Criminology & Criminal Justice
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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 THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE IN DRUG CASES: A MULTI-METHOD STUDY OF DISCRETION AND SENTENCING IN TEXAS(2017) Lee, Jacqueline; Johnson, Brian D; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While guilty pleas dominate criminal sentencing, researchers are still working to understand the inner workings of plea bargaining. Furthermore, much sentencing research focuses on guideline jurisdictions and many readily-available datasets do not include information on evidence or arrest circumstances, which are likely important for prosecutorial decisions. This dissertation starts to fill these gaps with a multi-method study using newly collected set of drug cases from a large, urban county in a state (Texas) with an indeterminate sentencing structure. Cocaine is particularly salient given its role in the War on Drugs and little is known about how drug cases are currently processed in state criminal courts. Practitioners in this jurisdiction depict a casual bargaining process that occurs in the vast majority of cases. Plea bargaining is described as a haggling process much like car buying and each defense attorney has their own personal negotiation strategy. Descriptions of “typical” cocaine defendants vary, but most participants believe that evidence and criminal history are the most important factors for bargaining. Interviews further reveal that popular operationalization of “criminal history” may be lacking, there are several layers of control over assistant district attorneys, and practitioners favor the indeterminate sentencing structure currently in place. With regards to evidence, cash seized at arrest, a search being performed, and selling to the police are particularly relevant. Further, larger substance quantity predicts a more serious distribution charge but does not impact charge reductions. For sentence length, drug quantity’s main role seems to be to place offenders into statutory categories; once in these categories, quantity is less impactful. Few extralegal covariates are predictive of charge type decisions, charge reductions, or sentence length, though descriptive statistics show minority defendants to be overwhelming majority of this sample. This project highlights a need for further detailed data collection and replication in additional jurisdictions, the value of qualitative research, and a need to better understand the role of defendants and their attorneys in court outcomes. A number of policy implications can also be gleaned from these results, including a potential inspection of quantity ranges in controlled substance laws and negotiation training for defense attorneys.Item Examining General Deterrence Using Data from the National Football League(2014) Greenman, Sarah; Paternoster, Raymond; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To date, research studies have found only mild support for classic deterrence theory with the greatest support for increased certainty, little support for increased severity, and scant research on the effect of increased celerity. Much of this prior literature has used scenario-based data, relied heavily on student samples, and explored rule breaking behavior over relatively short time periods. Finally, the slow pace of punishment within the criminal justice system potentially reduces any existing deterrent effect of the certainty and severity of punishment. This dissertation seeks to address these limitations of prior deterrence studies by using 13 years of data (2000-2012) from the National Football League consisting of rule breakers who are punished with penalties and monetary fines almost immediately upon discovery of the infraction. The main question driving this research is whether there is evidence of general deterrence. Specifically, this dissertation seeks to determine whether prior punishment reduces current rule-breaking behavior. To address this question, this research explores the effect of on-field penalties and post-game fines on behavior within the National Football League at both the league and team levels. The dataset has several rare characteristics including: large variety and detail in the types of punishment administered, an opportunity to directly observe the effect of punishment, the near immediate imposition of punishment, and the transmission of almost perfect information about punishment. The primary finding is that there is no evidence of general deterrence in the National Football League, independent of control variables. Specifically, penalties and fines do not appear to prevent future rule breaking behavior. In general, when controlling for particular seasons, opponents, or the record of a team, the effects of penalties and fines loose significance and approach zero. The different controls for seasons, opponents, or record are fairly consistent in their statistical significance for all penalties and violent penalties, although it appears that violent penalties vary less according to these outside factors than all types of penalties. In sum, this dissertation finds no evidence that punishment affects future rule-breaking behavior at either the team or league level and thus, does not provide support for general deterrence.