UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item Perpetuating Disadvantage: An Investigation of Racial Bias Embedded in Criminal History Records(2024) Houlihan, Sean Patrick; Johnson, Brian D; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Criminal history records are an integral component of the criminal legal system. They are typically seen as unbiased measures of prior offending that inform assessments of an individual’s dangerousness and risk of reoffending. Criminal records are incorporated into the decision-making calculus of legal actors such as police, prosecutors, and judges. Moreover, they have significant influence in the development of legal policies across all sectors of the system. In consequence, individuals with criminal history records face significant disadvantages in the likelihood of contact with the legal system and subsequent criminal punishment. Scaling legal decision making and policy to an individual’s prior criminal history is largely implemented to focus resources on apprehending and punishing the most dangerous offenders. For this to be accomplished effectively, criminal history records are required to be unbiased representations of prior offending. However, the collective evidence of racial and ethnic inequality in the criminal legal system calls into question the neutrality of criminal history records. Rather than being unbiased, criminal history records may instead be a source of systemic racism, as these records are merely reflections of criminal legal outcomes often shown to be subject to racial and ethnic inequality.Utilizing a framework that outlines the pathways for decision making and policy structures to produce inequalities in legal outcomes, the current dissertation examines the extent to which criminal history records contain racial and ethnic bias. Theoretical predictions are tested using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Specifically, NLSY97 data are used to test for racial and ethnic differences in outcomes related to criminal records, net of self-reported engagement in delinquency. The results provide mixed evidence of racial and ethnic disadvantage in outcomes related to arrest, conviction, and incarceration. Evidence of inequality in the outcomes of interest is more consistent across race than across ethnicity. Both racial and ethnic inequalities, when evidenced, were mediated by external factors. In particular, measures of individual risk factors and socioeconomic status strongly mediated the relationship between race, ethnicity, and legal outcomes. Despite nuances, findings from the current study largely support the theoretical supposition that criminal history records are not unbiased measures of prior offending but are instead imperfect proxies that are influenced by inequalities in the apprehension and punishment of individuals in the criminal legal system. Future research is needed to further explore the extent to which criminal records are embedded with bias and compound racial and ethnic inequality.Item Race, Disadvantage, and the Probability of Arrest: A Multi-Level Study of Baltimore Neighborhoods (2016-2018)(2024) Placzkowski, Madisen; Velez, Maria; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the relationship among neighborhood racial composition, concentrated disadvantage, and the probability of an arrest following a Part 1 crime report. Racial threat theory predicts that as the proportion of Black residents increases over time (dynamic proxy for racial threat), the use of formal social control will increase, while the benign neglect hypothesis predicts that formal social control will diminish in areas with relatively higher proportions of Black residents (static proxy for racial threat). I test racial threat theory and the benign neglect hypothesis for both citizen-initiated and officer-initiated Part 1 crime reports, using Baltimore Police Department crime reports and arrest data, as well as block group characteristics from the 2011-2015 American Community Survey. Through multi-level modeling and including both static and dynamic measures of racial threat, I find that proportion Black is negatively associated with the probability of arrest; concentrated disadvantage has no effect. This finding supports the benign neglect hypothesis and is robust to alternative model specifications, including controlling for victim gender and race. Implications for policy and theories in the conflict tradition are discussed.Item Innateness in the Sciences: Separating Nature, Nurture, and Nativism(2015) Engelbert, Mark; Rey, Georges; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scientists across the life sciences routinely appeal to notions of "innate" or "genetic" traits to explain developmental phenomena, and the idea of "innate" differences among people has figured prominently in some explanations of observed social inequality. This dissertation is an analysis of these concepts, which proceeds in two parts. Part I explores various philosophical issues related to the use of innateness as an explanatory concept, while Part II examines controversial claims that genetic differences among racial groups account for observed social inequality. I argue throughout that much disagreement about innateness arises from innocuous differences in explanatory goals and interests among different scientific research programs. Nevertheless, some proponents of genetic racial differences rely on understandings of "genetic" traits that conflict with the moral commitments of a just society. Part I begins with arguments for a contextual and pragmatic approach to scientific explanation: in order for an explanation to be a good one, it must cite causes that are relevant to our interests in the explanatory context. I then apply this framework to biology and psychology, showing how different contexts call for different interpretations of innateness. I conclude Part I by responding to arguments that aim to establish a single meaning for "innate"/"genetic" across all explanatory contexts. Part II examines the use of "innate" and "genetic" concepts in developmental biology and population genetics, and applies the lessons of this examination to debates about alleged racial differences in genes for intelligence. I show that "hereditarians," who argue for innate racial differences, employ an explanatory framework that abstracts away from substantial complexity in developmental interactions between genes and environments. While this framework is adequate for certain purposes, it is poorly suited to designing interventions capable of eliminating racial IQ differences and attendant social inequality. I propose an alternative, mechanistic framework that promotes understanding of developmental complexity and design of effective interventions. I argue that a full commitment to racial equality demands that we adopt this latter framework, and to the extent that hereditarians resist doing so, their work exhibits some racist tendencies.