The Iatrogenic Effects of Punishment

Abstract

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.