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    2. / Research / Recent Publications

Publications

2020

By Faculty

Zgoba, K., & Clear, T. R. (2020). A review of the reality of violent criminal offending and the administration of justice. Criminal Justice Policy Review.

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

By Faculty

Clear, T. R., & Frost, N. (2020). Coercive mobility in an era of declining prison populations. In Criminal justice theory: Explanations and effects, Johnson, C.L.,  Chouhy, C., & Cochran, J. (eds). Advances in criminological theory, 26. New York: Routledge.

Criminal Justice Theory: Explanations and Effects undertakes a systematic study of theories of the criminal justice system, which historically have received very little attention from scholars. This is a glaring omission given the risk of mass imprisonment, the increasing presence of police in inner-city communities, and the emergence of new policy initiatives aimed at improving the... Learn More

By Faculty

Yi, Y., Edwards, F.R., & Wildeman, C. (2020).  Cumulative prevalence of confirmed maltreatment and foster care placement for US children by race/ethnicity, 2011 – 2016.  American Journal of Public Health, 110, 704-709.

Objectives. To estimate the cumulative prevalence of confirmed child maltreatment and foster care placement for US children and changes in prevalence between 2011 and 2016.Methods. We used synthetic cohort life tables and data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System and the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System and population counts from the... Learn More

By Faculty

Wildeman, C., Edwards F.R., & Wakefield, S. (2020).  The Cumulative prevalence of termination of parental rights for U.S. children, 2000-2016.  Child Maltreatment, 25, 32-42.

Recent research has used synthetic cohort life tables to show that having a Child Protective Services investigation, experiencing confirmed maltreatment, and being placed in foster care are more common for American children than would be expected based on daily or annual rates for these events. In this article, we extend this literature by using synthetic... Learn More

By Faculty

Wakefield, S., & Andersen, L. H. (2020). Pretrial detention and the costs of system overreach for employment and family life. Sociological Science, 7,  342-366.

Pretrial detention, or incarceration prior to a legal finding of criminal responsibility, is common the world over. In most countries, between 10 and 40 percent of all prisoners are pretrial or remand detainees. The United States holds the largest absolute number of detainees, but the Americas and parts of Asia have increased their rates of... Learn More

By Faculty

Lageson, S. (2020). Digital punishment: Privacy, stigma, and the harms of data-driven criminal justice. Oxford University Press.

The proliferation of data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected by law enforcement and courts, posted on government websites, re-posted on social media,... Learn More

By Faculty

Lageson, S. (2020). The purgatory of digital punishment. Slate.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re accurate—criminal records are all over the internet, where anyone can find them. And everyone does. On a frozen December day in Minneapolis, William walked into a free legal aid seminar, to try to fix his criminal record. Lumbering toward a lawyer, his arms full of paperwork, William tried to explain... Learn More

By Faculty

Lageson, S. (2020). How criminal background checks lead to discrimination against millions of Americans. Washington Post.

As the criminal justice system comes under scrutiny, our national reckoning should include reining in the outsize influence that police and courts wield in the lives of millions of people outside the formal legal system. In particular, records created by police and prosecutors are routinely accessed in background checks — and regularly used to discriminate... Learn More

By Faculty

Corda, A., & Lageson, S. (2020). Disordered punishment: Workaround technologies of criminal records disclosure and the rise of a new penal entrepreneurialism. British Journal of Criminology 60(2):245-264.

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

By Faculty

Hagan, J., McCarthy, B., & Herda, D. (2020). What the study of legal cynicism and crime can tell us about reliability, validity, and versatility in law and social science research. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 16.

We call for a further appreciation of the versatility of concepts and methods that increase the breadth and diversity of work on law and social science. We make our point with a review of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism’s value, like other important concepts, lies in its versatility as well as its capacity for replication. Several... Learn More

By Faculty

McCarthy, B., Hagan, J. & Herda, D. (2020).  Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and complains about abuse of police power.  Criminology.

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighborhood variation in complaints about police misconduct. Using... Learn More

By Faculty, By Students

Jacobsen, S.K., Miller, J. & Bhardwaj, N.* (2020). Gender, racial threat, and perceived risk in an urban university setting.  Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 57(5), 612-639.

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

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