Prisoner Reentry

Criminology ◽  
2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andres F. Rengifo

Approximately 650,000 individuals are released from state and federal prisons every year in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of these ex-prisoners recidivate within three years. The social costs associated with this phenomenon are significant for prisoners and their families (e.g., higher penalties for repeated offenders, further detachment from pro-social networks) and government agencies (e.g., public safety concerns, growing fiscal pressures). Some of these obstacles are not new; however, their relevance and impact has been amplified by mass imprisonment and more conservative policies and ideologies. In response, practitioners and scholars have reconsidered the logic and structure of the reintegration process for ex-prisoners in order to provide more effective services and interventions. A growing body of research has begun to document these reentry initiatives from various perspectives and methodologies.

Author(s):  
Vincent Chiao

A popular form of retributivism insists that the permissibility of punishment is dependent solely upon the rights of the parties, with the social costs or benefits of a system of punishment relegated at best to a supporting role in justifying punishment. This chapter explains why theories of that form—despite their current popularity—cannot explain the moral judgment that the United States currently incarcerates too many people. Most commentators, including proponents of this type of theory, are inclined to believe that the United States does incarcerate too many people—that a policy of “mass incarceration” is unjustified. However, mass incarceration represents a failure of social policy, and is not readily analyzed in terms of the morality of individual transactions. The chapter concludes by briefly sketching how the political ideal of anti-deference might be brought to bear on the question of mass incarceration.


Author(s):  
Carlo Michael Knotz ◽  
Mia Katharina Gandenberger ◽  
Flavia Fossati ◽  
Giuliano Bonoli

AbstractMany important societal debates revolve around questions of deservingness, especially when it comes to debates related to inequality and social protection. It is therefore unsurprising that a growing body of research spanning the social and political sciences is concerned with the determinants of deservingness perceptions. In this contribution, we engage with the currently central theoretical framework used in deservingness research and point out an important weakness: Partly ambiguous definitions of the framework’s central concepts, the criteria for perceived deservingness. We also highlight the negative consequences this has for empirical research, including notably varying and overlapping operationalizations and thereby a lacking comparability of results across studies. Our main contribution is a redefinition of the criteria for perceived deservingness and a demonstration of the empirical implications of using this new set of criteria via original vignette survey experiments conducted in Germany and the United States in 2019. Our results provide a clearer image of which criteria drive deservingness perceptions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8335
Author(s):  
Jasmina Nedevska

Climate change litigation has emerged as a powerful tool as societies steer towards sustainable development. Although the litigation mainly takes place in domestic courts, the implications can be seen as global as specific climate rulings influence courts across national borders. However, while the phenomenon of judicialization is well-known in the social sciences, relatively few have studied issues of legitimacy that arise as climate politics move into courts. A comparatively large part of climate cases have appeared in the United States. This article presents a research plan for a study of judges’ opinions and dissents in the United States, regarding the justiciability of strategic climate cases. The purpose is to empirically study how judges navigate a perceived normative conflict—between the litigation and an overarching ideal of separation of powers—in a system marked by checks and balances.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Carbone

AbstractAlone among Western nations, the United States has a two-tier system for welfare protections for vertebrate animals in research. Because its Animal Welfare Act (AWA) excludes laboratory rats and mice (RM), government veterinarians do not inspect RM laboratories and RM numbers are only partially reported to government agencies1. Without transparent statistics, it is impossible to track efforts to reduce or replace these sentient animals’ use or to project government resources needed if AWA coverage were expanded to include them. I obtained annual RM usage data from 16 large American institutions and compared RM numbers to institutions’ legally-required reports of their AWA-covered mammals. RM comprised approximately 99.3% of mammals at these representative institutions. Extrapolating from 780,070 AWA-covered mammals in 2017–18, I estimate that 111.5 million rats and mice were used per year in this period. If the same proportion of RM undergo painful procedures as are publicly reported for AWA-covered animals, then some 44.5 million mice and rats underwent potentially painful experiments. These data inform the questions of whether the AWA needs an update to cover RM, or whether the NIH should increase transparency of funded animal research. These figures can benchmark progress in reducing animal numbers in general and more specifically, in painful experiments. This estimate is higher than any others available, reflecting the challenges of obtaining statistics without consistent and transparent institutional reports.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ayana Omilade Flewellen ◽  
Justin P. Dunnavant ◽  
Alicia Odewale ◽  
Alexandra Jones ◽  
Tsione Wolde-Michael ◽  
...  

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.


Author(s):  
Arati Maleku ◽  
Megan España ◽  
Shannon Jarrott ◽  
Sharvari Karandikar ◽  
Rupal Parekh

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 237802312098032
Author(s):  
Brandon G. Wagner ◽  
Kate H. Choi ◽  
Philip N. Cohen

In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records—marriage certificates and applications—gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document