Unemployment and Punishment: An Empirical Assessment*

Abstract

Evidence for a relationship between unemployment and imprisonment has been regarded as "elusive" and "conflicting. " Such conclusions have been based primarily on aggregate-level data. Individual-level data have provided only indirect evidence for this relationshb. This research considers prosecution, incarceration, and length of incarceration outcomes for I , 970 criminal defendants arrested in 1982. Multivariate logit and OLS estimates show a signifcant, strong, and independent impact of unemployment on pretrial and postsentencing incarceration. The interaction of race and unemployment shows that the greatest likelihood of incarceration is for unemployed black defendants, especially those who are young males or charged with violent and public order crimes. Theoretical implications for the control and punishment of "dangerous classes" are discussed.The links between labor market marginality and criminal punishment have received extensive and careful assessment over the past decade. The relationship formulated more than 50 years ago by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) has been advanced conceptually and empirically by a rapidly growing body of scholarship. That growth was highlighted by the recent (1989) special edition of Contemporary Crises marking the fiftieth anniversary of Rusche and Kirchheimer's seminal contribution. 1 Several authors have broadened the application of Rusche and Kirchheimer to include alternative measures of labor market marginality and state controls (e.g., Inverarity and Grattet, 1989;Laffargue and Godefroy, 1989). Still, a substantial core of recent effort has addressed the relationship between unemployment and imprisonment. Since 1976, more than 40 empirical studies have tested that specific relationship (DeLone, 1990), and that *This paper is a revised version of a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology meetings, November 1988. The authors are grateful to Gordon Waldo for his assistance at an earlier stage in this project and to Leroy Gould, Taiping Ho, Gary Kleck, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful Comments.Rusche and Kirchheimer were concerned to show (1) how different forms of punishment attended different systems of economic production and (2) how the severity of punishments vaned directly with the size of surplus populations. It is the latter issue that has commanded the bulk of recent attention. 1.CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 29 NUMBER 4 1991 2. Parker and Horowitz (1986:769) assert that "the available evidence suggests a genuine lack of a relationship."We sometimes use the term significant in place of srutisricully signifcunt to simplify expression. We recognize the important differences between substantive and statistical significance and only the latter is implied here. 3. -104.70 d z u NOTE: r-ratio in parentheses.

Conditional Race Disparities in Criminal Sentencing: A Test of the Liberation Hypothesis From a Non-Guidelines State

“…Our primary dependent variable, prison term, is an offender's expected minimum sentence, which helps account for the non-uniform nature of parole eligibility for South Carolina offenses (Freiberger and Hilinski, 2013; see also Chiricos and Bales, 1991;Spohn and Cederblom, 1991). 7 8 Because the data include extreme outliers such as life and death sentences, we top coded 0.44% of the cases at a maximum of 720 months, or an expected minimum sentence of 60 years in prison.…”

“…Using the expected minimum rather than the imposed maximum accounted for these differences in parole eligibility (Chiricos and Bales, 1991;Gertz and Price, 1985;Spohn and Cederblom, 1991). The expected minimum was calculated by adjusting the imposed maximum sentence by a parole eligibility multiplier as determined by the controlling offense (e.g., 0.25, 0.33, 0.85, 1.0) and rounded up to the nearest month (less than 200 of the 17,671 original sentences are nonintegers).…”

The Construction and Reinforcement of Myths of Race and Crime

“…According to Akers (1996, p. 127), "Self-report studies find class and race variations in criminal and delinquent behavior, but they are not as great as class and race differences in officially arrested, convicted, and/or imprisoned populations ." Thus, when unemployed citizens are disproportionately found in incarcerated populations (Chiricos, 1991), it is not likely due to their increased involvement with criminal behavior. Nor can the overrepresentation of African Americans in the criminal justice system be explained by their higher involvement in criminal behavior.…”

He Versus She: A Gender-Specific Analysis of Legal and Extralegal Effects on Pretrial Release for Felony Defendants

“…Offenders who spend time in jail before trial are more likely to spend time in incarceration after trial (Chiricos & Bales 1991). Demuth (2003:876) suggested that, "pretrial detention is punishment before conviction."…”