Dataset Information

Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts.

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Light MT

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6234017 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts.

Light Michael T MT Massoglia Michael M King Ryan D RD

American sociological review 20140930 5

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-whit ...[more]

PMID: 30443049

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Project description:BackgroundViolence is one of the leading causes of injury and death in the United States. One-way society attempts to eliminate violence is through criminal punishment. Yet, in many contexts, punishment fails to reduce violence and may cause other harms. Current research on violence often suffers from same-source bias which can produce spurious associations. This study assesses the associations of different forms of criminal punishment (monetary sanctions, incarceration, and probation) with violent injuries in two unique datasets.MethodsThis study examines a unique combination of hospital discharge data and court administrative data, two Minnesota county-level data sources. First, we assess the spatial distribution of the three criminal punishment variables and two violent injury variables, violent injury overall and violent injury in children by county from 2010 to 2014, using Moran's I statistic and Local Indicators of Spatial Autocorrelation. Then we assess the association of criminal punishment on violent injury and child abuse injury using a two-way fixed effects panel models.ResultsChild abuse injuries are relatively rare in our data but are significantly concentrated geographically, unlike violent injuries which are more dispersed throughout Minnesota. Incarceration and probation are significantly geographically concentrated in similar regions while monetary sanctions are not geographically concentrated. We find a link between probation loads and violent injury, specifically, with a 1 day increase in per capita probation supervision associated with a 0.044 increase in violent injury incidence per 1000 people. In contrast, monetary sanctions and incarceration loads have little association with either violent injury or child abuse injury incidence.ConclusionsCriminal punishment is intended to reduce harm in society, but many argue that it may bring unintended consequences such as violence. This study finds that county-level probation has a modest positive association with county-level violent injury rates, but monetary sanctions and incarceration are less associated with violence injury rates. No measure of criminal punishment was associated with a reduction in violence. This study addresses a gap in previous literature by examining the association of punishment and violence in two unrelated datasets. High rates of criminal punishment and violent injury are both urgent public health emergencies. Further individual-level investigation is needed to assess potential links.

Project description:How are evaluative reactions pertaining post-national citizenship identities interrelated and what are the potential mechanisms how post-national identities evolve? Previous efforts to operationalize and measure post-national citizenship identities leave it open how people's stances on different issues are related and suffer from a variety of theoretical and methodological shortcomings regarding the nature of political attitudes and ideologies. A recently proposed approach conceptualizes ideologies as networks of causally connected evaluative reactions to individual issues. Individual evaluative reactions form the nodes in a network model, and these nodes can influence each other via linked edges, thereby giving rise to a dynamic thoughts system of networked political and identity-related views. To examine this system at large, we apply network analysis to data from the European Values Study. Specifically, we investigate 33 evaluative reactions regarding national and supra-national identity, diversity, global empathy, global environmentalism, immigration, and supra-national politics. The results reveal a strongly connected network of citizenship identity-related attitudes. A community analysis reveals larger clusters of strongly related evaluative reactions, which are connected via bridges and hub nodes. Centrality analysis identifies evaluative reactions that are strategically positioned in the network, and network simulations indicate that persuasion attempts targeted at such nodes have greater potential to influence the larger citizenship identity than changes of more peripheral attitude nodes. We lastly show that socio-demographic characteristics are not only associated with the overall level of post-national citizenship, but also with the network structure, suggesting that these structural differences can affect the network function as people develop national or post-national citizenship identities, or respond to external events. These results provide new insights into the structure of post-national identities and the mechanism how post-national identities might evolve. We end with a discussion of future opportunities to study networked attitudes in the context of civic and citizenship education.

Dataset Information

Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts.

Publications

Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts.

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