As criminal legal reform sweeps the country, the mug shot has rightly come up for re-evaluation. Taken at horrible moments in people’s lives, these photos have been deployed across the internet for public shaming and extortion. The images reinforce racial stereotypes and imply criminality — although the only thing the photos tell us is whom the police decided to arrest.... Learn More
The privatization of punishment is a well-established phenomenon in modern criminal justice operations. Less understood are the market and technological forces that have dramatically reshaped the creation and sharing of criminal record data in recent years. Analysing trends in both the United States and Europe, we argue that this massive shift is cause to reconceptualize... Learn More
We provide new insights about the role of gender, race, and place in perceived risk and fear of crime and discuss the possible boundaries of the shadow of sexual assault thesis, which attributes women’s higher levels of fear to their underlying fear of rape across a variety of ecological contexts. Analyses are based on data... Learn More
This research uses experimental methods to gauge how different facets of essentialist thinking toward (1) types of offending and (2) biosocial risk factors for criminality predict lay punishment support. A randomized between‐subjects experiment using contrastive vignettes was conducted with members of the general public (N = 897). Overall, as hypothesized, aspects of essentialist thinking, particularly informativeness,... Learn More
Criminal courts in the United States engage defendants with Limited English Proficiency on a regular basis. However, we know little about how court‐appointed interpreters shape case‐level routines and dispositions, nor how these interpreters navigate their immediate courtroom environment. We draw on observations of bail hearings (N=647) conducted in 2015–16 in three arraignment courts in New... Learn More
Contextually salient social identities are those that individuals may not think of often but that may be temporarily activated by relevant situational cues. We hypothesized that victim, one of many identities people may possess, is a contextually salient identity that operates both implicitly and explicitly. To test this hypothesis, the present research tests the effect... Learn More
The current study, using a multi-factorial survey experiment with a sample of the general public (N=800), investigates if and how types of risk information on crime and public safety, such as maps, graphs, or tables, commonly used and communicated by law enforcement elicit dual-process (affective and cognitive) risk information processing in risk-based decision-making, and if... Learn More
The purpose of the paper is to provide data and theory to support three propositions: Incarceration rates have grown in concentrated ways, especially effecting poor minority males who come from impoverished neighborhoods. High levels of incarceration, concentrated in impoverished neighborhoods, damage the social capital of those who live there, destabilizing the capacity for informal social... Learn More
Policy makers have recently been exploring methods to reduce incarceration. Most current proposals for reducing incarceration exclude people in prison who were convicted of violent crimes. This article considers violence exclusion from criminal justice reform by examining a sample released from New Jersey’s prisons (n = 375). We assess the hidden nature of the violence... Learn More
Statistics regarding prisons are taken from various reports of the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice. With 50 states following 50 different patterns, there is much heterogeneity in the actual way these eras played out “on the ground.” But these dates and dynamics are a good representation of national trends. These... Learn More
