Digital Commons Network^™

A Second Look: Local Labor Markets And The Impact Of Ban The Box Policies After Criminal Legal Involvement, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

This paper estimates the impact of labor demand on the employment and recidivism outcomes of released prisoners. Higher labor demand at release generates higher earnings and lower recidivism. Reduced recidivism persists after controlling for the observed labor market outcomes of the returning cohort, suggesting that labor demand impacts crime through channels beyond the direct formal employment of returning prisoners. Difference-in-differences based evidence suggests Ban the Box (BTB) policies delaying when employers can ask about criminal records improve labor market outcomes and lower recidivism for misdemeanor defendants. Evidence for felony defendants and returning prisoners is mixed but suggestive of similar patterns.

Inmate Assistance Programs: Toward A Less Punitive And More Effective Criminal Justice System, Erkmen G. Aslim, Yijia Lu, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

High recidivism rates in the United States are a well-known and disturbing problem. In this article, we explain how this problem can be mitigated in a cost-effective manner through reforms that make greater use of humane methods that help inmates rather than using more punitive measures.

We focus on Inmate Assistance Programs (IAPs) adopted by many states. Some of these programs provide inmates with valuable skill sets to utilize upon their release while others are geared towards treating mental health and substance use disorder problems. IAPs are likely to reduce recidivism by lowering ex-convicts’ need to resort to crime for …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Lived Experiences Of African American Males' Challenges In Post Incarceration, Amber L. Scott

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This purpose of this phenomenological study is to understand the lived experiences of African American males in the state of Delaware post-incarceration. Incarceration disproportionately affects African American males leading to numerous difficulties during their transition back into the community. The research sought to comprehend the myriad of challenges and identify potential support systems to help facilitate successful reintegration. By utilizing a qualitative research approach, the study employs in-depth interviews to collect data from African American males who have experienced life post-incarceration. The analysis of the data incorporates elements of critical race theory and labeling theory to unravel the interplay of …

A Critical Assessment Of The First Step Act's Recidivism-Reduction Measures, Raquel Wilson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The First Step Act of 2018 (“FSA”) is the most impactful federal sentencing reform of the past 40 years. While the Act represents a partial resurgence of the rehabilitative model of imprisonment, which had fallen out of favor decades before, it also represents a missed opportunity to fully integrate evidence-based rehabilitation programs for those offenders who pose the greatest risks to public safety.

The public has a strong interest in reducing recidivism, particularly among violent offenders, most of whom will be released from federal prison eventually. The FSA incentivizes participation in evidence-based, recidivism-reducing programs offered by the Bureau of Prisons …

Massachusetts Community Mediation Center Grant Program (Cmc-Gp) Fiscal Year 2023 Report And Evaluation, Madhawa Palihapitiya, Karina Zeferino

Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration Publications

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts (MA) continued its investment in affordable, cost-effective community mediation by appropriating $2,713,465 in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 for the Community Mediation Center Grant Program (CMC Grant Program or Program), the Program’s eleventh year. This appropriation funded the continued operations of qualified Community Mediation Centers (Centers) that deliver free or low-cost dispute resolution services to the public. The Centers serve as the backbone of mediation across the state and are the publicly funded infrastructure on which statewide dispute resolution programs are built.

The FY2023 state funding in the CMC Grant Program budget appropriation …

Mass Incarceration In America: Where's The Church?, Michael J. Wing

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Due to mass incarceration, correctional facilities in America are dealing with unprecedented levels of overcrowding, staff shortages, violence, suicide, and widespread mental illness among inmates. Budget cuts and the corresponding loss of vocational, educational, and treatment programs have exacerbated such problems. Mass incarceration and its deleterious consequences are challenging the very soul of America, and the church has largely stood by and watched this tragic situation unfold over the last fifty years. This research project has explored some of the barriers that have precluded churches from taking a more intentional, active, and impactful role in doing something about the national …

When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, And Executioner: Justice In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence (Book Review), Stacy Fowler

Faculty Articles

In When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner, former federal judge Katherine Forrest raises concerns over the pervasive use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the American justice system to produce risks and need assessments (RNA) regarding the probability of recidivism for citizens charged with a crime. Forrest’s argument centers on AI’s primary focus on utilitarian outcomes when assessing liberty for individual citizens. This approach leads Forrest to the conclusion that in its current form, AI is “ill-suited to the criminal justice context.” Forrest contends that AI should instead be programmed to focus on John Rawl’ 'concept of justice as …

Estimating The Impact Of The Age Of Criminal Majority: Decomposing Multiple Treatments In A Regression Discontinuity Framework, Michael Mueller-Smith, Benjamin David Pyle, Caroline Walker

Faculty Scholarship

This paper studies the impact of adult prosecution on recidivism and employment trajectories for adolescent, first-time felony defendants. We use extensive linked Criminal Justice Administrative Record System and socio-economic data from Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit). Using the discrete age of majority rule and a regression discontinuity design, we find that adult prosecution reduces future criminal charges over 5 years by 0.48 felony cases (↓ 20%) while also worsening labor market outcomes: 0.76 fewer employers (↓ 19%) and $674 fewer earnings (↓ 21%) per year. We develop a novel econometric framework that combines standard regression discontinuity methods with predictive machine learning …

Negligent Hiring: Recidivism And Employment With A Criminal Record, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

This paper tackles a difficult legal and policy challenge—reducing the impact of criminal justice records on job applicants’ chances in a manner that does not spur more discrimination—by looking at how another area of law, tort liability, impacts employers’ decision-making. It uses theoretical and empirical methods to study the most common reason employers report being reluctant to hire workers with a criminal record: legal liability generated by the tort of negligent hiring. While the purpose of the tort is ostensibly to protect and make whole those harmed when an employee misbehaves in a foreseeable manner, I show that, in practice, …

Exploring Perceptions Of Control Within Offender Cognition And Recidivism Paradigms, Anistasha H. Lightning, Danielle Polage

Student Published Works

Elements of perceived control are associated with recidivism in offender populations. We investigated the application of locus of control to the frequency of personal involvement with the law and to beliefs surrounding the likelihood of future contact with the legal system. We hypothesized that, as the number of sentencings or legal experiences increased, locus of control would externalize. We also predicted that increased legal involvement would lead to greater belief in the likelihood of future involvement. A statistically significant path model suggests that locus of control appears to be a predictor of increased criminality, as opposed to the other way …

Problematic Ai — When Should We Use It?, Fredric Lederer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Combating Recidivism, Shaylin Daley

Senior Honors Projects

SHAYLIN DALEY (Psychology) Combating Recidivism Sponsor: Lisa Holley (Political Science) Many people believe that criminals cannot be helped. It is evident that at least some of society shuns people who break laws and have negative views about the amount of money spent on detaining inmates. Thousands of individuals are released from United States prisons a day. Many of these individuals have no plan in place for their return home and are sent into the streets with nothing except for a jail ID. Most of these people will end up returning to prison. A good sum of these people face problems …

Community-Based Rehabilitation's Effectiveness In Reducing Singapore Juvenile Recidivism, Denzil Neo, June Hyuk Lee, Mervin Xin Hong Chew, Munisraj Sarfoji, Timothy Prakash

Introduction to Research Methods RSCH 202

Singapore's juvenile recidivism rate has climbed by around 5% since 2013, putting the country at risk of increased youth crime. With several mandatory rehabilitative programmes classified into two categories, Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) and Institutional-Based Rehabilitation (IBR), it is unclear whether the mandatory individual rehabilitative programmes for offenders were actually effective in achieving their corrective goals. This proposal would undertake a regression analysis to compare the effectiveness of CBR and IBR programmes utilizing secondary data gathered by the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) and primary data from a survey. The survey will provide previously unstudied insights into the offender's …

The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting “The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism”, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges

Articles

What is the actual rate of sexual recidivism given the well‐ known fact that many crimes go unreported? This is a difficult and important problem, and in “The dark figure of sexual recidivism,” Nicholas Scurich and Richard S. John (2019) attempt to make progress on it by “estimat[ing] actual recidivism rates . . . given observed rates of reoffending” (p. 171). In this article, we show that the math in their probabilistic model is flawed, but more importantly, we demonstrate that their conclusions follow ineluctably from their empirical assumptions and the unrepresentative empirical research they cite to benchmark their calculations. …

The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges

Law & Economics Working Papers

What is the actual rate of sexual recidivism given the well-known fact that many crimes go unreported? This is a difficult and important problem, and in The Dark Figure of Sexual Recidivism, Nicholas Scurich and Richard S. John (2019) attempt to make progress on it by “estimate[ing] actual recidivism rates given observed rates of reoffending” (p.172). In this article, we show that the math in their probabilistic model is flawed, but more important, we demonstrate that their conclusions follow ineluctably from their empirical assumptions and the unrepresentative empirical research they cite to benchmark their calculations. Scurich and John contend that …

U.S. Prisons And System Reform, Darian Reimels

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Prison systems, specifically in the U.S., are a wicked problem. For years prisoners have been treated inhumanely inside and outside of prison, with everyone looking at them with a judgmental eye. This essay aims to point out and bring light to these issues within the prison system. Specifically, it focuses on how inmates are treated during and after serving their sentence, and solitary confinement. To better understand and explain the problems to you, extensive research was done. Articles were read, organizations were researched, and a documentary was watched to gather the information needed to write this essay. The results showed …

Offenders And Sorn Laws, Amanda Agan, J.J. Prescott

Book Chapters

Chapter 7 describes what we know about the effects of SORN laws on criminal behavior. A coherent story emerges from this review: there is virtually no evidence that SORN laws reduce recidivism or otherwise increase public safety. The chapter first delineates the various ways registration and notification alter the legal environment not only for registrants but also for nonregistrants, the public, and law enforcement. There are many channels through which SORN laws might impact the frequency of sex offenses, including some that would produce an increase in overall offending. The chapter assesses these possibilities in light of a large body …

Forensic Experts’ Perspectives On Australian Indigenous Sexual Offenders And Factors Important In Evaluating The Risk Of Recidivism, Alfred Allan, Cate L. Parry, Hilde Tubex, Caroline Spiranovic, Frank Morgan

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Law and ethics require that risk assessment should be cross-culturally valid and fair, but Australian research in this regard is underdeveloped. A logical first step in progressing the work required to build a strong evidence base on culturally sensitive risk assessment in Australia is to determine the expert views of those in the field. We interviewed 13 Australian evaluators who assess Indigenous sexual offenders’ recidivism risk to determine their perceptions of the risk assessment instruments they use and the attributes they believe evaluators doing cross-cultural assessments should have. Our central findings are that evaluators use the available instruments because they …

Advancing Applied Research In Conservation Criminology Through The Evaluation Of Corruption Prevention, Enhancing Compliance, And Reducing Recidivism, Jessica S. Kahler, Joseph W. Rivera, Zachary T. Steele, Pilar Morales-Giner, Christian J. Rivera, Carol F. Ahossin, Ashpreet Kaur, Diane J. Episcopio-Sturgeon

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Concomitant with an increase in the global illegal wildlife trade has been a substantial increase in research within traditional conservation-based sciences and conservation and green criminology. While the integration of criminological theories and methods into the wildlife conservation context has advanced our understanding of and practical responses to illegal wildlife trade, there remain discrepancies between the number of empirical vs. conceptual studies and a disproportionate focus on a few select theories, geographical contexts, and taxonomic groups. We present three understudied or novel applications of criminology and criminal justice research within the fields of fisheries, forestry, and wildlife conservation. First, we …

The Power Of A Clean Slate, J.J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

Tens of millions of Americans have criminal records, including about 20 million with felony convictions. Conviction records automatically trigger countless collateral legal consequences, such as occupational restrictions that bar employers from hiring qualified candidates. Moreover, research overwhelmingly shows that bearing a criminal record raises significant barriers to employment, housing, and various other opportunities. These persistent obstacles can overwhelm an individual’s efforts at reintegration and can aggravate poverty, inequality, and racial disparities in our society. And because factors like unemployment and housing instability contribute to crime risk, these effects in turn make society less safe.

Reimagining Reentry: A Vision For Transformative Justice Beyond The Carceral State, Kemiya Nutter

Ethnic Studies Senior Capstone Papers

Throughout the past decade, mass incarceration has emerged as a buzzword within academic scholarship and public policy discourse that seeks to examine the unparalleled expansion of the contemporary carceral state. With 2.2 million Americans imprisoned and over 7 million under various forms of penal control, the United States maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The unprecedented inflation in the nation’s incarceration rate is a direct manifestation of the 1970’s War on Drugs, which enabled the legislative transformations that permeate modern sentencing policy and procedure. Institutions of policing, surveillance, and incarceration are constitutive features of the carceral system’s …

Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J.J. Prescott, Benjamin Pyle, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …

Law School News: 'Injustice Dehumanizes Everyone It Touches' 1-31-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The 15th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Keynote Address 1-28-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Andrea Hansen

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr

Faculty Scholarship

People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …

Preventing Sexual Violence: Alternatives To Worrying About Recidivism, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

How can it be that in the era in which almost one million Americans are on sex offender registries—most of whom are publicly stigmatized on websites, banished from their homes, shunned from their jobs, prevented from uniting with their families and traveling internationally, forced into homelessness, all of which increases their risk for suicide, and shames their spouses and children, even if their offenses occurred long in the past—that the #MeToo movement would explode, revealing widespread sexual misconduct against women, by powerful men, protected by iconic institutions? How can we have had three decades of the most aggressive, “spare-no-expense” laws …

Arrests As Guilt, Anna Roberts

Faculty Articles

An arrest puts a halt to one’s free life and may act as prelude to a new process. That new process—prosecution—may culminate in a finding of guilt. But arrest and guilt—concepts that are factually and legally distinct—frequently seem to be fused together. This fusion appears in many of the consequences of arrest, including the use of arrest in assessing “risk,” in calculating “recidivism,” and in identifying “offenders.” An examination of this fusion elucidates obstacles to key aspects of criminal justice reform. Efforts at reform, whether focused on prosecution or defense, police or bail, require a robust understanding of the differences …

Redemptive Penology Vs. Exclusive Retributive Justice, Samuel Chuks Japhets

Masters Theses

Grounded on long-standing penal notions of exclusive retributivism inherited from classical theorists, Ancient Near East lex talionis, and theonomist penology, the United States federal sentencing and corrections system aims to administer just desert sentences on offenders, to curtail crimes. This exclusively retributive model of criminal sanction is, presumably transformative and innately capable of dispensing holistic justice to society, victims, and criminals. However, the preponderance of high rates of recidivism raises the question of whether this exclusively retributive doctrinal framework that drives the federal penology empirically results in a redemptive administration of penal justice, especially to the offender. Given the traditional …

The “Uncanny Valley” And The Verisimilitude Of Sexual Offenders–Part I: An “Ethorobotic” Perspective, Michael T. Flannery

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Holistic Defense On Criminal Justice Outcomes, James Anderson, Maya Buenaventura, Paul Heaton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.