Incarceration and the Economic Fortunes of Urban Neighborhoods

New research has identified the consequences of high rates of incarceration on neighborhood crime rates, but few studies have looked beyond crime to examine the collateral effects of incarceration on the social and economic well being of the neighborhoods themselves and their residents. We assess two specific indicia of neighborhood economic well-being, household income and human capital, dimensions that are robust predictors of elevated crime, enforcement and incarceration rates. We decompose incarceration effects by neighborhood racial composition and socio-economic conditions to account for structural disadvantages in labor force and access to wealth that flow from persistent patterns of residential segregation. We use panel methods to examine the effects on incarceration on New York City census tracts over an 11 year period from 1985-1996, a period which saw crime rates rise and fall sharply, and when incarceration rates increased and remained high in concentrated areas throughout the city. We examine whether persistently high incarceration rates erode human capital and depress median household incomes, further intensifying incarceration risks and threatening to create conditions where incarceration and economic disadvantage become endogenous features of certain neighborhoods. We find distinct but overlapping effects for prisons and jails, suggesting that these are parallel processes produced by loosely coupled law enforcement priorities. Incarceration effects are greater for household income than human capital, suggesting a complex relationship between persistent poverty, residential segregation, and incarceration that reinforces a classic poverty trap. Household incomes are lower over time in neighborhoods with higher proportions of African American population, even after controlling for the effects of race on incarceration, but we find no similar effects for Hispanic populations. Spatially targeted policies such as microinvestment and housing development may be needed offset the local embeddedness of poverty and disrupt its connections to incarceration and crime, while education policy and transitional labor market networking can strengthen local human capital

The Decline of the Juvenile Death Penalty: Scientific Evidence of Evolving Norms

In 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court set aside the death sentence of Christopher Simmons, who was 17 when he was arrested for the murder of Shirley Crook. The Simmons court held that the evolving standards of decency embodied in the Eighth Amendment\u27s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments barred execution of persons who committed capital crimes before their 18th birthday. This decision was based in part on the emerging legislative consensus in the states opposing execution of juvenile offenders and the infrequency with which the death penalty is imposed on juvenile offenders. The State sought a writ of certiorari, and the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. This article presents results of analyses of empirical data on the use of the death penalty for adolescent homicide offenders in state courts in the U.S. since 1990. The data show that, since 1994, when death sentences for juvenile offenders peaked, juvenile death sentences have declined significantly. In particular, the decline in juvenile death sentences since 1999 is statistically significant after controlling for the murder rate, the juvenile homicide arrest rate, and the rate of adult death sentences. This downward trend in juvenile death sentences signals that there is an evolving standard in state trial courts opposing the imposition of death sentences on minors who commit capital offenses

Incarceration and the Economic Fortunes of Urban Neighborhoods

This chapter turns to the response of the criminal justice system to neighborhood violence, in particular examining to what extent persistently high levels of incarceration can depress economic well-being and human capital in disadvantaged and racially segregated communities. A panel analysis of New York City neighborhoods between 1985 and 1996, a period in which the city\u27s violent-crime rates both rose and fell sharply, provides evidence that high incarceration rates reduce income growth, educational attainment, and work experience in disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods. To rectify this, targeted micro investment and housing development in such areas can break the connection between incarceration and economic and educational disadvantage

Words and things: souvenirs of over-site/over-sight for place-making

This paper addresses the problem of making things in a given place (Qatar), and asks how anticipations and memories of place contribute to practice-based manoeuvres of place-making. Flying across time zones and travelling through sites suggests aspects of place-making that would draw upon both a notion of meteorites coming to earth and an awareness of the sensory consequences of global travelling. What this experience also suggests is an ‘over-sight’ (‘over-site’) in how travellers remember a place for themselves, and how they re-member it for others in the form of souvenirs. Going to a place might often default to an envisioning of pre-emptive or imaginary souvenirs in anticipation of the destination; thinking about what a place might be like is hard to separate from what we think we will eventually take away from it. Thus, the idea to be explored is how we might ‘make in to place’ as much as we ‘make something in-place,’ which perhaps results in ‘making some thing into a place’. Etymologically, souvenir already suggests this in its derivation from Old French: ‘to remember, come to mind.’ How does one ‘come to remembering’ in a place that, like all planetary places, will always be both global and local? Perhaps it depends on how one lands in a place…. Meteoroids remain in orbit around a place: nascent souvenirs always above the horizon, un-made place-makings. Meteors come closer to landing but still, by definition, burn up in the atmospheres of the new place. Meteorites, though, land: they suggest what we mean by the human element of ‘makings in-/to place.’ Travelling from somewhere, to somewhere yet to be fully determined, meteorites (people and/or words and/or senses) reflect the dispersion and compression of sensory (thing-based) and word-based experiences of place. Drawing on the work of Paul Hopper, Paul Carter, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Serres, William Desmond and Julia Kristeva, the paper concludes that words evoke a place in which the present might take place, and that the senses evoke a present in which place might take place

A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995

There is a growing bipartisan consensus that flaws in America\u27s death-penalty system have reached crisis proportions. Many fear that capital trials put people on death row who don\u27t belong there. Others say capital appeals take too long. This report – the first statistical study ever undertaken of modern American capital appeals (4,578 of them in state capital cases between 1973 and 1995) – suggests that both claims are correct. Capital sentences do spend a long time under judicial review. As this study documents, however, judicial review takes so long precisely because American capital sentences are so persistently and systematically fraught with error that seriously undermines their reliability. Our 23 years worth of results reveal a death penalty system collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes. They reveal a system in which lives and public order are at stake, yet for decades has made more mistakes than we would tolerate in far less important activities. They reveal a system that is wasteful and broken and needs to be addressed. Our central findings are as follows: Nationally, during the 23-year study period, the overall rate of prejudicial error in the American capital punishment system was 68%. In other words, courts found serious, reversible error in nearly 7 of every 10 of the thousands of capital sentences that were fully reviewed during the period. Capital trials produce so many mistakes that it takes three judicial inspections to catch them – leaving grave doubt whether we do catch them all. After state courts threw out 47% of death sentences due to serious flaws, a later federal review found serious error – error undermining the reliability of the outcome – in 40% of the remaining sentences. Because state courts come first and see all the cases, they do most the work of correcting erroneous death sentences. Of the 2,370 death sentences thrown out due to serious error, 90% were overturned by state judges – many of whom were the very judges who imposed the death sentence in the first place; nearly all of whom were directly beholden to the electorate; and none of whom, consequently, were disposed to overturn death sentences except for very good reason. This does not mean that federal review is unnecessary. Precisely because of the huge amounts of serious capital error that state appellate judges are called upon to catch, it is not surprising that a substantial number of the capital judgments they let through to the federal stage are still seriously flawed. To lead to reversal, error must be serious, indeed. The most common errors – prompting a majority of reversals at the state post-conviction stage – are (1) egregiously incompetent defense lawyers who didn\u27t even look for – and demonstrably missed – important evidence that the defendant was innocent or did not deserve to die; and (2) police or prosecutors who did discover that kind of evidence but suppressed it, again keeping it from the jury. [Hundreds of examples of these and other serious errors are collected in Appendix C and D to this Report.] High error rates put many individuals at risk of wrongful execution: 82% of the people whose capital judgments were overturned by state post-conviction courts due to serious error were found to deserve a sentence less than death when the errors were cured on retrial; 7% were found to be innocent of the capital crime. High error rates persist over time. More than 50% of all cases reviewed were found seriously flawed in 20 of the 23 study years, including 17 of the last 19. In half the years, including the most recent one, the error rate was over 60%. High error rates exist across the country. Over 90% of American death-sentencing states have overall error rates of 52% or higher. 85% have error rates of 60% or higher. Three-fifths have error rates of 70% or higher. Illinois (whose governor recently declared a moratorium on executions after a spate of death-row exonerations) does not produce atypically faulty death sentences. The overall rate of serious error found in Illinois capital sentences (66%) is very close to – and slightly lower than – the national average (68%). Catching so much error takes time – a national average of 9 years from death sentence to the last inspection and execution. By the end of the study period, that average had risen to 10.6 years. In most cases, death row inmates wait for years for the lengthy review procedures needed to uncover all this error. Then, their death sentences are reversed. This much error, and the time needed to cure it, impose terrible costs on taxpayers, victims\u27 families, the judicial system, and the wrongly condemned. And it renders unattainable the finality, retribution and deterrence that are the reasons usually given for having a death penalty. Erroneously trying capital defendants the first time around, operating the multi-tiered inspection process needed to catch the mistakes, warehousing thousands under costly death row conditions in the meantime, and having to try two out of three cases again is irrational. This report describes the extent of the problem. A subsequent report will examine its causes and their implications for resolving the death penalty crisis

Misstatements of Fact in Adam Vangrack\u27s Student Note: A Letter to the Editors of the Washington University Law Quarterly

The Quarterly\u27s Fall 2001 issue published a Note reviewing our report, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. That Note has three inaccuracies that are so clear and frequently repeated, and are the result of such clear cite-checking lapses, that remedial steps are required. These matters do not involve differences of opinion, judgment, or interpretation between us and the Note\u27s author. Matters of that sort are appropriately addressed in a response. All instead are misstatements of fact that result from the Quarterly\u27s failure to fulfill its basic obligation to check the accuracy of verifiable factual statements it publishes. By forgoing peer-review, law journals rest their integrity on the care with which they cite-check articles to avoid statements with no credible support or basis. In default of that obligation, corrective action is required

Look Who\u27s Extrapolating: A Reply to Hoffmann

In late March, a reporter called with news of a pirated copy of Professor Joseph Hoffinann\u27s soon-to-be-published attack on our study, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. Did we care to comment? Obtaining our own copy revealed that Professor Hoffmann\u27s fusillade missed its mark (he misstates what we did) and boomeranged (his mischaracterizations of our analysis accurately describe his own). We do care to comment, and Hoffmann and the Indiana Law Journal have graciously let us do so. Hoffmann\u27s main claim is that we extrapolated the 68% rate of reversible error we reported for capital verdicts reviewed during the twenty-three-year study period. We did no such thing. But he did. His 40% counterstatistic is an extrapolation in the purest sense, which proceeds from deflationary assumptions that are factually wrong

Vangrack\u27s Explanations: Treating the Truth as a Mere Matter of Form

We welcome criticism by responsible scholars and readers, and the chance to address it in journals that enforce appropriate standards of accuracy and integrity. We have done just that in exchanges in Judicature and the Indiana Law Journal. But the inaccuracies in Adam VanGrack\u27s Note, and new problems with his present explanation, lead us to conclude that it is not useful to exchange views with him in the Washington University Law Quarterly. Beyond all is Mr. VanGrack\u27s dismissal of matters serious enough to trigger an extraordinary instruction to explain himself in print, and to prompt him to rescind statements published only a few months ago, as mere semantic complaints. Although fruitless as dialectic with Mr. VanGrack, this reply does give us a chance to discuss our data-sharing arrangements