Urban Gun Violence

The stigma associated with a felony conviction can impede the reentry process, and emerging research findings indicate that one’s community can amplify or temper the mark of a criminal record. Researchers examining criminal stigma have focused on individuals living in urban areas, overlooking the experiences of persons outside these communities. Using qualitative data collected from a sample of men and women paroled for sexual offenses in Missouri, we contrast how social and structural stigma alter the reentry experiences for participants…

Researchers continue to examine the macrolevel trends of gun crime but little consensus exists regarding the microlevel determinants of gun behaviors. More- over, little is known if patterns of gun behavior vary between adults and juve- niles. This research examines patterns of gun possession, carrying, and use across adult and juvenile arrestees. This research moves beyond descriptive studies of aggregate gun patterns and explores the demographic and perceptual correlates that may inhibit or facilitate gun behaviors. Current results illustrate the…

Monetary sanctions have long been a part of the U.S. criminal jus- tice system but have received increasing attention from the public as well as legal scholars and social science research in recent years. This essay describes initial findings from the Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions, a multi-method study designed to build on the prior research on legal financial obligations (LFOs) by examining the multi-tiered sys- tems of monetary sanctions operating within eight states representing key regions of the United…

Researchers have estimated that 63 percent of incarcerated women have one or more minor children and most reported living with their children prior to incarceration (Mumola, 2000). Unfortunately, children of incarcerated parents have been a relatively invisible population in the research on the collateral consequences of incarceration. The goal of the current study was to examine the long-term effect of maternal incarceration on adult offspring involvement in the criminal justice system using data from the mother child sample of the…

The current study adopts the life course framework to examine the effect of incarceration on the likelihood of becoming married and attaining full-time employment. It is hypothesized that men who have been incarcerated will be less likely to marry and to gain full-time employment. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are used to test the hypothesis. Results from the growth-curve models support the life-course theoretical model. Across all models estimated, incarceration is negatively associated with marriage and employment.…

As mass incarceration has proliferated in recent decades, there has been a corresponding increase in research examining outcomes among children of incarcerated parents (e.g., see Hagan & Foster, 2014; Uggen & McElrath, 2014). Despite the gains in knowledge this schol- arship has produced, the gendered effects of parental incarceration for offspring into adult- hood remain poorly understood. Most of the quantitative parental incarceration research to date has examined fathers’ incarceration only; the body of research on mothers’ incarceration is smaller…

The stigma associated with a felony conviction can impede the reentry process, and emerging research findings indicate that one’s community can amplify or temper the mark of a criminal record. Researchers examining criminal stigma have focused on individuals living in urban areas, overlooking the experiences of persons outside these communities. Using qualitative data collected from a sample of men and women paroled for sexual offenses in Missouri, we contrast how social and structural stigma alter the reentry experiences for participants…

Sex offenders are a unique class of offenders. Although all offenders have been affected by recent punitive policy mandates, changes in the philosophies of the criminal justice system have virtually separated the sexual offender from every other type of criminal (Edwards and Hensley, 2001). As a result, the imprisonment rate for sex offenders has grown faster than for any other crime, and sex offenders serve a larger proportion of their sentence when compared to other offenders (Greenfeld, 1997). On average,…