2010 Top 20 Crim Articles

For the third year in a row, I assess the year's most important journal publications. Here goes my year-end wrap-up of my favorite criminological journal articles published in 2010:

1. "Silence and Memory in Criminology - The American Society of Criminology 2009 Sutherland Address" by Nicole Rafter in Criminology (48, 1)

2. "Using Random Judge Assignment to Estimate the Effects of Incarceration and Probation on Recidivism among Drug Offenders" by Donald P. Green and Daniel Winik in Criminology (48, 2)

3. "Participation and Frequency During Criminal Careers Across the Life Span" by Hanno Petras, Paul Nieuwbeerta, and Alex Piquero in Criminology (48, 2)

4. "Legitimacy in Corrections: A Randomized Experiment Comparing a Boot Camp with a Prison" by Derrick Franke, David Bierie, and Doris Layton Mackenzie in Criminology & Public Policy (9, 1)

5. "Studying the Costs of Crime Across Offender Trajectories" by Mark Cohen, Alex Piquero, and Wesley Jennings in Criminology & Public Policy (9, 2)

6. "The Impact of Imprisonment on Marriage and Divorce: A Risk Set Matching Approach" by Robert Apel, Arjan Blokland, Paul Nieuwbeerta, and Marieke van Schellen in Journal of Quantitative Criminology (26, 2)

7. "Group-Based Trajectory Modeling (Nearly) Two Decades Later" by Daniel Nagin and Candice Odgers in Journal of Quantitative Criminology (26, 4)

8. "Gold Standard Myths: Observations on the Experimental Turn in Quantitative Criminology" by Robert Sampson in Journal of Quantitative Criminology (26, 4)

9. "What You Can and Can't Properly Do with Regression" by Richard Berk in Journal of Quantitative Criminology (26, 4)

10. "Linking the Crime and Arrest Processes to Measure Variations in Individual Arrest Risk per Crime (Q)" by Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Alex Piquero, and Christy Visher in Journal of Quantitative Criminology (26, 4)

11. "How Damaging is Imprisonment in the Long-term? A Controlled Experiment Comparing Long-term Effects of Community Service and Short Custodial Sentences on Re-offending and Social Integration" by Martin Killias, Gwladys Gillieron, Francoise Villard, and Clara Poglia in Journal of Experimental Criminology (6, 2)

12. "Low-intensity Community Supervision for Low-risk Offenders: A Randomized, Controlled Trial" by Geoffrey Barnes, Lindsay Ahlman, Charlotte Gill, Lawrence Sherman, and Ellen Kurtz in Journal of Experimental Criminology (6, 2)

13. "When Second Best is Good Enough: A Comparison Between a True Experiment and a Regression Discontinuity Quasi-experiment" by Richard Berk, Geoffrey Barnes, Lindsay Ahlman, and Ellen Kurtz in Journal of Experimental Criminology (6, 2)

14. "Justifying the Use of Non-experimental Methods and Disqualifying the Use of Randomized Controlled Trials: Challenging Folklore in Evaluation Research in Crime and Justice" by David Weisburd in Journal of Experimental Criminology (6, 2)

15. "The Correspondence of Family Features with Problem, Aggressive, Criminal, and Violent Behavior: A Meta-analysis" by James Derzon in Journal of Experimental Criminology (6, 3)

16. "Comparing the Effects of Community Service and Short-term Imprisonment on Recidivism: a Matched Samples Approach" by Hilde Wermink, Arjan Blokland, Paul Nieuwbeerta, Daniel Nagin, and Nikolaj Tollenaar in Journal of Experimental Criminology (6, 3)

17. "Trajectories of Offending and Their Relation to Life Failure in Late Middle Age: Findings from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development" by Alex Piquero, David Farrington, Daniel Nagin, and Terrie Moffitt in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (47, 2)

18. "Is it Who You Know, or How Many That Counts? Criminal Networks and Cost Avoidance in a Sample of Young Offenders" by Martin Bouchard and Holly Nguyen in Justice Quarterly (27, 1)

19. "The Empirical Status of Social Learning Theory: A Meta-analysis" by Travis Pratt, Francis Cullen, Christine Sellers, L. Thomas Winfree Jr., Tamara Madensen, Leah Daigle, Noelle Fearn, and Jacinta Gau in Justice Quarterly (27, 6)

20. "Are There Any True Adult-Onset Offenders?" by Tara Renae McGee and David Farrington in British Journal of Criminology (50, 3)

18 to 1: The Magic Ratio?

In case you haven't heard, the longstanding crack-cocaine disparity in the federal mandatory minimum statute (which dates back to 1986) has been scaled back by congress this week, in a bill that also includes the first repeal of a federal mandatory minimum sentence since Nixon was president. The bill now moves to the president's desk and is likely to be signed into law shortly. The blogosphere is buzzing about the significance of this, with most folks cheering for what they view as a long overdue move in the right direction for reducing disproportionately harsh criminal penalties on racial minorities. For those unfamiliar with the "crack-cocaine disparity", the 1986 federal law established a mandatory minimum prison sentence for crack that is 100 times more severe than the penalty for the same amount of powder cocaine. So possession of 5 grams of crack draws the same five year mandatory minimum penalty as does posession of 500 grams of powder cocaine. Under the new legislation passed this week, the disparity will now decrease from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, so that a five year mandatory minimum now requires 28 grams of crack possession rather than the previous 5 grams. Support for the bill was largely bi-partisan, most likely due to the ratcheting costs of the federal prison population that has exploded over the past several decades. Prison growth rates are simply no longer sustainable, especially in this economy.

Some are arguing, however, that the legislation passed this week doesn't go far enough, and that no disparity should exist in the penalty for crack compared to the penalty for powder cocaine. I say that a disparity is most certainly needed, but that 18-to-1 is probably much more reasonable than 100-to-1, especially given our out of control prison population and the diminishing of U.S. crack markets since their peak in the 1980s. The reason that a disparity is needed is because the impact of crack on communities far outweighs the impact of powder cocaine. In essence the statement we as a society have indirectly made by electing our representatives who have passed these mandatory minimums is that crack was once 100 times more costly than powder cocaine to us as a society, but now crack is only 18 times more costly. I don't know what the right answer is. Perhaps an 18-to-1 disparity is still too high. Perhaps the 100-to-1 disparity was too high even during the 1980s. We can argue over the economics and the scaling of the cost-benefit ratio, but I don't think we can dispute that crack is significantly more costly that powder cocaine. Crack has a much more pronounced record of being associated with inner-city violence and community disintegration. I'm no pharmacological expert and have never used crack or powder cocaine, but from what I understand the pharmacological effects of crack are also more pronounced that the pharmacological effects of powder cocaine (although some will dispute this point). Crack is a more pure form of cocaine, in that the impurities that are typically cut into powder cocaine many times over are removed in crack cocaine. Crack also produces a faster and more intense high. Just in terms of accessibility, crack is also more accessible since it is stereotypically sold in open-air drug markets and is easily smokable.

The liberal pundants claim (and will continue to claim) that the crack-cocaine disparity represents a racist policy. I side with Heather Mac Donald's analysis in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, which really sets the record straight on this issue. As Mac Donald points out, those who claim that any disparity in the penalty between crack and cocaine is an example of racism forget two facts: 1) the same federal mandatory minimum for 5 grams of crack also applies to 5 grams of meth which is a predominantly white/hispanic drug (only 2% of federal meth defendents are black), and 2) it was the black community who were first to sound the alarm on crack and call for the government to do something to fix it. On this second point, one needs only to recall the proliferation of stories about crack babies and crack moms during the 1980s (remember the movie New Jack City?). We were told by the media that crack was a devistating drug and was absolutely ravishing our inner-city communites. But more to the point, we were being told this story by African-American leaders. The Harlem congressman Charlie Rangel (yes, the same one in the news this week for political corruption) held a press conference alongside Jesse Jackson to bring attention to the dire consequences of crack, and then voted for the original 1986 mandatory minimum. Others supporting harsh penalties for crack included Brooklyn congressman Major Owens and Queens congressman Alton Waldon. As Waldon noted back then, "for those of us who are black this self-inflicted pain is the worst oppression we have known since slavery." So the charge of racism just doesn't make sense. The criminal justice system was told by minority communities to do something about crack, and then called racist when it tried to do something.

I don't think one can diminsh the impact of having a higher criminal penalty for crack in terms of obtaining convictions through plea-bargaining and in terms of pressuring co-defendants to testify in serious criminal offense cases either. I think this has to be a tool in the bag of tricks available to prosecutors for targeting serious criminal activity tied up in crack markets. I think even preeminent liberal drug scholar Mark Kleiman agrees on this point, although he would likely argue that it is relatively rare that it is necessary for this tool to be used by the prosecution.

So an 18-to-1 disparity certainly seems much more reasonable to me at this point in time, but having no disparity does not yet make sense to me. I offer this as a tempered view, compared to that being presented by most other writers on this issue who are at the same time overjoyed that the disparity has been reduced but continue to persist in their claims that any disparity is racist, cruel, and should be completely eliminated. What I don't know is what the magic number is in terms of a disparity, or under what precipitating conditions it should be changed down or up. We do know that the severity of a sanction is much less effective than the certainty and swiftness in which it is delivered. Is 5 years in prison for 28 grams of crack too severe? Can we squeeze out the same bit of deterrence with less? Who knows.

The Dean of American Criminology

You know you're big time when they dedicate a whole panel at the American Society of Criminology (ASC) annual conference to you. This year's upcoming conference in San Fran has a session dedicated to Al Blumstein's Contributions to Criminology!

Ironies

As I was driving to work today, I listened with great intrigue to the new Freakonomics podcast. I'm a huge fan of those Freakonomics guys. The first full episode of their brand new podcast poses the question "what do Nascar drivers, NFL "hitmen", and Glenn Beck have in common?" That alone was intriguing. The answer to this question is what Steve Levitt refers to as the Peltzman Effect (named after a University of Chicago professor Sam Peltzman). The Peltzman Effect arises when people adjust their behavior to a regulation in ways that counteract the intended effect of the regulation. So, for example, with safer, "death proof" cars, Nascar drivers have become more dangerous in their racing habits. And with great strides made in improving safety gear for sports such as football, the players have responded by taking greater risks on the field, which in turn ironically leads to greater probability of injury. So what struck me as I was listening to this is that perhaps prison is a Peltzman Effect. Historically, America's experiment with mass incarceration was a response to skyrocketing crime rates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But ironically as mass incarceration eventually led to a leveling off (and eventual decrease during the late 1990s) of the crime rate, perhaps the unintended and collateral consequences of mass incarceration will soon lead to increases in the crime rate. Thus, what was intended to make us more safe as a society (and did so for a period of time), may actually make us more unsafe in the long run. We haven't seen large increases in the crime rate yet (in fact crime rates are still falling in many cities nationwide), but many criminologists speculate that this may be on the way. There is a whole literature on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, including an observed propensity towards criminal behavior for children of incarcerated parents. Several criminologists have also studied the negative impacts that high incarceration rates have on certain (primarily urban) communities. And then there are those researchers who study prisoner reentry, noting that offenders returning to the community after a significant period of incarceration may face obstacles that can actually facilitate their return to criminal behavior. Those who study the impact of prison on crime more generally, have found that, on the whole, a period of incarceration tends to have more of a criminogenic than a deterrent effect (although the verdict is still out on this). Speaking in the technical language of researchers who study the prison-crime relationship, the problem with simply examining correlations between crime rates and incarceration rates is that these correlations suffers from endogeneity (or simultaneity). Absent truly experimental evidence, this problem is a hard one to overcome methodologically. The problem is that there are good reasons to believe that crime rates impact imprisonment rates and conversely that imprisonment rates impact crime rates. If we lock up more people when crime goes up (i.e., crime rates primarily impact imprisonment rates), then we'd expect to observe a positive correlation between crime rates and imprisonment rates. But if prison serves to reduce crime (either through a deterrent or incapacitative effect), then we would expect the correlation between prison and crime to be negative. So how do we disentangle this relationship? Well...that's for another post. My point is that perhaps mass incarceration will one day come to be known as a Peltzman Effect.

Speaking of ironies, I read a criminal justice news story the other day that struck me as ironic. The story comes from the state of California (a state that is no stranger to ironies). Apparently in California a new piece of legislation has created a type of parole supervision referred to as "non-revokable parole". This is most likely in response to California having the highest technical parole violator rate in the country. Under "non-revokable parole", the only way that a parolee can be returned to prison is by being prosecuted through the court system for committing a new crime. No technical parole violations can be given out. Why this strikes me as ironic is that this type of approach to parole supervision seems to fly in the face of the central premises of the popular new book by UCLA professor Mark Kleiman entitled "When Brute Force Fails". I've actually been looking for an opportunity to write on Kleiman's book so here it goes. In the book, Kleiman applies the age-old principles of deterrence theory to a community corrections setting. In classical deterrence theory, punishment must be certain, severe, and swift in order to be effective. Kleiman, like other recent criminologists, finds that certainty and swiftness are far more effective than severity. In fact, severity is often the enemy of certainty and swiftness since certainty and swiftness are sacrificed almost by necessity (at least in our current criminal justice system) as the severity of the proposed sanction increases. This idea is particularly germane to probationers and parolees. Kleiman points to a successful experiment in Hawaii (the H.O.P.E. project) as evidence that minor punishments for technical violators (e.g., a weekend or week in jail at most) can be extremely effective in reducing recidivism if delivered swiftly and with a high degree of certainty. If monitoring of probationers/parolees is increased (e.g., weekly random drug tests, GPS monitoring, etc.), expectations are outlined to probationers/parolees in advance, and every infraction is punished immediately, the evidence suggests that even hardcore meth addicts can change their behavior without treatment. The underlying principles of this approach are actually quite common-sense to any person who has ever raised a child or a puppy. Evidence in support of these principles have also been demonstrated in policing experiments going back more than a decade. All of this evidence suggests that careful monitoring and sanctioning of parolees can stimulate conforming behavior. Technical violations can be a particularly effective tool in the toolbag because they can be delivered swiftly and frequently without court processing. So it is ironic that the the spokesman for this type of approach is a prominent professor at a California-based university (UCLA), and yet California has just gone the opposite direction by implementing "non-revokable parole". Personally, I wonder what is even the point of "non-revokable parole". If parole agents can only "arrest" for new crimes and now must go through the court system in order to prosecute, then it strikes me that (a) parole agents are now just cops and (b) parole supervision has a lower chance of being a deterrent since the certainty and swiftness of sanctioning will in all likelihood decline.

To tie it all together in one final ironic twist, it may be the case that while prison is generally not a deterrent (and may in fact have a "Peltzman Effect" by actually increasing crime), it may be a significant deterrent for parole violators if delivered correctly.