independent effect on housing instability is weaker, however, suggesting that the association between incarceration and housing instability found in prior studies may largely be driven by conviction status. Conclusions These findings reveal that conviction, independent of incarceration, introduces instability into the lives of the 12 million Americans who have been convicted of a felony but never imprisoned. Thus, research that attempts to identify an incarceration effect by comparing outcomes to convicted individuals who receive non-custodial sentences may obscure the important independent effect of conviction. Moreover, these findings highlight that the socioeconomic effects of criminal justice contact are broader than incarceration-focused research suggests. Consequently, reform efforts promoting the use of community corrections over incarceration may do less to reduce the harm of criminal justice contact than expected.

The felony murder doctrine is one of the most widely criticized features of American criminal law. Legal scholars almost unanimously condemn it as irrational, concluding that it imposes punishment without fault and presumes guilt without proof. Despite this, the law persists in almost every U.S. jurisdiction. Felony Murder is the first book on this controversial legal doctrine. It shows that felony murder liability rests on a simple and powerful idea: that the guilt incurred in attacking or endangering others depends on one's reasons for doing so. Inflicting harm is wrong, and doing so for a bad motive—such as robbery, rape, or arson—aggravates that wrong. In presenting this idea, Guyora Binder criticizes prevailing academic theories of criminal intent for trying to purge criminal law of moral judgment. Ultimately, Binder shows that felony murder law has been and should remain limited by its justifying aims.

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the nonrandom assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior-offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for burglary, petty larceny, felony and misdemeanor drug offenses, aggravated assault, and felony sex offenses. The influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category. We also find evidence that the predominant types of peer effects differ in residential versus nonresidential facilities; effects in the latter are consistent with network formation among youth serving time close to home.

This paper is one of the first systematic assessments of ex-felons’ workplace performance. Using FOIA-requested data from the Department of Defense, we follow 1.3 million ex-offender and non-offender enlistees in the US military from 2002 to 2009. Those with a felony background show no difference in attrition rates due to poor performance compared to those without criminal records. Moreover, exfelons are promoted more quickly and to higher ranks than other enlistees. At the same time, we find that ex-felons are slightly more likely to commit a legal offense in the military system (5 percent of non-felons compared to 6.6 percent of ex-felons). We also find a higher rate of work-related deaths among the ex-felon sample; closer evaluation of limited data suggests this may be driven by ex-felons being assigned more often to combat positions. Overall, our study shows that the military’s criminal history screening process can result in successful employment outcomes for exfelons, at least in terms of job mobility and reliability, to the mutual benefit of employer and employee. An important question arising from this analysis is whether the military’s “whole person” review can apply successfully to the civilian sector.

Theoretical research suggests that racialized felony disenfranchisement-a form of structural racism-is likely to undermine the health of Black people, yet empirical studies on the topic are scant. We used administrative data on disproportionate felony disenfranchisement of Black residents across US states, linked to geocoded individual-level health data from the 2016 Health and Retirement Study, to estimate race-specific regression models describing the relationship between racialized disenfranchisement and health among middle-aged and older adults, adjusting for other individual- and state-level factors. Results show that living in states with higher levels of racialized disenfranchisement is associated with more depressive symptoms, more functional limitations, more difficulty performing instrumental activities of daily living, and more difficulty performing activities of daily living among Black people. However, there are no statistically significant relationships between racialized disenfranchisement and health among White people. These findings suggest that policies aiming to mitigate disproportionate Black felony disenfranchisement not only are essential for political inclusion but also may be valuable tools for improving population health equity.

Because of racially disproportionate imprisonment rates, the literature on mass incarceration has focused on the labor market consequence of imprisonment and the implications of those effects for racial inequality. Yet, the effects of imprisonment itself, as distinct from conviction, are not well understood. The authors leverage a natural experiment based on the random assignment of judges to felony cases in Michigan to examine the causal effect of being sentenced to prison as compared to probation, stratifying by race and work history. The most widespread effect of imprisonment on employment occurs through incapacitation in prison, both for the initial prison sentence and through the heightened risk of subsequent imprisonment. Negative postrelease effects of imprisonment on employment, employment stability, and employment outside the secondary labor market are concentrated among whites with a presentence work history. Postrelease effects of imprisonment on employment among those with no work history are positive but fade over time.

Criminal justice systems across the United States are reducing reliance on prison incarceration and moving toward more local and noncustodial types of responses to felony offenders. Rather than wholesale decarceration, states and counties are shifting felons along what we call a “continuum of control,” which allows for people who previously might have been incarcerated in state prison to be sentenced to jail, jail plus probation, or probation without a custodial spell. With some notable exceptions, existing research has focused primarily on contrasting prison versus community placements and ignored the intermediary alternatives between the poles of the continuum. In this study, we compare the recidivism outcomes of felons sentenced to prison versus those sentenced to jail, jail plus probation, and probation alone. On balance, our findings show that jail incarceration results in the same or lower rearrest and reconviction rates than incarceration in prison. We also find consistent evidence that while rearrests are frequently higher for probation with or without a jail spell, reconvictions are consistently lower for similarly situated offenders than prison. These findings provide partial evidence in support of policies that move people convicted of felonies to less costly, more local, and less confining alternatives than prison.