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Scholarship has shown that visitation helps individuals maintain social ties during imprisonment, which, in turn, can improve inmate behavior and reduce recidivism. Not being visited can result in collateral consequences and inequality in punishment. Few studies, however, have explored the factors associated with visitation. This study uses data on Florida inmates to identify individual-and community-level factors that may affect visitation. Consistent with expectations derived from prior theory and research, the study finds that inmates who are older, Black, and who have been incarcerated more frequently experience less visitation. In addition, inmates who come from areas with higher incarceration rates and higher levels of social altruism experience more visits. Unexpectedly, however, sentence length and economic disadvantage are not associated with visitation. Implications of these findings are discussed., Keywords: violence, crime, recidivism, social support, imprisonment, homicide, incarceration, inequality, misconduct, neighborhood context, prison experiences, social isolation, social ties, ties, visitation, Publication Note: The publisher's version of record is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128714542503
Despite national calls for churches to become more involved in social service, many churches may not be willing or able to respond. Drawing on sociological theory, previous research, and interviews with pastors and parish social ministers from Catholic congregations in a large, urban city in Texas, we examine key factors linked to church-based social service efforts. Particular attention is given to church leadership, race/ethnicity, organizational characteristics, social and political networks, and the intersection of these factors in affecting service provision and advocacy. We then discuss the likely impacts of policies calling for religious organizations to increase their social service activities., Publication Note: Publisher’s version of record available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/jrlsasw29&div=20&g_sent=1&collection=journals, Preferred Citation: Leventhal, Emily A., and Daniel P. Mears. 2002. “Will Churches Respond to the Call? Religion, Civic Responsibility, and Social Service.” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 29(2):53-76.
Objectives: The transition to adulthood can be challenging, especially for children of incarcerated parents. Drawing on reentry and life-course scholarship, we argue that parental incarceration may adversely affect multiple life outcomes for children as they progress from adolescence into adulthood and that such effects may persist from early young adulthood into late young adulthood.
Methods: The study uses propensity score matching analyses of National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data (N = 12,844).
Results: Analyses identified harmful effects of parental incarceration on many life domains, including criminal behavior, mental health, illegal drug use, education, earnings, and intimate relationships. These effects typically surfaced by early young adulthood and continued into late young adulthood.
Conclusions: The results suggest that parental incarceration constitutes a significant turning point in the lives of young people and underscore the importance of life-course perspectives for understanding incarceration effects. They also illustrate that formal punishment policies may create harms that potentially offset intended benefit, Keywords: parental incarceration, young adults, life course, outcomes, Publication Note: The published version can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022427815592452, Preferred Citation: Mears, Daniel P., and Sonja E. Siennick. 2016. “Young Adult Outcomes and the Life-Course Penalties of Parental Incarceration.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 53(1):3-35.
Keywords: juvenile, youth, prisoner, justice, reentry, Publication Note: The version of record can be found at https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1541204003260044.
Objectives An enduring legacy of the 1980s “war on drugs” is the increased use of imprisonment for drug offenders. Advocates anticipated, in part, that prison is more effective than community sanctions in reducing recidivism. Despite the contribution of drug offender incarceration to prison growth nationally, and debates about whether this approach should be curtailed, only limited rigorous research exists that evaluates the effect of imprisonment on drug offender recidivism. To address this gap, this paper uses sentencing and recidivism data from a cohort of individuals convicted of felony drug offenses in Florida to examine the effect of imprisonment—as compared to community sanctions—on recidivism.
Methods Regression discontinuity analyses are used. These minimize potential selection bias by exogenously assigning cases to conditions based on a rating variable and a cut-off score.
Results Results indicate that prison has no effect on drug offenders’ rates of reconviction. This finding holds across a range of offender subgroups (racial and ethnic, gender, age, and prior criminal justice system involvement).
Conclusions Imprisoning individuals convicted of marginally serious drug offenses—that is, those close to a cut-off score for being sent to prison—did not reduce subsequent offending. This finding suggests that curtailing the use of imprisonment for such individuals will not appreciably affect future criminal activity and may have the benefit of reducing correctional system costs., Keywords: Drug crime, Prison, Recidivism, Specific deterrence, Regression discontinuity design
A large body of social science research is devoted to understanding the causes and correlates of discrimination. Comparatively less effort has been aimed at providing a general prevalence estimate of discrimination using a nationally representative sample. The current study is intended to offer such an estimate using a large sample of American respondents (N = 14,793) while also exploring perceptions regarding why respondents felt they were discriminated against. The results provide a broad estimate of self-reported discrimination experiences-an event that was only reported by about one-quarter of all sample members-across racial and ethnic categories., Grant Number: P01 HD031921, Publication Note: This NIH-funded author manuscript originally appeared in PubMed Central at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5570361.
Over the last two decades, super-maximum custody (or ‘supermax’) prisons have become increasingly common throughout the American correctional landscape. Although these institutions can be justified using a variety of arguments (e.g. retribution), one of the most commonly used rationalizations is that they promote higher levels of prison order throughout the systems in which they are used. Because of the lack of direct empirical evidence to support this claim, we refer to this argument as the ‘system-wide order’ conjecture. In this essay, we explore the different pathways through which supermax prisons may achieve system-wide order. Our analysis suggests that the conceptual foundation upon which the system-wide order conjecture rests is unstable, and that empirical research is needed to resolve debates about the merits of supermax prisons in contributing to order in prison systems. We conclude by identifying critical research gaps that must be addressed to better understand the effects of this high-cost correctional approach., Keywords: correctional policy, prisons, prison order, punishment, supermax, Publication Note: The version of record can be found at https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1462474506059139., Grant Number: 2002-IJ-CX-0019
Age is the only factor used to demarcate the boundary between juvenile and adult justice. However, little research has examined how age guides the juvenile court in determining which youth within the juvenile justice system merit particular dispositions, especially those that reflect the court's emphasis on rehabilitation. Drawing on scholarship on the court's origins, attribution theory, and cognitive heuristics, we hypothesize that the court focuses on youth in the middle of the range of the court's age of jurisdiction—characterized in this article as “true” juveniles—who may be viewed as meriting more specialized intervention. We use data from Florida for court referrals in 2008 (N = 71,388) to examine the decision to proceed formally or informally and, in turn, to examine formally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, probation, commitment, and transfer) and informally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, and probation). The analyses provide partial support for the hypothesis. The very young were more likely to be informally processed; however, among the informally processed youth, the youngest, not “true” juveniles, were most likely to be diverted or placed on probation. By contrast, among formally processed youth, “true” juveniles were most likely to receive traditional juvenile court responses, such as diversion or probation., Keywords: juvenile court, age, sanctioning, Publication Note: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Mears, Daniel P., Joshua C. Cochran, Brian J. Stults, Sarah J. Greenman, Avinash S. Bhati, and Mark A. Greenwald. 2014. “The ‘True’ Juvenile Offender: Age Effects and Juvenile Court Sanctioning.” Criminology 52:169-194., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12034. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving (http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-820227.html#terms)., Preferred Citation: Mears, Daniel P., Joshua C. Cochran, Brian J. Stults, Sarah J. Greenman, Avinash S. Bhati, and Mark A. Greenwald. 2014. “The ‘True’ Juvenile Offender: Age Effects and Juvenile Court Sanctioning.” Criminology 52:169-194.
