Scholars have tested Becker's master status thesis on criminal justice system outcomes, yet have been unable to disentangle the label from behavioral characteristics. To clarify the effects of labels, we used archival juvenile court data to test Becker's master status through the effects of gang affiliation on case disposition. Stratified multivariate regression models revealed consistent effects of predictors-mental health needs, offenses per case, felony offense, and pretrial detention-on case referral to juvenile court across the gang-affiliated demarcation. The static effects of legal predictors across the gang demarcation levy questions about the legal consequences of labels.
Felon disenfranchisement is unique to the United States, as our nation is one of the last democratic countries to permit this type of restriction on felons. The right to vote hold public office and serve on a grand jury or trial jury is civil rights that are limited by statutes which restrict the citizenship rights of felons. Limitations on these citizenship rights, sometimes referred to as the "collateral consequences" of a criminal conviction, impact the administration of justice in a myriad of ways. In this research, we explore how states limit these rights and whether these rights are more or less restricted by states in certain regions of the country and whether the political composition of the state is associated with the denial or granting of such rights.
s Trading Democracy for Justice is a timely contribution to the collateral consequences of mass incarceration literature. While certain subtopics within this scholarship have been more extensively studied than others, neighborhood-level political participation has not been fully explored in any other book to date. Considering the approaching presidential election and the current focus on criminal justice reform as a political topic, the content of this book is timely and important for not only criminologists and other researchers, but the public at large.Trading Democracy for Justice is a book focused on exposing how mass incarceration has political spillover effects that impact not only offenders but also their communities. Many political researchers simply ignore felon and ex-felon voting due to the fact that they represent such a minimal portion of the entire electorate (the criminal justice system only supervises 3% of the population) and thus the impact on politics logically would be negligible. However, this stance ignores the fact that mass incarceration is both demographically and geographically specific; thus, already disadvantaged neighborhoods feel the brunt burden of such a policy.Traci Burch uses a highly interdisciplinary approach by incorporating political, geographic, and criminal justice research to provide data-driven conclusions in Trading Democracy for Justice. The book is organized into eight chapters that blend together and read more as a novel than a textbook. She begins by examining the current disparities that exist within mass incarceration in the United States and then moves into her main quantitative data collection of political, geographic, and criminal justice records in Chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 provide statistical analyses to explain the relationships between neighborhood context and voter turnout. Chapter 5 provides potential mechanisms that might explain these relationships, while Chapter 6 provides qualitative fieldwork research that also aims to help better understand the relationship between neighborhood composition and voting patterns. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the implications of these findings and potential policy solutions.In order to assess the collective political cost to neighborhoods, Burch utilized a comprehensive mixed methodology that included a large amount of data from specific high-incarceration cities in Georgia (Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, and Savannah) and North Carolina (Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, and Raleigh) to produce her findings. She collected neighborhood-level data in the form of voter registrations, actual voting history, criminal records, imprisonment and probation/parole records, demographic information, and geographic information from the state board of elections, the departments of corrections, census data, and marketing firms. With these data, she was able to conduct several noteworthy statistical analyses. First, she assessed the spatial issues of high incarceration by determining the prisoner-per-square-mile rate for each locale. Most of the...
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