{"id":1396,"date":"2012-01-13T17:28:16","date_gmt":"2012-01-13T23:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/?p=1396"},"modified":"2012-01-13T17:28:17","modified_gmt":"2012-01-13T23:28:17","slug":"stale-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2012\/01\/13\/stale-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Stale Records"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2008\/09\/02\/civil-rights-complaints-in-us-district-courts-1990-2006\/657-revision-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-659\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-659\" title=\"ethel\" src=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2012\/01\/ethel-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>Criminologists Al Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura offer a powerful New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/01\/10\/opinion\/paying-a-price-long-after-the-crime.html\">op-ed<\/a> this week, arguing that &#8220;stale criminal records&#8221; should expire when they can no longer distinguish criminals from non-criminals.<\/p>\n<p>But this isn&#8217;t just a couple of bleeding heart academics advocating on behalf of a stigmatized group &#8212; there&#8217;s a solid research foundation supporting the argument. Several smart and creative studies have now followed people arrested or convicted of crimes to watch how long it takes before a criminal&#8217;s risk of a new offense drops to the point that it is indistinguishable from those with no record of past crimes.<\/p>\n<p>Several teams of social scientists have designed really elegant studies to answer this important question. Most use some variant of event history or survival analysis &#8212; a semi-fancy but straightforward set of statistical tools. Based on their own <a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/j.1745-9125.2009.00155.x\/abstract\">research<\/a>, Blumstein and Nakamura now conservatively estimate the \u201credemption time\u201d at 10 to 13 years. <a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/j.1745-9133.2006.00397.x\/abstract\">Megan Kurlychek, Bobby Brame, and Shawn Bushway<\/a> came up with about a 6-year window using somewhat different data and methodology in <a href=\"http:\/\/chrisuggen.blogspot.com\/2006\/05\/when-do-i-stop-being-felon_04.html\">2006<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>While the specific &#8220;time-to-no-crime&#8221; varies across studies, the best evidence is now calling into question standard &#8220;lifetime&#8221; bans on employment, voting, and other rights and privileges. This doesn&#8217;t mean that the laws will be changed or even that they should be changed. But it does show how good social science can challenge old assumptions and inject much-needed evidence into public debates. And, for those of us who like to put our semi-fancy statistics to good purpose, the op-ed and the research beneath it offer a fine example of public scholarship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Criminologists Al Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura offer a powerful New York Times op-ed this week, arguing that &#8220;stale criminal records&#8221; should expire when they can no longer distinguish criminals from non-criminals. But this isn&#8217;t just a couple of bleeding heart academics advocating on behalf of a stigmatized group &#8212; there&#8217;s a solid research foundation supporting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1396"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1398,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396\/revisions\/1398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}