The Growth of Incarceration in the United States Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix C: Incarceration in the United States:A Research Agenda
Appendix C: Incarceration in the United States:A Research Agenda
Pages 424-434
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From page 424... ...
Much of the research on the consequences of incarceration is directed at what statisticians call the identification of causal effects -- isolating independent changes in incarceration and studying how outcomes vary as a result. Although researchers have focused on the challenge of identification, our review suggests that many of the main research priorities for the field are of a more fundamental kind, of data and measurement and of conceptualization.
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From page 425... ...
The effects of incarceration may vary greatly depending on conditions of overcrowding, the quality of health and treatment services, order and safety in specific facilities, exposure to administrative segregation, and so on. This report, particularly in Chapter 6, shows that the conditions of penal confinement vary enormously across jurisdictions, as well as across facilities within jurisdictions.
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From page 426... ...
transitional jobs programs for New York parolees assigned control group subjects to a jobs resource room. In the control condition, parolees searched online jobs databases with program staff, whereas members of the treatment group worked in subsidized employment (Redcross et al., 2009)
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From page 427... ...
offers a sharp definition of the treatment effect as it actually came to operate at the research site. THE HETEROGENEITY OF INCARCERATION EFFECTS The "effect of incarceration" is a coarsely defined quantity because the conditions of incarceration vary greatly, and the policies that yield marginal increments in incarceration also show significant variation.
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From page 428... ...
argues that the population turnover associated with incarceration may be criminogenic for the wider neighborhood, as the informal social ties that would otherwise sustain public safety are undermined. In labor markets or marriage markets with high incarceration rates, employers and prospective spouses may assume that potential employees or spouses have previously been incarcerated even when they have not, with the effect of reducing overall rates of employment or marriage.
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From page 429... ...
. In a context of high incarceration rates that are spatially concentrated, the effects of incarceration on institutional legitimacy may be more complex than the simple summation of individual beliefs.
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From page 430... ...
Something in the nature of the relationship among the state and society, race relations, and social inequality has been transformed by the substantial growth in prison and jail populations. Whatever its effects, life in poor, high-crime communities now is also characterized by very high levels of criminal justice supervision in addition to well-documented social problems of unemployment, housing insecurity, nonmarital births, family complexity, high school dropouts, and so on.
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From page 431... ...
Research on urban ecology and inequality and on social exclusion in poor European communities argues that each factor, in a setting of clustered disadvantages, may reduce opportunity and social mobility only a little, but a whole cluster of disadvantages may have a much larger impact. Thus, the reproduction of social inequality and persistent poverty results not only from historic levels of poverty but also from the myriad social conditions with which poverty is correlated.
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From page 432... ...
For example, it is nearly impossible to analyze variation in incarceration outcomes by type of criminal conviction (beyond broad violent versus nonviolent distinctions available in only a few data sets) , security level of the confinement institution, or reentry services utilized after release.
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From page 433... ...
At birth and age 1, the measures of paternal incarceration are very limited, with only fathers currently incarcerated being counted with confidence as having been incarcerated since the child's birth. Between ages 1 and 3, the measures of paternal incarceration improve markedly, with some information not only on whether the father is currently incarcerated but also on whether he was incarcerated since the last interview, which makes it possible to easily run a fixed effects model (or other fairly rigorous models)
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From page 434... ...
While analysis of the implementation of specific sentencing policies is a key supplement to understanding policy effects, opportunities for analysis across jurisdictions and over time would nevertheless be important for extending understanding of the crime and other social effects of the precise levers driving variation in incarceration rates.
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