Browsing by Subject "punishment"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Digital Punishment: The Production and Consequences of Online Crime Reporting
    (2015-07) Lageson, Sarah
    This dissertation is a mixed methods study of the production, dissemination and effects of digital crime reporting, such as mug shot websites, crime blogs, Facebook crime watch pages, and Twitter crime update accounts. These websites post arrest records and booking photos before individuals are charged or convicted, but they remain online indefinitely. This dissertation asks big questions about data privacy, criminal justice and punishment through three qualitative studies: 1) the murky world of citizen journalism within the specific context of crime news; 2) the sociolegal framework of case law in this area and how social actors interpret this law, and; 3) the empirical effects of these records for those who appear on the websites, speaking to broader social, civic, and psychological consequences. At its core, this study argues that the internet has elevated crime and punishment to the center of daily life, routine activities, and American culture more than ever before. Within this framework, I make three concrete arguments: First, I argue that these websites operate as a new form of social control strategies by fostering a fear of crime and publicizing transgressions. Importantly, publishers are non-state actors who engage in a meaning-making process by focusing on crime and therefore feeling they have a direct impact on crime. Second, I argue that the ambiguity around the legality of these sites produces new forms of consciousness around our rights to public information and freedom of speech. Finally, I argue these sites constitute novel forms of punishment in the widespread nature of the reporting, in heightening the variety and levels of crimes publicly punishable, and by permanently archiving these punishment symbols in digital spaces. Empirically, I find digital criminal histories are characterized by their scope, breadth, availability, and permanence. These websites post arrest records, full names, and booking photos before individuals are charged with or convicted of a crime, yet they remain online indefinitely. These websites are often produced by amateurs who use crime as a method to address broader social issues. These sites appeal to consumers by providing access to real-time crime information allowing them to feel they have an active role in crime prevention without directly interacting with the criminal justice system. There are consequences to these practices, particularly in the spread of erroneous and dismissed records. While criminal history data changes rapidly at the jurisdictional level, there does not exist a system to ensure corresponding updates are made online. These crime websites thus constitute a new form of punishment: They culminate in a curated and searchable online history, which is often unknown to the website subject until they face consequences of these records. These records communicate powerful signals of guilt by attaching a criminal label to millions of arrestees, simultaneously introducing a host of social and psychological consequences.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Iatrogenic Effects of Punishment
    (2022-08) Larson, Ryan
    Sociological criminology has undergone a scholarly revolution in identifying the vast reach of punishment’s deleterious effects across multiple domains of American social, political, and economic life. However, this scholarship has largely neglected to empirically examine what ramifications these adverse effects of punishment have for crime. Across three empirical studies at multiple levels of analysis, this dissertation brings crime back in as a central outcome in the study of the effects of punishment, and examines aspects of the potential iatrogenic, or crime inducing, pathways of punishment. The first study, using court administrative data and the quasi-random assignment of judges in Minnesota, investigates the causal “packaging” effects of punishment on crime, finding the combination of hefty probation and monetary sanctions to be particularly criminogenic, alongside weak overall effects of punishment on recidivism. Second, this dissertation situates community-level punishment within sociological theories of neighborhood ecology and crime, and reveals bifurcating effects punishment on violence at the community-level, with incarceration and monetary sanctions loads tied to lower levels of neighborhood crime, but probation concentrations tied to higher crime rates. The second study also highlights a criminogenic path of punishment on violence by increasing neighborhood levels of concentrated disadvantage. The third empirical study leverages a difference-in-difference design to estimate the causal effect of ban-the-box legislation, which delays the disclosure of criminal records during the employment process, on both state-level employment and crime rates, finding little relationship between ban-the-box adoption and crime. In contrast, ban-the-box appears to bolster employment overall, but it may have adverse effects on Black employment. These empirical studies document the iatrogenic links between punishment and crime, as well as examine the efficacy of state policy to sever these relationships.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Maximae Furiarum: The Female Demonic in Augustan Epic
    (2016-05) Cullick, Rachael
    This dissertation examines the development of the traditional Greek Furies into a new type of demonic figure that arises in Vergil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Along with the new emphasis on their independent agency, disguise, and feminine and monstrous physicality, one of the most important innovations in the Aeneid is that the Furies incite crimes by playing on human desires, even as their traditional power to enforce order by punishing crimes is expanded upon. At the heart of the Furies' structural and thematic importance in the Aeneid is their fundamental connection to inflaming passion, which is both necessary and dangerous, and to the authoritative punishment that is central to Roman social order. The associations with wrath and passions developed by Vergil are very much a part of the Furies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but they are also important within the broader context of ancient views of women, the supernatural, and how they intersect with provocation, punishment, and power. Overall, then, the traits of this new type of figure are very influential on imperial Latin epic and later images of the demonic in Western culture, particularly in their double edged power to arouse human passions and punish the resulting crimes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Towards a Sociology of Mercy: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Commutation Release in the United States
    (2019-08) Horowitz, Veronica
    Using a multimethod approach, this dissertation explores a legal mechanism of mercy in the United States: commutation of sentence. Commutation is a form of executive clemency that allows the president (at the federal level) or the governor (at the state level) to shorten a prisoner's sentence. While this release mechanism exists throughout the country, it has been neglected in empirical scholarship, particularly in state systems where state governors typically have wide discretion, with power to alter sentencing decisions made by prosecutors, judges, statutes, and sentencing guidelines. The unprecedented size and cost of imprisonment has led to increased bipartisan support for reducing the prison population. Commutation, if utilized widely, has the potential to reduce incarceration rates. This study is the first mixed-methods investigation of state-level commutation releases in the United States. The primary aim underlying this project is to identify how commutation release could be expanded. With so little known about the current use of commutation, I investigate four specific research questions: 1) who is being released through commutation? 2) in what contexts do these releases occur? 3) how does commutation occur? 4) why are individual commutation cases successful? I address questions 1 and 2 through quantitative methods, including statistical techniques such as logistic regression, mixed-effects, and multinomial models on individual, state, and national prison data. I find that this type of mercy is rarely used, with whites, women, and those with greater educational attainment favored in commutation releases. This holds true both when comparing commutation releasees to the entire prison population, and when comparing the determinants of release through commutation to release through other mechanisms such as discretionary and mandatory parole. Regarding the macro-level contexts in which commutation releases occur, I find Republican governorship and higher rates of violent crime predict more commutation releases. Cross-level interactions reveal that while for white women, governor political affiliation has no impact on the probability of commutation release, yet black men, black women, and white men all benefit under Republican governorship. I address questions 3 and 4 qualitatively, through an analysis of commutation policies, individual commutation applications, transcripts from past commutation hearings, and hearing observations in four sites (Iowa, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington). I find that despite wide variation in the bureaucracy of commutation, each of these sites has structural features that severely curtail the large-scale use of commutation as a mechanism of prison release. For individual applicants, I conclude that while under present practices there seems to be nothing a person can do to ensure success in their request for mercy, many conditions must be met for commutation release to be a reasonable possibility. I term these Necessary But Insufficient Conditions (NBICs), grouping these conditions into four categories: changeable, subjectively determined, external, and unchangeable. Theoretically, I argue that despite its infrequency, commutation serves an important and overlooked function in modern penal practice. Commutation plays a key role in the reification of state power and maintenance of social control, both within prisons and in society more broadly.