Essays
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Capital Punishment - Lynch, Mona
This essay reviews foundational and cutting‐edge social science research on capital punishment. It first describes policy‐relevant work on the death penalty as legal punishment, and then provides a brief overview of the more recent contributions on capital punishment and social theory. The scope of relevant scholarship is limited to more empirically based social science scholarship on the American death penalty. Specifically, relative to the longstanding, foundational research on capital punishment, it addresses in order, the research on the deterrent effect of the death penalty; racial inequality in the administration of capital punishment capital case processing and jury decision‐making; and the role of public opinion in the death penalty. It then discusses the more recently developed body of research that addresses the culture of capital punishment; and capital punishment and state governance. Finally, it lays out several potential lines for new research, including contextualizing death penalty within a broader punishment framework. -
Deterrence - Apel, Robert
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment. Studies of changes in police presences, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Three high priority areas for future research are identified: developing and testing an integrated model of the effects of the threat and experience of punishment, measuring perceptions of sanction regimes, developing and estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences, and identifying high deterrence policies. -
Incarceration and Health - Wildeman, Christopher
In this essay, I start by briefly discussing the foundational research in this area, which, similar to the study of the consequences of mass imprisonment more broadly, is mostly new. Indeed, all of the foundational research in this field (with the exception of The Prison Community and The Society of Captives), which considered the mental and physical health of current and former inmates, as well as their mortality risks, was conducted only in the past 25 years. In general, this research finds that (i) the imprisonment period appears to have negative effects on mental health but some paradoxical benefits for physical health and mortality and (ii) former inmates have more health problems and higher mortality risk than a comparison group in the free population. After reviewing this literature, I then review some new research in this area, which shows how incarceration shapes (i) the mental health of current and former inmates, (ii) the health of women connected to current and former inmates, and (iii) the health of the children of current and former inmates. This new research is unique not just because of the breadth of outcomes it considers but also because it uses much more rigorous methods to tease out causal relationships (especially for mental health). I close by discussing directions for research, focusing especially on overcoming obstacles to causal inference, considering effects on inequality, and further returning to the roots of this field, which focused on the acute effects of incarceration on the mental health of inmates. -
Politics of Criminal Justice - Barker, Vanessa
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government responses suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to crime. If criminal justice were guided by technical choices, gun death would equal gun control, gun violence would be considered a public health crisis replete with public resources, and the political will to solve it. Instead what we know from the social sciences is that criminal justice tends to be caught up in morality plays about human nature and political competition over the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security, where special interests rather than the public interest tend to hold sway. The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its capacity to account for and explain the disjuncture. Key issues for future research will be scholars' ability to close this gap.