Spent Time In Prison Research Articles

Proliferation of Punishment: The Centrality of Legal Fines and Fees in the Landscape of Contemporary Penology.

Decades of significant crime declines and recent reductions in the number of people confined in prisons and jails in the United States have been accompanied by the emergence of new, and the resurgence of old, forms of punishment. One of these resurgent forms is the assessment of fines, fees, and costs to those who encounter the criminal legal system. Legal financial obligations (LFOs) have become widespread across the United States and are levied for offenses from alleged traffic violations in some states to felony convictions in others. Their emergence has been heralded by some as a less punitive alternative to spending time in prison or jail but recognized by others as uniquely consequential for people without the means to pay. Drawing on data from 254 counties in Texas, this article explores the emergence and enforcement of LFOs in Texas, where LFOs play a particularly prominent role in sanctions for alleged misdemeanor offenses and serve as an important source of revenue. Enforcement of LFOs varies geographically and is related to conservative politics and racial threat. We argue that LFOs are a defining feature of a contemporary punishment regime where racial injustice is fueled by economic inequality.

Prison and Violent Political Extremism in the United States

In the current study we consider the link between imprisonment and post-prison participation in violent political extremism. We examine three research questions: (1) whether spending time in prison increases the post-release risk of engaging in violent acts; (2) whether political extremists who were radicalized in prison are more likely to commit violent acts than political extremists radicalized elsewhere; and (3) whether individuals who were in prison and radicalized there were more likely to engage in post-prison violent extremism compared to individuals who were in prison and did not radicalize there. We perform a two-stage analysis where we first preprocess the data using a matching technique to approximate a fully blocked experimental design. Using the matched data, we then calculate the conditional odds ratio for engaging in violent extremism and estimate average treatment effects (ATE) of our outcomes of interest. Our results show that the effects of imprisonment and prison radicalization increases post-prison violent extremism by 78–187% for the logistic regression analysis, and 24.6–48.53% for the ATE analysis. Both analyses show that when radicalization occurs in the context of prison, the criminogenic effect of imprisonment is doubled. In support of longstanding arguments that prison plays a major role in the identity and behavior of individuals after their release, we find consistent evidence that the post-prison use of politically motivated violence can be estimated in part by whether perpetrators spent time in prison and whether they were radicalized there.

Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison

The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to assess whether the association between incarceration and reduced voting is causal. Using administrative records that reduce the possibility of measurement error, we employ several different research designs to investigate the possibility that the observed negative correlation between incarceration and voting might result from differences across individuals that lead both to incarceration and to low participation. As this selection bias issue is addressed, we find that the estimated effect of serving time in prison on voting falls dramatically and for some research designs vanishes entirely.

El error judicial en el uso de la prisión preventiva: Personas en prisión que nunca llegan a ser condenadas.

Judicial error in preventive prison: People in prison who will never be convicted. Spanish correctional institutions admitted in 2014 more than 8000 people in pretrial detention. Some of them will be absolved after an inquiry and they will be found innocent having spent time in prison. The present study examines cases in which the State, in the interest of public safety, deprives innocent people of freedom. The ultimate purpose of this study is to analyze the possible presence of bias or judicial heuristics in decision-making. To this end, 70 sentences later compensated for wrongful detention and 136 convictions after pretrial detention have been systematically analyzed. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the age, the sex, the nationality, or the criminal records of the innocent and convicts. Nevertheless, differences in the type of crime have been observed. Serious crimes (murder or sexual assault) have been significantly more frequent in compensatory judgments, while the prisoners have been convicted of minor offenses (theft or crimes against road safety). Finally, we discuss the need to conduct research that is generalizable to a target ecology. This will allow study of wrongful convictions both in general and in the application of undue pretrial detention.

Re‐‘homing’ the ex‐offender: constructing a ‘prisoner dyspora'

Recent work within and beyond the geography discipline has come to understand that where might be imagined a sharp boundary between the ‘hidden’ inside and outside of prisons, there is in fact a myriad of materials that cleave and bind penal geographies that mark the prison wall as a site of transaction and exchange. Recidivism in the UK is of serious concern, rendering the ‘prisoner’ a participant of a very unique and dynamic type of border exchange. In light of this, this paper questions how this impacts prisoners' identities and attachments to ‘home’. Although ex‐offenders may idealise a return to the communities where they lived prior to incarceration, the ability to re‐integrate is often limited. This may be attributed to the transformations that individuals undergo while spending time in prison, such as the possession of a criminal record. In grounding this discussion in the case of a company that employs ‘ex‐offenders’, I examine the implications of belonging to such a group of ‘conventional employees’ and ‘those with criminal records’; revealing tensions that complicate matters of belonging. This paper therefore posits the prison as a kind of ‘homeland’ that continues to significantly shape one's identity following their out‐migration. Those leaving prison find themselves unable to display conventional attachments to the outside society, while performing a dystopian relationship with the prison homeland, allowing for a consideration of what I have termed the ‘prisoner dyspora’.

Compounded Disadvantage: Race, Incarceration, and Wage Growth

Spending time in prison has become an increasingly common life event for low-skill minority men in the United States. The Bureau of Justice Statistics now estimates that one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. A growing body of work implicates the prison system in contemporary accounts of racial inequality across a host of social, health, economic, and political domains. However, comparatively little work has examined the impact of the massive increase in the prison system—and growing inequality in exposure to the prison system—on racial inequality over the life course. Using a unique data set drawn from state administrative records, this project examines how spending time in prison affects wage trajectories for a cohort of men over a 14-year period. Multilevel growth curve models show no evidence of racial divergence in wages in quarters leading up to incarceration. However, after release, wages grow at a 21 percent slower rate for black compared to white ex-inmates. Blacks also enjoy fewer wage returns to work history compared to their white counterparts. This research broadens our understanding of the sources of racial stratification over the life course and underscores the relevance of recent policy interventions in the lives of low-skilled minority men.

Sir Thomas Benger: Ups and Downs of a Master of the Revels

WHEN Lord Protector Somerset fell from power in 1549, his steward of thirteen years, Sir John Thynne, also lost his position at court. After paying fines, forfeiting property, and twice spending time in prison, Thynne withdrew in the early 1550s to Wiltshire, where he dedicated himself to what would be his life's work, the building of Longleat House.1 Thynne's re-location made him more dependent than ever before on his London contacts in order to conduct his legal and business affairs there and to stay abreast of current events in Europe and at court. Because the ‘newsletters’ he received sometimes also reported not only on politics, but also on theatrical entertainments, they shed new light on masques devised by Sir Thomas Benger in the 1560s and on the impact of these entertainments on his career as Master of the Revels. Appointed to that office by warrant on 18 January 1560,2 Benger was immediately under pressure to produce shows appropriate for the celebration of the marriage on Sunday, 25 February of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, and Frances Newton, one of the chamberers of Queen Elizabeth's privy chamber. As one of the letters in the Thynne correspondence makes clear, Benger was up to the occasion. William Honing, who had also lost his position as Clerk of the Privy Council when Somerset fell but continued as one of the clerks of the Signet at this time,3 wrote to Sir John Thynne on 28 February. After noting that the couple solemnly married in the presence of the queen and most of the nobility, Honing reported that ‘that night we had a solempne maske & on shroftewesdaye night a handsom shewe of trivmphe in the hawle besides a fayre maske.’4 Presumably the masques to which Honing alluded included some of those that the accounts of the Revels Office document: one of Nusquams or Clowns for men, another of Actaeon and his hunters for men, and one of Diana and her nymphs for women.5 Honing adds to our knowledge of these court festivities by indicating that there was also a ‘triumph’, that is, ‘a masque-like revel that combined dramatic action with martial combat’6—a form of entertainment that was one of Benger's favourite courtly devices. From Honing's letter we now know that Sir Thomas Benger's career as Master of the Revels began on a high note, for Honing wrapped up his report of the masques by telling Thynne of their impact on Benger's reputation: ‘The newe Mr of the revelles … hath wonne his spurres by his gay devises.’

Incarceration and the Legitimate Labor Market: Examining Age-Graded Effects on Employment and Wages

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. inmate population has increased dramatically, and the penal system has acquired growing attention in accounts of recent trends in economic stratification. As the prison system has expanded, its population has aged; incarceration rates have risen sharpest among older age groups. A large body of research documents differences in criminal offending and incarceration over the life course, but little attention has been paid to how the effects of spending time in prison depend on the timing of incarceration in the life course. Using state administrative data that provide significant variance in the age of offenders, this article investigates how the timing of incarceration in the life course influences its effects on post-release employment and wages. We do not find consistent evidence that incarceration effects vary by age at admission. Instead, incarceration appears to have important consequences for employment and wage outcomes regardless of when individuals are admitted to prison. Even the most motivated offenders suffer sizeable and significant wage penalties and, over time, decreased likelihood of employment. These findings underscore the relevance of legal and institutional shifts associated with carceral expansion and the aging of the inmate population for life course theories of criminal desistance, accounts of labor market inequality, and prisoner reentry programs.

SHOULD CRIMINAL HISTORY RECORDS BE UNIVERSALLY AVAILABLE?

At current incarceration rates, roughly 9% of all males born today will serve time in prison at some point in their lives. By race and ethnicity, the comparable figures are 4% for white males, 16% for Hispanic males, and 28% for black males (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997). Ample research now documents that having spent time in prison worsens one’s employment prospects through several potential channels. First, employers are strongly averse to hiring ex-offenders, a finding that has been born out in both audit studies (Pager, 2003) as well as employer interviews (Holzer et al., 2004). Second, spending time in prison may prohibit the accumulation of valuable work experience and even erode one’s labor market skills. In conjunction with the large increases in U.S. incarceration rates in recent decades, these facts suggest that criminal history records represent an increasingly important barrier to employment for young, less-skilled men. Moreover, given racial disparities in incarceration rates, the increasing salience of this characteristic is likely to exacerbate racial inequality in employment and earnings. In their provocative analysis, Kurlychek et al. (2006) raise the important question of whether unfettered employer access can be justified by the legitimate concerns of employers. More specifically, they assess whether the rate at which young offenders desist from offending with time since the last offense merits limiting employer access to arrest and conviction information for sufficiently distant past offenses. This question is important and timely given the large increase in the pool of ex-offenders (by some estimates nearly 5% of the adult male population). Moreover, as policies governing access have liberalized and information systems have advanced to the point where now several private firms offer cheap and quick criminal background checks, employers are checking the criminal history records of applicants at rates that are historically unprecedented (Holzer et al., 2004). Kurlychek et al. (2006) demonstrate that for a cohort of young men in Philadelphia the likelihood of a repeat offense declines precipitously with the time that has elapsed since the last offense. This pattern is consistent with both a causal effect of staying clean as well as a remaining population of former offenders that becomes increasingly selected with time since the