Incarceration and Support for Children in Fragile Families

Incarceration is widespread in the United States, and previous literature has shown significant negative effects of incarceration on later employment, earnings, and relationship stability. Given the high rates of fatherhood among men in jails and prisons, a large number of children are placed at considerable risk when a parent is incarcerated. This paper examines one dimension of the economic risk faced by children of incarcerated fathers: the reduction in the financial support that they receive. We use a population-based sample of urban children to examine the effects of incarceration on this support. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models, as well as a propensity score matching analysis, indicate that men with incarceration histories are significantly less likely to contribute to their families and those that do contribute provide significantly less. Moreover, sensitivity analysis suggests that these differences are unlikely to be a result of unobserved heterogeneity between incarcerated and never-incarcerated fathers. The negative effects of incarceration on fathers’ financial support are due not only to diminished performance in the labor market by formerly incarcerated men, but also to their increased likelihood to live apart from their children. Men contribute far less through child support (formal or informal) than they do when they share their earnings within their household, suggesting that the destabilizing effects of incarceration on family relationships place children at significant economic disadvantage.

Parental Incarceration and Child Wellbeing: Implications for Urban Families

Using a population-based, longitudinal family survey (N=4,898), we identify a set of economic, residential, and developmental risks particular to the children of incarcerated parents. We use parental reports of incarceration history, demographic background, and a rich set of child and family outcomes, in a series of multivariate regression models. Children of incarerated parents face more economic and residential stability than their counterparts. Children of incarcerated fathers also display more behavior problems, though other developmental differences are insignificant. Several family differences are magnified when both parents have been incarcerated. We find that incarceration identifies families facing severe and unique hardship. Given the prevalence of incarceration, this means a large population of children suffers unmet material needs, residential instability, and behavior problems. These risks may be best addressed by using the point of incarceration as an opportunity for intervention, and the administration of age-appropriate social services.

Pot as Pretext: Marijuana, Race, and the New Disorder in New York City Street Policing

Although possession of small quantities of marijuana has been decriminalized in New York State since the late 1970s, arrests for marijuana possession in New York City have increased more than tenfold since the mid-1990s, and remain high more than 10 years later. This rise has been a notable component of the city’s “Order Maintenance Policing” strategy, designed to aggressively target low-level offenses, usually through street interdictions known as “stop, question, and frisk” activity. We analyze data on 2.2 million stops and arrests carried out from 2004 to 2008, and identify significant racial disparities in the implementation of marijuana enforcement. These disparities, present in both stops and arrests, are robust to controls for social structure, local crime conditions, and stop levels more broadly. The racial imbalance in marijuana enforcement in black neighborhoods suggests a “doubling down” of street-level policing in places already subject to heightened scrutiny in the search for weapons, a link suggesting that the policing of marijuana may be a pretext in the search for guns. Despite these ties, however, we show no significant relationship between marijuana enforcement activity and the likelihood of seizing firearms or other weapons. We also show that a large proportion of marijuana enforcement lacks constitutional justification under either federal or New York law. Marijuana stops are more prevalent in precincts where “other” and “high-crime area” justifications are more likely to be reported, two factors that are constitutionally insufficient to justify a street stop. The racial skew, questionable constitutionality, and limited efficiency of marijuana enforcement in detecting serious crimes suggest that nonwhite New Yorkers bear a racial tax from contemporary policing strategy, a social cost not offset by any substantial observed benefits to public safety

Following the Script: Narratives of Suspicion in \u3ci\u3eTerry\u3c/i\u3e Stops in Street Policing

Regulation of Terry stops of pedestrians by police requires articulation of the reasonable and individualized bases of suspicion that motivate their actions. Nearly five decades after Terry, courts have found it difficult to articulate the boundaries or parameters of reasonable suspicion. The behavior and appearances of individuals combine with the social and spatial contexts in which police observe them to create an algebra of suspicion. Police can proceed to approach and temporarily detain a person at a threshold of suspicion that courts have been unable and perhaps unwilling to articulate. The result has been sharp tensions within Fourth Amendment doctrine as to what is reasonable, why, and in what circumstances. The jurisprudence of suspicion is no clearer today than it was in the aftermath of Terry. This issue has taken center stage in both litigation and policy debates on the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk policing regime in New York City. Under this regime, police state the bases of suspicion using a menu of codified stop rationales with supplemental text narratives to record their descriptions of suspicious behaviors or circumstances that produced actionable suspicion. Evidence from 4.4 million stops provides an empirical basis to assess the revealed preferences of police officers as to the bases for these Terry stops. Analyses of this evidence reveal narratives of suspicion beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual case that police use to justify their actions. First, we identify patterns of articulated suspicion. Next, we show the individual factors and social conditions that shape how those patterns are applied. We also show how patterns evolve over time and become clearer and more refined across a wide range of police stops. That refinement seems to follow the capacious interpretative room created by four decades of post-Terry Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Next, we assess the extent of constitutional compliance and examine the neighborhood and individual factors that predict noncompliance. The results suggest that the observed patterns of narratives have evolved into shared narratives or scripts of suspicion, and that these patterns are specific to suspect race and neighborhood factors. We conclude that scripts are expressions of the norms within the everyday organizational exercise of police discretion and that these scripts defeat the requirement of individualization inherent in case law governing Fourth Amendment stops

Profiling and Consent: Stops, Searches and Seizures after \u3ci\u3eSoto\u3c/i\u3e

Following Soto v State (1999), New Jersey was among the first states to enter into a comprehensive Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike by the state police from 2005-2007, the final months of the Consent Decree. Specifically, we exploit heterogeneity of officer and driver race to identify disparities in the probability that stops lead to a search. We assume a crime-minimizing or welfarist rationale for stops, under which race-neutral factors are equally likely to motivate stops, regardless of driver or passenger race. We also test a Fairness Presumption (Durlauf, 2006) by comparing search patterns between driver-officer pairs where the driver and officer are different races, and a set of race-neutral benchmarks where the driver and officer are the same race. Results of fixed effects logistic regressions show that Black and Hispanic drivers, when stopped, are more than twice as likely as White drivers to be searched, regardless of officer race. The results also suggest that search patterns vary significantly by officer race: Black officers are less likely to conduct a search in the course of a stop than are white drivers. We also see significant interactions between the race of officers and that of the drivers they stop: Black drivers are significantly more likely to be searched by white officers than they are by black officers; on the other hand, Hispanic drivers are significantly less likely to be searched by either black or white officers than they are by Hispanic officers. Racial disparities in the selection of stopped drivers for search suggest that despite institutional gains under the Consent Decree in management and professionalization, there were no tangible gains in distributional equity. We review the design of the Consent Decree and the accompanying oversight mechanisms to identify structural weaknesses in external monitoring and institutional design in the oversight of the State Police that compromised the pursuit of equality goals

The Science of Justice, Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force

The current report examines racial disparities in use of force across 12 law enforcement departments from geographically and demographically diverse locations and reveals that racial disparities in police use of force persist even when controlling for racial distribution of local arrest rates. Additionally, multiple participating departments still demonstrated racial disparities when force incidents were benchmarked exclusively against Part I violent arrests, such that Black residents were still more likely than Whites to be targeted for force

Following the Script: Narratives of Suspicion in Terry Stops in Street Policing

Regulation of Terry stops of pedestrians by police requires articulation of the reasonable and individualized bases of suspicion that motivate their actions. Nearly five decades after Terry, courts have found it difficult to articulate the boundaries or parameters of reasonable suspicion. The behavior and appearances of individuals combine with the social and spatial contexts where police observe them to create an algebra of suspicion. Police can proceed to approach and temporarily detain a person at a threshold of suspicion that Courts have been unable and perhaps unwilling to articulate. The result has been sharp tensions within Fourth Amendment doctrine as to what is reasonable, why, and in what circumstances. The jurisprudence of suspicion is no clearer today than it was in the aftermath of Terry. This issue has taken center stage in both litigation and policy debates on the legality of the Stop and Frisk policing regime in New York. Under this regime, police record the bases of suspicion using both a menu of codified stop rationales with supplemental text narratives to record their descriptions of suspicious behaviors or circumstances that produced actionable suspicion. Evidence from 4.4 million stops provide an empirical basis to assess the revealed preferences of police officers as to the bases for these Terry stops and identify narratives of suspicion that justify their actions beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual case. First, we identify patterns of articulated suspicion. Next, we show the individual factors and social conditions that shape how those patterns are applied. We also show how patterns evolve over time and become clearer and more refined across a wide range of police stops. That refinement seems to follow the capacious interpretative room created by Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Next, we assess the extent of constitutional compliance and examine the neighborhood and individual factors that predict noncompliance. The results suggest that the observed patterns of narratives have evolved into shared narratives or scripts of suspicion, and that these patterns are specific to suspect race and neighborhood factors. We conclude that scripts are expressions of the norms within the everyday organizational exercise of police discretion and that these scripts defeat the requirement of individualization inherent in caselaw governing Fourth Amendment stops

Police, Race, and the Production of Capital Homicides

Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within-race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to an earlier stage of capital case processing: the production of capital-eligible cases beginning with the identification of potential defendants by the police. It seeks to trace these sentencing disparities to examining earlier stages in the processing of homicides. Using data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, we examine every homicide reported between 1976 and 2009, and find that homicides with white victims are significantly more likely to be “cleared” by the arrest of a suspect than are homicides with minority victims. We estimate a series of hierarchical regressions to show that a substantial portion of this disparity is explained by social and demographic characteristics of the county in which homicides take place. Most notably, counties with large concentrations of minority residents have lower clearance rates than do predominantly white counties; however, county characteristics do not fully explain the observed race-of-victim disparities. Our findings raise equal protection concerns, paving the way for further research into the production of capital homicides and the administration of the death penalty

Housing insecurity among urban fathers

This article examines housing insecurity among an understudied population: urban fathers of young children. Housing security is of particular importance for vulnerable populations, and urban fathers, many of whom face unemployment and monitoring from the child support and criminal justice systems, often rely on this security to mitigate the socioeconomic challenges they face. By assessing the extent and type of housing insecurity affecting urban fathers, we identify a potentially serious source of disadvantage facing families more broadly. A year after the birth of a new child, fully a quarter of fathers reported significant housing insecurities with 3% experiencing homelessness. Results suggest that from 9-12% of fathers are doubling up, relying on others for living expenses, and moving more than once every year. Finally, only half of fathers had been able to maintain housing security over the three to four years since the focal child's birth