Offenders and SORN Laws

Chapter 7 describes what we know about the effects of SORN laws on criminal behavior. A coherent story emerges from this review: there is virtually no evidence that SORN laws reduce recidivism or otherwise increase public safety. The chapter first delineates the various ways registration and notification alter the legal environment not only for registrants but also for nonregistrants, the public, and law enforcement. There are many channels through which SORN laws might impact the frequency of sex offenses, including some that would produce an increase in overall offending. The chapter assesses these possibilities in light of a large body of relevant empirical research, focusing on potential changes in registrant recidivism, nonregistrant criminal behavior, the geography of victimization, and the distribution of types of sex offenses and victims. Scholars have plumbed many different data sources using a range of methodologies, yet nearly every study finds no evidence that SORN laws – in particular, community notification laws – reduce sexual recidivism. In fact, notification laws may increase recidivism risk. The final section discusses registrant beliefs about the effects of SORN laws. In sum, the chapter comprehensively engages with the pressing question of whether SORN laws protect the public and concludes that they do no

Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit

We study how salary history disclosures affect employer demand, and how salary history bans shape hiring and wages. We show how these effects depend on the properties of the labor market, and we measure the key properties using a novel, two-sided field experiment. Our field experiment features hundreds of recruiters reviewing more than 2, 000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary history questions as well as job candidates’ disclosures. We find that employers make negative inferences about nondisclosing candidates, and that they anticipate positive selection into disclosure. Recruiters view salary history as a stronger signal about competing options than about worker quality. Disclosures by men (and other highly paid candidates) yield higher salary offers; however, they are negative signals of the value (net of salary) that a worker brings to the firm, and thus they yield fewer callbacks. While disclosures (especially of high amounts) generally increase recruiter beliefs about quality and competing offers, male wage premiums are regarded as a weaker signal of quality than other sources (such as the premiums from working at higher-paying firms or being well paid compared to peers). Recruiters correctly anticipate that women are less likely to disclose salary history at any level, and thus they punish women less than men for silence. When we simulate the effect of salary history bans using our results, we find muted effects on callbacks. Gender inequality in salary offers is reduced; however, equality comes at the expense of lower salaries overall (and especially for men)

"Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment"

“Ban-the-Box” (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging statistical discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant’s race or other observable characteristics. To investigate this possibility as well as the effects of race and criminal records on employer callback rates, we sent approximately 15,000 fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, before and after each jurisdiction’s adoption of BTB policies. Our causal effect estimates are based on a triple-differences design, which exploits the fact that many businesses’ applications did not ask about records even before BTB and were thus unaffected by the law. Our results confirm that criminal records are a major barrier to employment, but they also support the concern that BTB policies encourage statistical discrimination on the basis of race. Overall, white applicants received 23% more callbacks than similar black applicants and employers that ask about criminal records are 62% more likely to call back an applicant if he has no record. However, we find that the race gap in callbacks grows dramatically at the BTB-affected companies after the policy goes into effect. Before BTB, white applicants to BTB-affected employers received about 7% more callbacks than similar black applicants, but BTB increases this gap to 45%

Sex Offender Registries: Fear without Function?

I use three separate data sets and designs to determine whether sex offender registries are effective. First, I use state-level panel data to determine whether sex offender registries and public access to them decrease the rate of rape and other sexual abuse. Second, I use a data set that contains information on the subsequent arrests of sex offenders released from prison in 1994 in 15 states to determine whether registries reduce the recidivism rate of offenders required to register compared with the recidivism of those who are not. Finally, I combine data on locations of crimes in Washington, D.C., with data on locations of registered sex offenders to determine whether knowing the locations of sex offenders in a region helps predict the locations of sexual abuse. The results from all three data sets do not support the hypothesis that sex offender registries are effective tools for increasing public safety.

Experiences of young women in managerial positions at an Insurance Company based in Johanesburg Central Buisness District

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Bachelor of Social WorkIn South Africa, studies has shown that women are still discriminated when it comes to fulfilling their leadership roles, even though the country has developed laws and policies promoting equal rights for all. Thus the study seeks to understand the experiences that young women are facing in managerial positions. The purpose of this research study is to explore the experiences of young women between the ages of 25-45years in managerial positions at a well-known Insurance Company based in Johannesburg Central Business District. Based on a comprehensive research literature review, it is proven that women still face many challenges when taking on leadership roles in the corporate world. Women in South Africa have an important role to play in enhancing socio-economic growth so it is important to explore the challenges and opportunities they experience in the leadership positions. The research study has taken the qualitative research approach, namely a case study. Data was gathered by conducting personal, in-depth interviews with five women in managerial positions. The study has adopted the feminist theoretical framework, which argues that men and women should be given equal chances in all forms of life. The findings indicated that women are still underrepresented in managerial positions in which there are few numbers of women that hold the managerial positions. Furthermore with this few numbers, they face challenges engaging in the fields dominated by men. The young women’s leadership authority is undermined as they often not have the same share of voice with their male colleagues within boardrooms as they often look down at them. They also experience racist and sexist within their working environments in the form of stereotyping. Balancing work and home life was seen as a challenge for women in managerial positions. Keywords: Women’s experiences, Leadership, Feminism, Employment Equity ActGR201

Sex Offender Law and the Geography of Victimization

Sex offender laws that target recidivism (e.g., community notification and residency restriction regimes) are premised—at least in part—on the idea that sex offender proximity and victimization risk are positively correlated. We examine this relationship by combining past and current address information of registered sex offenders (RSOs) with crime data from Baltimore County, Maryland, to study how crime rates vary across neighborhoods with different concentrations of resident RSOs. Contrary to the assumptions of policymakers and the public, we find that, all else equal, reported sex offense victimization risk is generally (although not uniformly) lower in neighborhoods where more RSOs live. To further probe the relationship between where RSOs live and where sex crime occurs, we consider whether public knowledge of the identity and proximity of RSOs may make offending in those areas more difficult for (or less attractive to) all potential sex offenders. We exploit the fact that Maryland’s registry became searchable via the Internet during our sample period to investigate how laws that publicly identify RSOs may change the relationship between the residential concentration of RSOs and neighborhood victimization risk. Surprisingly, for some categories of sex crime, notification appears to increase the relative risk of victimization in neighborhoods with greater concentrations of RSOs

The Minimum Wage, EITC, and Criminal Recidivism

For recently released prisoners, the minimum wage and the availability of state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) can influence both their ability to find employment and their potential legal wages relative to illegal sources of income, in turn affecting the probability they return to prison. Using administrative prison release records from nearly six million o enders released between 2000 and 2014, we use a difference-in- differences strategy to identify the effect of over two hundred state and federal minimum wage increases, as well as 21 state EITC programs, on recidivism. We find that the average minimum wage increase of 8% reduces the probability that men and women return to prison within 1 year by 2%. This implies that on average the wage effect, drawing at least some ex-o enders into the legal labor market, dominates any reduced employment in this population due to the minimum wage. These reductions in reconvictions are observed for the potentially revenue generating crime categories of property and drug crimes; prison reentry for violent crimes are unchanged, supporting our framing that minimum wages affect crime that serves as a source of income. The availability of state EITCs also reduces recidivism, but only for women. Given that state EITCs are predominantly available to custodial parents of minor children, this asymmetry is not surprising. Framed within a simple model where earnings from criminal endeavors serve as a reservation wage for ex-o enders, our results suggest that the wages of crime are on average higher than comparable opportunities for low-skilled labor in the legal labor market

Employer Neighborhoods and Racial Discrimination

Using a large field experiment, we show that racial composition of employer neighborhoods predicts employment discrimination patterns in a direction suggesting in-group bias. Our data also show racial disparities in the geographic distribution of job postings. Simulations illustrate how these patterns combine to shape disparities. When jobs are located far from Black neighborhoods, Black applicants are doubly disadvantaged: discrimination patterns disfavor them, and they have fewer nearby opportunities. Finally, building on prior work on Ban-the-Box laws, we show that employers in less Black neighborhoods appear much likelier to stereotype Black applicants as potentially criminal when they lack criminal record information