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i just served as discussant for an american sociological assocation session on incarceration and the labor market and as guest editor for a set of upcoming criminology & public policy papers on the effect of criminal background checks. in each case, some fine sociologists, economists, policy school folks, and criminologists weighed in on research and policy questions surrounding employer access to criminal records.

the stark differences in disciplinary approaches make for stimulating exchanges. for example, in his forthcoming essay, harvard economist richard freeman argues that employers should have greater access to criminal history and post-conviction information. i’ve long taken the opposite view, citing the poor quality and biases in much arrest and conviction information, the proliferation of trivial records for traffic and misdemeanor offenses, and larger concerns about encroachments on individual privacy rights.

nevertheless, professors freeman and holzer cite theory and emerging evidence suggesting that cloaking such information may have ugly unintended consequences. in the absence of reliable signals about applicants’ criminality, the argument goes, employers will rely instead upon statistical discrimination — screening out applicants from groups thought to be characterized by high crime rates. the upshot is that young african american males without records could face greater discrimination if employers lose access to criminal record data.

if i remember my undergraduate economics courses correctly, more information is generally better than less information — and perfect information is best of all. i buy this argument to a point, but would suggest instead that public release of a more uniform, standardized, and parsimonious set of criminal history information might be the best policy course.

here is a list of the papers:

american sociological association session:

Session Organizer: Bruce Western (Harvard University)
*Collateral Costs: The Effects of Incarceration on Employment and Earnings Among Young Men – Harry Holzer (Georgetown University)
* Sequencing Disadvantage: Race, Criminal Background, and the Diminishing of Opportunity –Devah Pager (Princeton University)
*Incarceration Length, Employment, and Earnings –Jeffrey Kling (Brookings Institution)
Discussant: Christopher Uggen (University of Minnesota)

criminology & public policy papers (volume 7, issue 3, august 2008)

*Uggen, Christopher. 2008. Editorial introduction: The Effect of Criminal Background Checks on Hiring Ex-offenders. Criminology & Public Policy.
*Stoll, Michael A. and Shawn D. Bushway. 2008. The effect of criminal background checks on hiring ex-offenders. Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.
*Freeman, Richard. 2008. Incarceration, criminal background checks, and employment in a low(er) crime society. Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.
*Western, Bruce. 2008. Criminal background checks and employment among workers with criminal records. Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.

I. the good news:

a. the city of minneapolis honors 39 officers today for outstanding valor in the line of duty.

b. official reports of violent crime continue to drop — about 14 percent from january-june 2008 in comparison to january-june, 2007. this follows a drop of similar magnitude between 2006 and 2007. the numbers look (surprisingly) good for just about every part I crime.

II. the bad news:

city attorneys are advising that the city pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit by five african american police officers alleging discriminatory treatment. such news is disturbing in both its costs to taxpayers and its meaning for the department and the city. i don’t have any inside information about the case, but cities are rarely eager to settle on numbers this large without some evidentiary basis for the allegations. as of friday, the city council had yet to approve the settlement.

i’ve got some excellent former students on the minneapolis police force, so i’d like to think they’ve played some part in the good news reported above — and, of course, that they bear no responsibility for the bad news.

jay wrote this morning, regarding david carr’s piece in sunday’s times magazine. i don’t think our paths ever crossed, though we certainly ran in the same minneapolis music/journalism circles. mr. carr, now a respected writer with a regular times column, offers a disturbingly honest first-person account of his addiction and criminal history. his book, the night of the gun, will be released this august. if the times excerpt is representative, the memoir will offer an unflinching look at some ugly truths. an excerpt:

just about every prison has a hole, a box, or a seg unit. these are thought to deter inmates from disruptive behavior, incapacitate those dangerous to themselves or others, and, sometimes, to protect inmates who might be especially vulnerable. if a prison is a microcosm of society, the seg unit is therefore the prison’s prison.

in gideon v. wainright (1963), the u.s. supreme court ruled that state courts are required under the constitution’s sixth amendment to provide counsel for criminal defendants who can’t afford their own attorneys. the decision greatly expanded public defender offices to provide for such defense.

now abc news is reporting that the severe budget problems faced by these offices may be compromising their ability to provide adequate counsel:

Statewide public defenders in Kentucky and Minnesota and local offices in cities such as Atlanta and Miami say budget cuts are forcing them to fire or furlough trial lawyers, leaving the offices unable to handle misdemeanor and, in some instances, serious felony cases.

The cuts leave states scrambling to find a solution to a constitutional dilemma: The Sixth Amendment requires the government to either provide poor defendants with lawyers or release them.

in the jurisdictions i know best, they’ve trimmed away every ounce of fat in the budgets over the past five years. so today they are cutting muscle and bone — paralegals, investigative staff, administrative support, and, finally, the attorneys themselves. for a strapped mayor or city council, it can be easier to cut the defender’s office than to trim the DA’s budget or that of the police. that’s why it could take some major wrongful conviction lawsuits — or another clarence earl gideon — to preserve the right to counsel for indigent defendants.

i’ve posted before about the crippling employment problems of former felons, many of whom have shared first-hand testimony here. a fine associated press report by kathy matheson details philadelphia’s municipal tax credit program for hiring former prisoners. in my view, the program represents a bold and courageous move by mayor michael nutter and the city of brotherly love.

criminologists typically adopt a supply-side approach, rather than viewing crime as a problem of demand for illegal goods and services. demand reduction strategies have long been practiced with regard to substance use. if effective, however, the idea might be productively extended to problem landlords and myriad other areas. for prostitution, at least, there’s some evidence that simple interventions with consumers might slow demand.

nij and the san francisco chronicle report that the first offender prostitution program (or “john school”) might be effective in reducing the demand for prostitution. i say “might” because the clever multi-method analysis (details here) by abt associates isn’t really set up to make strong causal claims.

via boingboing: a radar magazine story reports on bill geerhart, an unemployed thirtysomething, who sent letters to oprah winfrey, donald rumsfeld, and larry flynt while posing as a ten year old. “little billy” also sent letters to (and received responses from) richard ramirez, charles manson, ted kacynzski, and eric menendez.this is an old bit, perhaps best executed in don novello’s classic the lazlo letters. the prisoners’ responses weren’t terribly revealing, since billy’s short letters didn’t give them much to work with. that said, i’m just a bit more sympathetic to clarence thomas after reading him tell billy that he likes egg mcmuffins and pretty much everything at mcdonalds.

yahoo/ap reports today on a strongly-worded JAMA piece on guest authorship and ghostwriting in publications related to rofecoxib.

from lindsey tanner’s associated press article:

CHICAGO (AP) — Two new reports involving the painkiller Vioxx raise fresh concerns about how drug companies influence the interpretation and publication of medical research.

The reports claim Merck & Co. frequently paid academic scientists to take credit for research articles prepared by company-hired medical writers, a practice called ghostwriting…

the story gets better, but i’m stuck on the idea that the “academic scientists” are literally selling their names and the credibility of their institutions — and that the results are published in respectable journals. while authorship norms vary greatly by discipline and department, i always figured that the putative authors were the ones paying the ghostwriters.

although big pharma wouldn’t care to tempt me, i can envision such a scenario arising in my field of study. let’s say i get a grant from privateprisonco to fund my next recidivism study. they hire criminological ghostwriters from the firm of shill & hack to write a manuscript comparing the recidivism of privateprisonco releasees with that of a matched comparison group of statepen releasees. they give me first authorship and $500 for my trouble, in exchange for whatever credibility attaches to my name and institution.

the full JAMA piece is well-documented, though merck is challenging the article and its pointed conclusion:

Authors who “sign-off” on or “edit” original manuscripts or reviews written explicitly by pharmaceutical industry employees or by medical publishing companies should offer full authorship disclosure, such as, “drafting of the manuscript was done by representatives from XYZ, Inc; the authors were responsible for critical revisions of the manuscript for important intellectual content.”