Review of \u3cem\u3eDoing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Megan Comfort.\u3c/em\u3e Reviewed by Jonah A. Siegel.

Book review of Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. $55.00 hardcover,$22.00 paperback

Pleading Guilty: Indigent Defendant Perceptions of the Plea Process

Public defenders and other court actors most often engage in behind-the-scene plea negotiating to manage overwhelming workloads and to dispose of cases as quickly and efficiently as possible. In prior work, scholars have documented an increased reliance on plea bargaining and the deleterious impact of the practice on the legal process and the rights of individuals accused of a crime; however, this research has not systematically analyzed the decisions made, and the perspectives of justice of society’s most disadvantaged and arguably most important actors of the court, the defendants. Relying on data collected in a Midwestern public defense system, this article focuses attention to the intersection of indigent defense and plea bargaining by shedding light on the decision-making processes and perceptions of justice among indigent defendants. Our findings indicate that regardless of innocence, defendants plead guilty because it offers the quickest pathway out of court and with little risk; however, misunderstanding and fear often mediate decisions to plead guilty. Also, while the majority of defendants perceive the plea outcome to be fair, they do not always perceive the plea process as fair

Prisoner Reentry, Parole Violations, and the Persistence of the Surveillance State.

The revolving door of the state and federal prison system may be the most persistent challenge faced by criminological practitioners and scholars. Following release from custody, the majority of former prisoners end up back in the system within three years, suggesting that correctional involvement is not an isolated incident for most offenders. Through its analysis of parole violations and sanctions, the current dissertation project offers important new insights on this “revolving door” between prisons and high-risk communities. To do so, each of three empirical chapters looks at a different phase in the cycle of recidivism: offending behavior, institutional responses to offending behavior, and the consequences of institutional sanctions for offenders’ well-being. The first analytic chapter examines how geographical proximity to social service providers is related to the risk of recidivism. The findings suggest that the observed impact of contextual conditions on recidivism depends on how expansively one defines the “community” in which parolees are embedded and further demonstrates the importance of capturing the effect of service accessibility on offending behavior within the larger ecological context of where parolees live. The second analytic chapter explores how “supervision regimes,” the legal, political, and cultural factors that shape the way supervision is practiced across jurisdictions, influence the risk of recidivism. The analysis demonstrates that regional and county-level attributes shape local templates for decisionmaking among parole officers in ways that affect not only whether parolees are revoked to prison, but also the use of alternative sanctions, such as stricter community supervision and incarceration in short-term correctional facilities such as jails or detention centers. The final analytic chapter offers a rigorous assessment of the causal impact of incarceration on labor market outcomes through an examination of whether return to short-term custody interferes with the ability of parolees to find and maintain work. Findings indicate that the experience of short-term re-incarceration dramatically increases the risk of unemployment among parolees in the months during and following their incarceration. Taken as a whole, the analyses shed light on how offending behavior, institutional decision-making, and the experience of incarceration combine to perpetuate the cycle of recidivism.PHDSocial Work and SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110423/1/siegelja_1.pd

Lang’s Survivals

Andrew Lang’s ideas on the nature and sources of originality seem fated for renewed attention due to the ways they appear to have forecast or anticipated modern attempts to get beyond the celebration of individual creativity. But rather than simply illustrating recent theoretical truisms, Lang’s formulations, whether developed in his writings on myth or in his texts devoted to literary topics, present subtle and not easily resolved challenges to attempts to dissolve individuality and agency into a greater communal whole. For Lang, because the effective use of material from the past to arrive at new forms is the measure of individual creativity, no work can ever make a claim to absolute originality. However, the prestige of the author, though hedged about by survivals from a lost past, is not for that reason lost. To recognize the tension between inherited material and new achievement is to begin to do justice to the historical place and conceptual force of the Andrew Lang effect

Pleading Guilty: Indigent Defendant Perceptions of the Plea Process

Public defenders and other court actors most often engage in behind-the-scene plea negotiating to manage overwhelming workloads and to dispose of cases as quickly and efficiently as possible. In prior work, scholars have documented an increased reliance on plea bargaining and the deleterious impact of the practice on the legal process and the rights of individuals accused of a crime; however, this research has not systematically analyzed the decisions made, and the perspectives of justice of society\u27s most disadvantaged and arguably most important actors of the court, the defendants. Relying on data collected in a Midwestern public defense system, this article focuses attention to the intersection of indigent defense and plea bargaining by shedding light on the decision-making processes and perceptions of justice among indigent defendants. Our findings indicate that regardless of innocence, defendants plead guilty because it offers the quickest pathway out of court and with little risk; however, misunderstanding and fear often mediate decisions to plead guilty. Also, while the majority of defendants perceive the plea outcome to be fair, they do not always perceive the plea process as fair

Custodial Parole Sanctions and Earnings after Release from Prison.

Although the labor market consequences of incarceration in prison have been central to the literature on mass incarceration, punishment, and inequality, other components of the growing criminal justice system have received less attention from sociologists. In particular, the rise of mass incarceration was accompanied by an even larger increase in community supervision. In this paper, we examine the labor market effects of one frequently experienced aspect of post-prison parole, short-term custody for parole violations. Although such sanctions are viewed as an alternative to returning parole violators to prison, they have the potential to affect labor market outcomes in ways similar to imprisonment, including both adverse and positive effects on earnings. We estimate that parolees lost approximately 37 percent of their earnings in quarters during which they were in short-term custody. Although their earnings tended to increase in the quarter immediately following short-term custody-consistent with the stated intentions of such sanctions-parolees experienced further earnings loss over the longer term after such sanctions. In the third quarter following a short-term custody sanction, earnings are lowered by about 13 percent. These associations are larger for those who were employed in the formal labor market before their initial incarceration