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Abstract:
Since the early 1970s, the number of individuals in jails and state and federal prisons has grown exponentially. Today, nearly 2 million people are currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails. The growth of imprisonment has been borne disproportionately by African-American and Hispanic men from poor communities in urban areas. Rising incarceration should have greatly reduced the crime rate. After all, incapacitated offenders were no longer free to rob, assault, steal, or commit other crimes. However, no large scale reduction in crime was detected until the mid-1990's. The failure of crime rates to decline commensurately with increases in the rate and severity of punishment reveals a paradox of punishment: recent experiments have shown that among persons of color, especially those who are poor or reside in poor neighborhoods, harsher punishment has produced iatrogenic or counterdeterrent effects.

Two processes are identified that produced punishment paradoxes or defiance of legal sanctions. First, the long-term and spatially concentrated shift of social and economic resources from informal social controls to formal legal controls, particularly incarceration, weakens localized informal social controls and creates recurring cycles of discontrol. Neighborhood and work contexts offer social status and mete out shame and social opprobria for wrongdoing. However, stable rates of inequality and deprivation in minority communities compromise three dimensions of social control: social capital or regulation, "stakes in conformity" through marriage and work, and participation in political institutions. Second, high rates of punishment produce "stigma saturation" where punishment loses its contingent value that lends credibility to its claims of fairness and proportionality. As the social and cultural distance between the punishers and the punished widens, respect for the legitimacy of punishment suffers. Dissatisfaction with both procedural and distributive justice can motivate legal cynicism and noncompliance, and these processes are intensified in contexts of weak social control and high legal control.

As legal control replaces informal social control, the state's role in socialization and the fostering of moral communities diminishes. The devolving of the public sector involvement in socialization further moots the reintegrative functions of punishment. This restructuring and devaluation of government, accompanied by the restructuring and fragmentation of economic activity in poor communities, complicates the achievement of a social consensus on the rationale of punishment in a broader context of social control, and limits the efficacy of informal processes of social regulation.

Abstract:
Both legal scholars and social scientists have leveraged new research evidence on the deterrent effects of the death penalty into calls for more executions that they claim will save lives and new rules to remove procedural roadblocks and hasten executions. However, the use of total intentional homicides to estimate deterrence is a recurring aggregation error in the death penalty debate in the U.S.: by studying whether executions and death sentences affect all homicides, these studies fail to identify a more plausible target of deterrence - namely, those homicides that are punishable by death. By broadening the targets of deterrence, these studies overestimate the number of murders that are averted by the threat of execution. We address this error by focusing on the subset of homicides that have been defined statutorily as capital-eligible to provide a more sensitive indicator of the deterrent effects of the death penalty. We use a public-use data archive based on police descriptions of homicides from 1976-2003 to construct rates of potentially death-eligible killings. We estimate that less than 25% of total criminal homicides are eligible for the capital sanction under the range of current state statutes. We find no changes over time in the rate of these capital-eligible homicides in death penalty states, despite fluctuations in capital punishment over time. Nor are there differences capital-eligible homicides between death penalty and non-death penalty states. We find similar flat trends in Texas, and also in Harris County, the county that supplies the most death cases in Texas. Using hierarchical regression models to fit growth curve trajectories over time and with a rich set of covariates that account for competing influences on homicide rates, we find no deterrent effects either from the presence of the death penalty or from variation over time in the dosage of any of its components in the states. Similar models for Texas counties produced identical results. The results show that none of the distinctive patterns one might expect from marginal death penalty deterrence can be found in the three decades since Gregg. Where the risk of execution goes up in a death penalty state, the death-eligible cases where that risk should make a difference decline no more than the non-death-eligible cases, nor is the proportion of all homicides that risk a capital sanction in death states any smaller in those states than it is in states without any death penalty. The rate of capital-eligible homicides is insensitive over time to variations in the incidence of executions or to the large swings from one decade to the next in the number or rate of non-death-eligible killings. Our search for death penalty deterrence where it should be a strong influence on homicide rates has produced consistent results: the marginal deterrent effect of the threat or example of execution on those cases at risk for such punishment is invisible.

Abstract:
Patterns of "stop and frisk" activity by police across New York City neighborhoods reflect competing theories of aggressive policing. "Broken Windows" theory suggests that neighborhoods with greater concentrations of physical and social disorder should evidence higher stop and frisk activity, especially for "quality of life" crimes. However, while disorder theory informs quality of life policing strategies, observed patterns of stop and frisk activity suggest that neighborhood characteristics such as racial composition, poverty levels and the extent of social disorganization are stronger predictors of race- and crime-specific police stops than is the presence of "broken windows." Furthermore, stops of minority citizens more often failed to meet Terry standards of reasonable suspicion, suggesting the conflation of race with the strategic design of "order maintenance policing."

Our empirical evidence suggests that policing is not about disorderly places, nor about improving the quality of life, but about policing poor people in poor places. This strategy contradicts the policy rationale derived from Broken Windows theory, and deviates from its original emphasis on community conditions by instead focusing disproportionately on minority citizens. Racially disparate policing reinforces perceptions by citizens in minority neighborhoods that they are under non-particularized suspicion and are therefore targeted for aggressive stop and frisk policing. Such broad targeting raises concerns about the legitimacy of law, threatens to weaken citizen participation in the co-production of security, and undercuts the broader social norms goals of contemporary policing.

Abstract:
Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is ineffective at deterring or controlling future crimes. This legislative activism has reshaped the boundaries of the juvenile court, and animated calls for its elimination. Yet these developments have taken place in a near vacuum of empirical analysis of the efficacy of these measures to increase punishment or reduce crime. Jurisprudential analyses of the fit between the traditional doctrines of immaturity and reduced culpability of juveniles also has lagged far behind the pace of legislative change. The redrawing of the boundaries of the juvenile court also has not reflected new knowledge on adolescent development, the legal socialization of adolescents, and their responsiveness to criminal sanctions. The new boundaries of the juvenile court also threaten to reify and intensify social and racial dimensions of criminal punishment.

To address these questions, we conducted a natural experiment to assess whether prosecuting and sentencing adolescent felony offenders in the criminal court leads to harsher punishment, and whether that harsher punishment translates into improved public safety. We show that serious adolescent offenders prosecuted in the criminal court are likely to be rearrested more quickly and more often for violent, property and weapons offenses, and they are more often and more quickly returned to incarceration. Adolescents prosecuted and punished in the juvenile court are more likely to be rearrested for drug offenses. These results suggest that law and policy facilitating wholesale waiver or categorical exclusion of certain groups of adolescents based solely on offense and age, are ineffective at both specific deterrence of serious crime, despite political rhetoric insisting the opposite. Such laws may increase the risk of serious crimes by adolescents and young adults, by heavily mortgaging their possibilities to deflect their criminal behavioral trajectory and enter a path of prosocial human development. Returning to a discretionary, judge-centered transfer policy, rather than wholesale waiver or surgical exclusion of entire categories of adolescent offenders, would limit the number of youth subjected to criminal court prosecution and harsh punishment conditions in adult corrections. A policy of discretionary transfer of only the most serious offenders, whose eligibility for transfer would be transparently assessed with full access to evidence and expertise, would ensure proportional punishment for the few adolescents whose severe crimes demand greater punishment than is available in the juvenile court, and whose punishment as juveniles might corrode the legitimacy of the juvenile court.

Criminal Sanctions, Juvenile Offenders, Waiver, Public Safety

Abstract:
The social concentration of incarceration among non-whites is a recurring theme in criminal justice research and legal scholarship. Despite robust evidence of its social concentration, few studies have examined its spatial concentration, or the effects of spatially concentrated incarceration over time on individuals and social areas. In this article, we examine the growth and spatial concentration of incarceration in police precincts and smaller homogeneous neighborhoods in New York City from 1985-96. We show that rates of incarceration spiked sharply after 1985 as crime rates rose. Higher incarceration rates persisted through the 1990s, and declined far more slowly after 1990 than did the sharply falling crime rates during the same period. We show that imprisonment rates are highest in the City's poorest neighborhoods and police precincts, although not necessarily the neighborhoods with the highest overall crime rates. We also show the perverse effects of incarceration on crime rates when analyzed at the precinct level: across the time series, higher incarceration rates predict higher crime rates one year later. We show that the growth of incarceration and its persistence over time are attributed primarily to two factors: drug enforcement and structured sentencing laws that mandate imprisonment for repeat felons. Neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration invite closer and more punitive police enforcement and parole surveillance, contributing to the growing number of repeat admissions and the resilience of incarceration even as crime rates fall. Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration. We discuss three mechanisms that contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family's ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

Abstract:
This research uses a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN) initiatives on neighborhood level crime rates in Chicago. Four interventions are analyzed: (1) increased federal prosecutions for convicted felons carrying or using guns, (2) the length of sentences associated with federal prosecutions, (3) supply-side firearm policing activities, and (4) social marketing of deterrence and social norms messages through justice-style offender notification meetings. Using an individual growth curve models and propensity scores to adjust for non-random group assignment, our findings suggest that several PSN interventions are associated with greater declines of homicide in the treatment neighborhoods as compared to the control neighborhoods. The largest effect is associated with the offender notification meetings that stress individual deterrence, normative change in offender behavior, and increasing views on legitimacy and procedural justice. Possible competing hypotheses and directions for individual-level analysis are also discussed.

guns, crime, deterrence, compliance, legitimacy

Abstract:
There is a growing bipartisan consensus that flaws in America's death-penalty system have reached crisis proportions. Many fear that capital trials put people on death row who don't belong there. Others say capital appeals take too long. This report?the first statistical study ever undertaken of modern American capital appeals (4,578 of them in state capital cases between 1973 and 1995)?suggests that both claims are correct.

Capital sentences do spend a long time under judicial review. As this study documents, however, judicial review takes so long precisely because American capital sentences are so persistently and systematically fraught with error that seriously undermines their reliability.

Our 23 years worth of results reveal a death penalty system collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes. They reveal a system in which lives and public order are at stake, yet for decades has made more mistakes than we would tolerate in far less important activities. They reveal a system that is wasteful and broken and needs to be addressed.

Our central findings are as follows:

Nationally, during the 23-year study period, the overall rate of prejudicial error in the American capital punishment system was 68%. In other words, courts found serious, reversible error in nearly 7 of every 10 of the thousands of capital sentences that were fully reviewed during the period.

Capital trials produce so many mistakes that it takes three judicial inspections to catch them ?leaving grave doubt whether we do catch them all. After state courts threw out 47% of death sentences due to serious flaws, a later federal review found "serious error"?error undermining the reliability of the outcome?in 40% of the remaining sentences.

Because state courts come first and see all the cases, they do most the work of correcting erroneous death sentences. Of the 2,370 death sentences thrown out due to serious error, 90% were overturned by state judges?many of whom were the very judges who imposed the death sentence in the first place; nearly all of whom were directly beholden to the electorate; and none of whom, consequently, were disposed to overturn death sentences except for very good reason. This does not mean that federal review is unnecessary. Precisely because of the huge amounts of serious capital error that state appellate judges are called upon to catch, it is not surprising that a substantial number of the capital judgments they let through to the federal stage are still seriously flawed.

To lead to reversal, error must be serious, indeed. The most common errors?prompting a majority of reversals at the state post-conviction stage?are (1) egregiously incompetent defense lawyers who didn't even look for?and demonstrably missed?important evidence that the defendant was innocent or did not deserve to die; and (2) police or prosecutors who did discover that kind of evidence but suppressed it, again keeping it from the jury. [Hundreds of examples of these and other serious errors are collected in Appendix C and D to this Report.]

High error rates put many individuals at risk of wrongful execution: 82% of the people whose capital judgments were overturned by state post-conviction courts due to serious error were found to deserve a sentence less than death when the errors were cured on retrial; 7% were found to be innocent of the capital crime.

High error rates persist over time. More than 50% of all cases reviewed were found seriously flawed in 20 of the 23 study years, including 17 of the last 19. In half the years, including the most recent one, the error rate was over 60%.

High error rates exist across the country. Over 90% of American death-sentencing states have overall error rates of 52% or higher. 85% have error rates of 60% or higher. Three-fifths have error rates of 70% or higher.

Illinois (whose governor recently declared a moratorium on executions after a spate of death-row exonerations) does not produce atypically faulty death sentences. The overall rate of serious error found in Illinois capital sentences (66%) is very close to?and slightly lower than?the national average (68%).

Catching so much error takes time?a national average of 9 years from death sentence to the last inspection and execution. By the end of the study period, that average had risen to 10.6 years. In most cases, death row inmates wait for years for the lengthy review procedures needed to uncover all this error. Then, their death sentences are reversed.

This much error, and the time needed to cure it, impose terrible costs on taxpayers, victims' families, the judicial system, and the wrongly condemned. And it renders unattainable the finality, retribution and deterrence that are the reasons usually given for having a death penalty.

Erroneously trying capital defendants the first time around, operating the multi-tiered inspection process needed to catch the mistakes, warehousing thousands under costly death row conditions in the meantime, and having to try two out of three cases again is irrational.

This report describes the extent of the problem. A subsequent report will examine its causes and their implications for resolving the death penalty crisis.

Abstract:
Past research indicates that legitimacy encourages compliance with the law. This study extends consideration of the influence of legitimacy by exploring its impact on cooperation with the police and with neighbors to combat crime in one's community. It uses a panel study design and focuses upon the residents of New York City. The study finds that legitimacy shapes cooperation with the police and has a lesser influence on cooperation with others in the community. Consistent with the findings of prior research, legitimacy itself is found to be linked to the justice of the procedures used by the police to exercise their authority. Finally, the study explores the influence of personal experience with the police on legitimacy and cooperation. Results suggest that experiencing procedural justice during a personal experience increases legitimacy, irrespective of the favorability of the outcome. These results suggest that the police can generally enhance their legitimacy by using fair procedures.

Legitimacy, Police, Procedural Justice

Abstract:
Since 1990, nearly every state has enacted new laws to expand the transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal courts for sentencing and punishment. What happens to adolescents once placed in the criminal justice system, the returns to crime control from these policies, and the potential violations of human rights that ensue, are the focus of this essay. The quick pace of change, the broad reach of the new laws, the potential for unintended negative outcomes, and the harsh conditions of adult punishment for juvenile offenders add new urgency to these questions. The first section discusses the tension between new laws and both jurisprudential theory and social science evidence on the culpability of adolescent offenders. Although waiver of juveniles to criminal court legally may signal the "end of childhood" for that offender, theory and research on adolescent development suggest that the developmental process is far from complete with respect to further antisocial behavior, the jurisprudential indicia of adult competencies and culpability, and the natural history of more generalized transitions from adolescence to adult social roles and behaviors. Next, I assess the returns to crime control from current policies that punish adolescent offenders as adults to reduce crime and increase public safety. Recent controlled studies suggest that while punishment in criminal court for adolescent offenders in more certain and severe, utilitarian goals of lowering juvenile crime rates have not been achieved. Increasing substantive punishment for adolescents may in fact elevate crime rates and heighten the same public safety risks that the legislation is intended to reduce. Next, these empirical results are contextualized in theories of adolescent development and criminology to locate the sources of iatrogenic effects within prevailing policies of retribution and deterrence. Punishment of adolescents as adults exposes them to high levels of violence, attenuates their socialization to prosocial norms by constraining critical developmental transitions to a prison setting, and mortgaging their work prospects through the stigma of felony conviction. Punishment as an adult is analogized to toxic exposure that sharply elevates disease risk. The fourth section discusses the implications of this theoretical tension for the jurisprudence of adolescent criminality, and the theory and future of the juvenile court. This conclusion revisits the human rights dimensions of these developments in law and policy.

Abstract:
A recent cohort of studies report deterrent effects of capital punishment that substantially exceed almost all previous estimates of lives saved by execution. Some of the new studies go further to claim that pardons, commutations, and exonerations cause murders to increase, as does trial delay. This putative life-life tradeoff is the basis for claims by legal academics and advocates of a moral imperative to aggressively prosecute capital crimes, brushing off evidentiary doubts as unreasonable cautions that place potential beneficiaries at risk of severe harm. Challenges to this "new deterrence" literature find that the evidence is too unstable and unreliable to support policy choices on capital punishment. This article identifies numerous technical and conceptual errors in the "new deterrence" studies that further erode their reliability: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider several factors such as drug epidemics that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, weak to non-existent tests of concurrent effects of incarceration, inadequate instruments to disentangle statistical confounding of murder rates with death sentences and other punishments, failure to consider the general performance of the criminal justice system as a competing deterrent, artifactual results from truncated time frames, and the absence of any direct test of the components of contemporary theoretical constructions of deterrence. Re-analysis of one of the data sets shows that even simple adjustments to the data produce contradictory results, while alternate statistical methods produce contrary estimates. But the central mistake in this enterprise is one of causal reasoning: the attempt to draw causal inferences from a flawed and limited set of observational data, the absence of direct tests of the moving parts of the deterrence story, and the failure to address important competing influences on murder. There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that pits execution against a robust set of competing explanations to identify whether it exerts a deterrent effect that is uniquely and sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the recurring epidemic cycles of murder. This and other rebukes remind us to invoke tough, neutral social science standards and commonsense causal reasoning before expanding the use of execution with its attendant risks and costs.

Abstract:
In the past two decades, nearly every state has expanded its authority and simplified its procedures to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. As a result, the use of jurisdictional transfer has grown steadily. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that punishment in juvenile courts is too lenient for serious crimes committed by adolescents. Yet there is mixed evidence that expanded transfer authority has produced more certain or severe punishments for adolescents prosecuted in criminal courts. Some empirical studies show that adolescents transferred to criminal court are more likely to be convicted, sentenced to prison, and serve longer sentences, compared to similar cases that remain in the juvenile court. Other studies show that transferred cases receive similar sentences or receive less severe punishments. In this article, we report the results of a natural experiment comparing detention, disposition and custodial sentence lengths for matched groups of adolescents charged with serious felony offenses in juvenile or criminal courts. We report that adolescents prosecuted as adults are at a greater risk of detention and incarceration, and if incarcerated, sentenced to longer sentences than adolescents in juvenile courts. Yet the disparity between outcomes in juvenile and criminal courts is not as large as the rhetoric surrounding this issue would lead one to believe. The resilience of common law doctrine of diminished culpability of adolescents is evident in the limited effects of expanded jurisdictional transfer activity on sentencing and punishment of adolescents in criminal court. We discuss the jurisprudential and social policy implications of denying adolescents the latitude of a traditionally more rehabilitative and lenient juvenile court.

Abstract:
Recent studies by police departments and researchers confirm that police stop racial and ethnic minority citizens more often than whites, relative to their proportions in the population. However, it has been argued stop rates more accurately reflect rates of crimes committed by each ethnic group, or that stop rates reflect elevated rates in specific social areas such as neighborhoods or precincts. Most of the research on stop rates and police-citizen interactions has focused on traffic stops, and analyses of pedestrian stops are rare. In this paper, we analyze data from 175,000 pedestrian stops by the New York Police Department over a fifteen-month period. We disaggregate stops by police precinct, and compare stop rates by racial and ethnic group controlling for previous race-specific arrest rates. We use hierarchical multilevel models to adjust for precinct-level variability, thus directly addressing the question of geographic heterogeneity that arises in the analysis of pedestrian stops. We find that persons of African and Hispanic descent were stopped more frequently than whites, even after controlling for precinct variability and race-specific estimates of crime participation.

criminology,hierarchical model,multilevel model,overdispersed Poisson regression,police stops,racial bias

Abstract:
In 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court set aside the death sentence of Christopher Simmons, who was 17 when he was arrested for the murder of Shirley Crook. The Simmons court held that the "evolving standards of decency" embodied in the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments barred execution of persons who committed capital crimes before their 18th birthday. This decision was based in part on the emerging legislative consensus in the states opposing execution of juvenile offenders and the infrequency with which the death penalty is imposed on juvenile offenders. The State sought a writ of certiorari, and the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. This article presents results of analyses of empirical data on the use of the death penalty for adolescent homicide offenders in state courts in the U.S. since 1990. The data show that, since 1994, when death sentences for juvenile offenders peaked, juvenile death sentences have declined significantly. In particular, the decline in juvenile death sentences since 1999 is statistically significant after controlling for the murder rate, the juvenile homicide arrest rate, and the rate of adult death sentences. This downward trend in juvenile death sentences signals that there is an evolving standard in state trial courts opposing the imposition of death sentences on minors who commit capital offenses.

Abstract:
Since 1968, violence and other crimes in New York City have followed a pattern of recurring epidemics. There have been three consecutive and contiguous cycles characterized by sharp increases in homicides and assaults to an elevated rate followed by equally steep declines to levels near the previous starting point. The most recent epidemic, from 1985-96, had the sharpest rise and steepest decline of the three epidemics. Popular explanations of the current epidemic fail to account for both the rise and fall of the decline, or for the repetitive pattern of these epidemics. In this article, we use public health data to identify factors associated with the cyclical rise and fall of homicides and non-lethal injury violence in this most recent of the three epidemics. Homicides in this period were concentrated among minority males, ages 15-24, while victimization rates for females of all ages remained stable. Gun homicides and non-lethal gun assaults accounted for all the increase and decline in interpersonal violence from 1985-95; intentional injuries caused by other means also were stable or declining over this period. Next, we use hierarchical linear regression models, with a rich set of time-varying covariates and controls for both temporal and spatial autocorrelation, to identify whether the rise and fall of homicide are explained by processes of diffusion across adjacent neighborhoods. We estimate the probabilities of homicides and assaults in a neighborhood controlling for rates of homicide or assault in the surrounding neighborhoods in the preceding year, and find that gun violence diffuses across neighborhoods over time. Epidemic patterns of violence disproportionately affected African Americans as victims of gun violence, both homicides and non-lethal gun assaults. Diffusion was strongest in neighborhoods where social control was compromised by extreme poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Concentrations of immigrant households in neighborhoods were a protective factor in suppressing the violence epidemic. We then use social contagion theories to link contagion of violence across neighborhoods to individual data on social interactions that may animate the transmission and diffusion of violence. Analyses of the social contexts and interpersonal dynamics of violent events reveals how street interactions in interpersonal disputes link individuals within and across social networks in a competition for status that is skewed by the presence of firearms. Decisions to carry, show and use weapons are based on perceptions of threat and danger, which are shaped by the presence of firearms and the potential stigma associated with non-action. These events occur across multiple contexts - bars, streetcorners, drug markets - to reinforce perceptions of risk and expectations of the threat or reality of lethal violence.

Abstract:
The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium has permitted researchers to employ state level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason this has occurred is that the use of alternative models across studies produces differing estimates of the deterrent effect. Because differences across models are not well motivated by theory, the deterrence literature is plagued by model uncertainty. We argue that the analysis of deterrent effects should explicitly recognize the presence of model uncertainty in drawing inferences. We describe methods for addressing model uncertainty and apply them to understand the disparate findings between two major studies in the deterrence literature, finding that evidence of deterrent effects appears, while not nonexistent, is weak.

Abstract:
Recent law and scholarship has claimed that the developmental limitations of adolescents affect their capacity for control and decision making with respect to crime, diminishing their culpability and reducing their exposure to punishment. Social science has focused on two concurrent adolescent developmental influence: the internalization of legal rules and norms that regulate social and antisocial behaviors, and the development of rational thought to frame behavioral choices and decisions. The interaction of these two developmental processes, and the identification of one domain of socialization and development as the primary source of motivation or restraint in adolescence, is the focus of this paper. Accordingly, we combine rational choice and legal socialization frameworks into an integrated, developmental model of recidivism. We test this framework in a sample of 1,385 adolescent felony offenders who have been interviewed at six month intervals for four years. Using hierarchical and growth curve models, we show that both legal socialization and rational choice factors influence patterns of criminal offending over time. When punishment risks and costs are salient, crime rates are lower over time. We show that procedural justice is a significant antecedent of legal socialization, but not rational choice. We also show that both mental health and developmental maturity moderate the effects of perceived crime risks and costs on criminal offending.

crime, rational choice, adolescent development, procedural justice

Abstract:
Research on children and the law has recently renewed its focus on the development of children's ties to law and legal actors. We identify the developmental process through which these relations develop as legal socialization, a process that unfolds during childhood and adolescence as part of a vector of developmental capital that promotes compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors. In this paper, we show that ties to the law and perceptions of law and legal actors among children and adolescents change over time and age. We show that neighborhood contexts and experiences with legal actors shape the outcomes of legal socialization. Children report lower ratings of legitimacy of the law and greater legal cynicism when they view interactions with legal actors as unfair and harsh. We show that perceived legitimacy of law and legal authorities shapes compliance with the law, and that these effects covary with social contexts including neighborhood. We identify neighborhood differences in this relationship that reflect differential experiences of children with criminal justice authorities and other social control agents. The results suggest that legal actors may play a role in socialization processes that lead to compliance with or rejection of legal and social norms.

Abstract:
In Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that mentally retarded people lacked a range of developmental capacities that were necessary to establish the higher threshold of culpability for the execution of murderers in the Court's death penalty jurisprudence. The Court emphasized that the impairments of mental retardation lead to a . . . special risk of wrongful execution. The Court had previously concluded that the limitations in developmental capacities that characterize mentally retarded defendants also characterize a significant proportion of adolescent offenders. These parallels invite an extension of the Atkins Court's reasoning to juveniles by highlighting the diminished capacity for culpability common to offenders of both groups.

This Article addresses the logic and substance of an extension of Atkins to juveniles. Extending Atkins to juveniles requires analyses showing that: (a) many of the developmental characteristics that establish the diminished culpability of the mentally retarded also characterize adolescents, (b) the age-specific competencies for adolescents that define maturity and in turn culpability can be identified and then reliably measured, and (c) the age at which adolescents attain these competencies and when their developmental trajectory begins - that is, the age at which adolescent development measurably departs, both substantively and permanently, from the stable and flat developmental trajectories of the mentally retarded. The Article discusses recent evidence on the developmental capacities of adolescents showing that that many of the same deficits in cognitive and neuropsychological developmental that define retardation also are common markers of adolescence, and elements of immaturity long recognized in death penalty jurisprudence: diminished capacities to (a) understand and process information, (b) learn from experience and mistakes, engage in logical reasoning, (c) foresee the consequences of their actions, (d) control impulses, (e) understand the reactions of others, and (f) resist peer influence.

Accordingly, the Article begins by decomposing the diagnostic category of retardation into specific dimensions of underdevelopment. Next, the Article analyzes the correspondence of these dimensions of underdevelopment among the retarded to legal standards about immaturity and culpability of adolescents. If children are in fact less formed developmentally than adults, they lack full capacity and therefore are less culpable than adults. Empirical research shows that a significant number of juveniles have a pattern of developmental and cognitive incapacities that places them well below the threshold of culpability that also exempts the mentally retarded under Atkins. In addition, adolescents will vary in the age when they realize these threshold developmental competencies that constitute maturity and in turn culpability, complicating attribution of full culpability to adolescents at the higher threshold set in death penalty jurisprudence. Recent evidence also suggests that brain development in areas controlling the developmental components of maturity may be incomplete at age 18 or beyond.

The Article concludes because defendants with diminished competence and culpability, like the mentally retarded, are immature at age 18 and beyond, that there is sufficient evidence in social science to create a categorical exemption from capital punishment for adolescents who commit murders before the age of 18. The alternative - creating exempted categories such as the immature - invites disputes about how to reliably establish membership. Such classifications will be unreliable and inevitably suffer from the subjective risks of misdiagnosis, testing error, instrument unreliability, or other limits of behavioral science. To ignore the logic of Atkins elevates the risk of an erroneous attribution of cognitive and volitional maturity to a seemingly competent adolescent whose developmental reality may be exactly the opposite, raising the terrible risk of a death sentence where it is not deserved.

Abstract:
Recent research on procedural justice and legitimacy suggests that compliance with the law is best secured not by mere threat of force, but by fostering beliefs in the fairness of the legal systems and in the legitimacy of legal actors. To date, however, this research has been based on general population surveys and more banal types of law violating behavior (such as unpaid parking tickets, excessive noise, etc.). Thus, while we know why normal people obey the law, we do not have similar knowledge as it pertains to the population most likely to commit serious violent crimes. This study fills this void by using a unique survey of active offenders in Chicago called the Chicago Gun Project (CGP). Part of a larger evaluation effort of the Project Safe Neighborhoods program, the CGP posed a series of individual, neighborhood, legitimacy, and social network questions to a sample of 141 offenders in 52 Chicago neighborhoods. The CGP is designed to understand how the perceptions of the law and social networks of offenders influence their understanding of the law and subsequent law violating behavior. Our findings suggest that while criminals as a whole have negative opinions of the law and legal authority, the sample of gun offenders (just like non-criminals) are more likely to comply with the law when they believe in (a) the substance of the law, and (b) the legitimacy of legal actors, especially the police. Moreover, we find that opinions of compliance to the law are not uniformly distributed across the sample population. In other words, not all criminals are alike in their opinions of the law. Gang members - but especially gang members with social networks saturated with criminal associates - are significantly less likely to view the law and its agents as a legitimate form of authority. However, those individuals (including gang member) with less saturated criminal networks, actually tend to have more positive opinions of the law, albeit these opinions are still overall negative.

Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, Social Networks, Project Safe Neighborhoods, Chicago, Gun Violence

Abstract:
For decades, violence, drugs and public housing have been closely linked in political culture and popular imagination. In 1990, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) made funds available to public housing authorities to combat drug and crime problems. This program, the Drug Elimination Program (DEP) combined several strategies under one administrative umbrella: police enforcement, drug treatment, drug prevention, youth and gang outreach, community organizing, integrated health and social service agencies, and tenant mobilization projects. In New York, the Housing Authority spent $165 million on DEP in its 330 public housing sites between 1990 and 1996. Yet there has been little research on this large investment, either in New York City or nationwide. In this study, we examined the effects of the DEP intervention at three levels of complementary theoretical relevance: the public housing development itself, the neighborhood in which public housing is situated, and the police precinct that surrounds each public housing project. We used spatial analyses and hierarchical regressions to estimate DEP effects on drug and crime in public housing sites and their surrounding neighborhoods. We show that crime and drug problems were reduced significantly in the immediate neighborhoods and police precincts surrounding the public housing sites, but crime and drug problems in public housing sites were unaffected by DEP interventions. The absence of effects within public housing reflects the details of the DEP strategies, with its disproportionate allocation of funds to policing strategies compared to demand reduction and informal social control programs. DEP police efforts were nominally focused on public housing sites, but in reality were diffused in the NYPD's broader administrative units to provide resources that benefited law enforcement generally. Seen this way, DEP was an important and strategically valuable supplement to the NYPD's strategic response to a particularly acute violence and crime epidemic, but did little to alter the basic social organization of crime and drugs within public housing sites. We argue for an intervention model that promotes collective action between residents and legal actors, interactions that promote citizen compliance and cooperation with police. The police depend heavily on the voluntary cooperation of citizens to fight crime, and DEP created disincentives for cooperation. This social norms approach would invite policing of drug problems in the context of a legitimacy-focused approach that promotes citizen-based regulation of crime and disorder.

Abstract:
Rising juvenile crime rates over three decades spurred legal mobilizations within many state legislatures to vastly expand the transfer of adolescent criminal offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court. The proliferation of transfer regimes over the past several decades calls into question the very rationale for a juvenile court. Both the boundaries for transfer and mechanisms to effect it were redesigned. This redrawing of the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems resulted in a wholesale movement of large numbers of juveniles into the adult system, while stripping juvenile court judges of the discretion to make retail individualized assessments of culpability and dangerousness. About one in four juvenile offenders below the age of 18 now are prosecuted in adult court, most of whom are excluded from juvenile court in states where the age boundary between juvenile and criminal court has been lowered to sixteen or seventeen. The legislative line drawing process assumes that modern adolescent offenders are now criminally culpable and more dangerous at younger ages than they were in the past. These developments are challenged by evidence from developmental science about the capacities of minors for emotional regulation and behavioral control.

The article examines the legal architecture and institutional design of the new boundary-drawing regime and assesses its instrumental and expressive effects, and estimates its effects on public safety and the allocation of punishments. Nearly all studies, across a range of sampling and measurement conditions, produce strong evidence that rates of juvenile offending are not lower in states where it is relatively more common to try adolescents as adults. Transferring adolescent offenders to the criminal court exposes them to harsh and sometimes toxic forms of punishment that have the perverse effect of increasing criminal activity. Juveniles who have been tried and sentenced as adults are more likely to re-offend, more quickly and for more serious offenses, than their counterparts who have been tried as juveniles. The criminalization of adolescent crime is an ineffective and dangerous means of crime control that may actually compromise public safety. Individualized and neutral decision making and greater regulation of eligibility can reduce and mitigate the excessive reach of modern transfer laws while preserving the important legitimating functions of waiver.

Abstract:
The contributions of order-maintenance policing and broken windows theory to New York City’s remarkable crime decline have been the subject of contentious debate. The dominant policing tactic in New York since the 1990s has been aggressive interdiction of citizens through street encounters in the search for weapons or drugs. Research showed that minority citizens in the 1990s were disproportionately stopped, frisked and searched at rates significantly higher than would be predicted by their race-specific crime rates, and that this excess enforcement was explained by the social structure of predominantly minority neighborhoods than by either their disorder or their crime rates. In the decade since the first study on OMP, stop rates have increased by 500 percent while crime rates have remained low and stable. In this article, we update and extend research on order maintenance policing in New York City to explain temporal and spatial patterns of police stops of citizens from 1999, 2003 and 2006. We estimate stop rates by neighborhood as a function of local crime rates, neighborhood demography and social structure, and physical disorder, including direct measures of broken windows. We report that the sharp increase in stop activity since 1999 is concentrated in predominantly poor and minority neighborhoods, and that these stops continue to be more closely tied to demographic and socioeconomic conditions than to disorder or crime. Moreover, we show that the efficiency of stops in producing arrests has declined over a decade as stops have increased, and that the decline is greatest in predominantly minority neighborhoods where stop activity is highest. We then compare the probabilities of police stops for young adults by race and ethnicity, to show the extraordinary concentration of stops of minorities. Absent reliable evidence that these tactics are either efficient or effective crime reduction measures, we attribute the excess stops to institutional management concerns, such as productivity and supervision or intelligence gathering, at the expense of the City’s minority citizens. The racial-spatial concentration of excess stop activity threatens to undermine police legitimacy and diminish the social good of policing, while doing little to reduce crime or disorder.

Abstract:
Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case whose ramifications for the pursuit of racial equality within criminal justice are still felt today. McCleskey set an impossibly high bar for constitutionally-based challenges seeking fundamental racial fairness in capital punishment. The McCleskey decision strengthened a jurisprudential climate that shifted and increased the burden onto defendants seeking constitutional relief from discriminatory and biased decisions at every step of the criminal justice process, from arrest to conviction and punishment. The McCleskey court articulated a crime-control rationale for tolerance of error and refused to confront the racial disparities inherent in those errors, offering an affirmative argument for the institutionalization of racialized discretion in criminal justice. The Court chose to tolerate widespread errors and racial disparities in criminal justice, finding no offense to the Constitution in these patterns. In so doing, the McCleskey court reified the institutional norms and structural biases that sustain racial imbalances in all stages of the criminal law.

We convened the Symposium on Pursuing Racial Fairness in Criminal Justice at Columbia Law School in March 2007 to draw lessons from current work on racial inequality in criminal law, and to design new strategies to pursue the goals of the McCleskey litigation and the movement that surrounded the case. The participants included legal scholars, practitioners, researchers and activists engaged in the difficult analysis, mobilization, and theorizing to develop the foundation of new models of legal scholarship and civil rights advocacy to challenge McCleskey. The contributions in this Symposium are not naïve with respect to the formidable litigation-based challenges or the racial inequality that persists in the criminal law. Rather, they take on the task of building a diverse and empirically-informed strategy that looks critically into the institutional norms and designs of criminal justice institutions. The articles locate racial disparities in the institutional dynamics of criminal justice and in the racial skew of everyday decision-making. The authors identify the frontlines of a renewed struggle for the pursuit of racial fairness that was the heart of the McCleskey litigation.

Abstract:
We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 1996-97 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast,has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore executions nor the more recent steep drop producing any differential impact. By comparing two closely matched places with huge contrasts in actual execution but no differences in homicide trends, we have generated a unique test of the exuberant claims of deterrence that have been produced over the past decade in the U.S.

Capital punishment, deterrence, homicide

Abstract:
Two of the most striking aspects of New York City’s 'Order Maintenance Policing' strategy have been the use of 'stop, question, and frisk' tactics in street enforcement, and the aggressive targeting of marijuana possession. Although possession of small quantities of marijuana has been decriminalized in New York State since the late 1970s, arrests for marijuana possession have increased more than tenfold since the late 1990s. Both the “stop, question, and frisk” tactics and the targeting of marijuana possession raise constitutional questions based on the stark racial disparities in enforcement and questionable Fourth Amendment justifications. These tactics raise policy concerns as well, due to their limited efficiency in detecting serious crimes.

We examine the extent to which these two strategies are linked strategically and in terms of the potential for constitutional regulation. We identify significant racial disparities in the implementation of marijuana stop activity; stop levels are higher, and marijuana comprises a greater portion of street-level enforcement, in precincts with large black populations. This disparity is robust to controls for precinct socioeconomic makeup, local crime conditions, and stop activity more broadly. Furthermore, while increased levels of marijuana stops are associated with increased marijuana arrests, we find the practice to have diminishing returns: each additional street stop becomes less likely to lead to an arrest or weapons seizure.

We also show that despite recent litigation requiring police officers to specify the reasons for each stop, a substantial portion of these stops lack constitutional justification under both federal and New York law. More than ten percent of stops on suspicion of marijuana are justified with ambiguous circumstances such as 'other,' or being in a 'high-crime' area, justifications that do not pass constitutional challenges. Moreover, systematic differences in stop justifications by precinct fully explain the racial disparities in stop activity, suggesting not only a disparate impact of marijuana policing on the city’s black communities, and one with little public safety payoff, but that the targeting of these neighborhoods relies on pretextual police actions lack constitutional validity.