Suchergebnisse

Deeply rooted historical patterns allow us to make a correlation between imprisonment and unemployment and the marginalization of blacks. This paper examines the interrelationships among criminal activity, punishment, and cycles of the economic system based on the influence of political and economic forces on forming penal policies. The penal system is viewed as a device by which labor market fluctuations can be regulated. We examine differences between blacks and whites and between the North and the South to arrive at this paper's thesis: that race provides the link among economic cycles, employment, and crime.

Although misdemeanors make up the bulk of criminal cases in the United States, the majority of research on court decision‐making examines felony sentencing. In contrast to felony courts, lower‐level courts are characterized by higher case volumes and increased reliance on informal sanctions, which may contribute to greater racial–ethnic disparities. To assess this possibility, we examine pretrial detention and case processing outcomes for misdemeanants in Miami‐Dade County, Florida. Utilizing temporal (detention time) and monetary (bond amount) measures of pretrial detention, we assess whether and to what extent there are racial–ethnic disparities in formal and informal sanctions facing misdemeanants. Results indicate that black defendants, especially black Latinx defendants, face greater informal sanctions (longer detention and higher bond amounts), are more likely to be convicted, and experience more severe formal sanctions than do white non‐Latinx defendants. These findings complicate Feeley's (1979) argument about lower‐level cases, revealing that black defendants are punished by both the court process and formal sanctions. In this way, "the process is the punishment" for lower‐level white and nonwhite defendants, while the punishment is also the punishment for black defendants.

When compared to research on the association between immigration and crime, far less attention has been given to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and criminal punishment. As such, several fundamental questions about how noncitizens are sanctioned and whether citizenship is a marker of stratification in U.S. courts remain unanswered. Are citizens treated differently than noncitizens—both legal and undocumented—in U.S. federal criminal courts? Is the well-documented Hispanic-white sentencing disparity confounded by citizenship status? Has the association between citizenship and sentencing remained stable over time? And are punishment disparities contingent on the demographic context of the court? Analysis of several years of data from U.S. federal courts indicates that citizenship status is a salient predictor of sentencing outcomes—more powerful than race or ethnicity. Other notable findings include the following: accounting for citizenship substantially attenuates disparities between whites and Hispanics; the citizenship effect on sentencing has grown stronger over time; and the effect is most pronounced in districts with growing noncitizen populations. These findings suggest that as international migration increases, citizenship may be an emerging and powerful axis of sociolegal inequality.