Curriculum vita:

•  Click here for a copy of my CV.

Links to some of my recent papers:

• Why are Immigrants' Incarceration Rates So Low? Evidence on Selective Immigration, Deterrence, and Deportation (with Kristin Butcher).  We document that immigrants have lower incarceration rates than the native born in the United States and that the differential has increased over time. We present evidence that these low rates are not the mechanical result of deportation policies toward criminal aliens.  Based on empirical patterns in the data, we argue that the process of immigration selects those less likely to become incarcerated. 
• Immigration and Crime in Early 20th Century America (with Carolyn Moehling).  We find that a century ago immigrants may have been slightly more likely than natives to be involved in crime.  In 1904 prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity for all ages except ages 18 and 19 when the commitment rate for immigrants was higher than for the native born.  By 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older.  But this advantage disappears when one looks at commitments for violent offenses.  Aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data meant that analysts at the time missed these important features of the immigrant-native incarceration comparison.  The relative decline of the criminality of the foreign born reflected a growing gap between natives and immigrants at older ages, one that was driven by sharp increases in the commitment rates of the native born, while commitment rates for the foreign born were remarkably stable.
• The Crime-Control Effect of Incarceration:  Does Scale Matter? (with Raymond V. Liedka and Bert Useem), Criminology & Public Policy, vol. 5, no. 2, May 2006, pp.245-275.  We show crime rates have a nonlinear relationship to prison populations, revealing accelerating declining marginal returns. Because it is difficult to identify a strictly causal relationship between these key variables, we are cautious in interpreting the magnitude of the effect or the precise point at which returns turn negative.  Nonetheless, as the prison population continues to increase, albeit at a slower rate, after three decades of phenomenal growth, these findings provide an important caution that for many jurisdictions, the point of accelerating declining marginal returns may have set in.  This research is put into the larger context of the American prison buildup in my forthcoming book with Bert Useem, Prison State: The Challenge of Mass Incarceration, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Measuring and Explaining Charge Bargaining (with Shawn Bushway), Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23(2), June 2007, 105-125. This paper analyzes charge bargaining, a potentially important form of discretion in criminal sentencing that is obscured in many studies of sentencing outcomes. We measure the difference in sentencing outcomes caused by plea bargain as the magnitude of the reduction in sentence length. Using this measure, we compare prosecutorial discretion across counties in the two states in the earlier papers with divergent results. We conclude that charge bargaining plays an empirically important role in determining sentencing outcomes.  Furthermore, we find that measuring the distance (in months of prison time) moved during a charge bargain may provide a very different estimate of the discretion than is given by the rate of bargaining, which is the usual measure used. Although the rate of charge bargaining was higher in the voluntary guidelines state, its impact on sentences was greater in the presumptive guidelines jurisdiction, as predicted by Reitz’s (1998) typology.  Our finding of differential charge bargaining in these two jurisdictions should provide a caution when comparing the results of studies of disparity in sentencing across jurisdiction types.
• The Inextricable Link between Age and Criminal History in Sentencing (with Shawn Bushway), Crime & Delinquency, 53(1), January 2007, 156-183. In sentencing research, significant negative coefficients on age research have been interpreted as evidence that actors in the criminal justice system discriminate against younger people. This interpretation is incomplete. Because criminal sentencing laws generally specify punishment in terms of the number of past events in a defendant’s criminal history, age becomes a meaningful variable because older people have had more time to accumulate criminal history events. Therefore, two people of different ages with the same criminal history are not in fact equal. This is true for pure retributivists (as the fact that the younger offender has been committing crimes at a higher rate of offending may make the younger offender more culpable) and is also true for those with some utilitarian aims for sentencing (as recidivism will be higher for younger offenders).  This paper includes the results of simulations of alternative sentencing schemes to illustrate the stakes. To a certain extent, the interests of low-rate older offenders are opposed to those of high-rate younger offenders.

Last revision of this page: 11/17/2008