Stephanie L. Kent

Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and Death Sentences

Capital punishment is the most severe punishment, yet little is known about the social conditions that lead to death sentences. Racial threat explanations imply that this sanction will be imposed more often in jurisdictions with larger minority populations, but some scholars suggest that a tradition of vigilante violence leads to increased death sentences. This study tests the combined explanatory power of both accounts by assessing statistical interactions between past lynchings and the recent percentage of African Americans after political conditions and other plausible effects are held constant. Findings from count models based on different samples, data, and estimators suggest that racial threat and lynchings combine to produce increased death sentences, but the presence of liberal political values explains the absence of death sentences. These findings both confirm and refine the political version of conflict theory because they suggest that the effects of current racial threat and past vigilantism largely directed against newly freed slaves jointly contribute to current lethal but legal reactions to racial threat.

Who survives on death row? An individual and contextual analysis

What are the relationships between death row offender attributes, social arrangements, and executions? Partly because public officials control executions, theorists view this sanction as intrinsically political. Although the literature has focused on offender attributes that lead to death sentences, the post-sentencing stage is at least as important. States differ sharply in their willingness to execute and less than 10 percent of those given a death sentence are executed. To correct the resulting problems with censored data, this study uses a discrete-time event history analysis to detect the individual and state-level contextual factors that shape execution probabilities. The findings show that minority death row inmates convicted of killing whites face higher execution probabilities than other capital offenders. Theoretically relevant contextual factors with explanatory power include minority presence in nonlinear form, political ideology, and votes for Republican presidential candidates. Inasmuch as there is little or no systematic research on the individual and contextual factors that influence execution probabilities, these findings fill important gaps in the literature.

Killings of Police in U.S. Cities since 1980: An Examination of Environmental and Political Explanations

Most research on killings of police in urban areas attempted to link lethal violence against officers to the violence and disorder in the communities they work.Yet support for this relationship is inconsistent. Fewer studies considered whether local political arrangements affect killings of police. This study attempts to remedy this gap by using recent data to investigate the relationship between the political conditions of large U.S. cities and the number of homicides of police officers in the line of duty in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. Negative binomial regression analyses suggest that racial income inequality and the size of the Black population are positively associated with killings of police but cities with African American mayors have less killings. Police killings of citizens are also positively related to officer killings. The results largely support political explanations and uncover time-contingent effects of segregation on violence against state representatives.

Predicting Abolition: A Cross-National Survival Analysis of the Social and Political Determinants of Death Penalty Statutes:

Cross-national research on the determinants of criminal penalties has generally recognized that the amount of crime is an insufficient explanation for the use of punishment. Some research supports conflict explanations, reporting that economic inequality and the presence of ethnic minorities threatens elites who respond by advocating increased punishments largely aimed at minority groups. Other research reports that democratized nations in which citizens enjoy many civil liberties have lower levels of punishment. This study uses event history and logistic analyses to identify the social and political factors that shape the existence of the death penalty in 92 nations over a 23-year period. The results largely support conflict explanations for the existence of this punishment by finding that nations with high-income inequality and large ethnic minority populations have the lowest likelihood of abolition.

Race, poverty, and the traffic ticket cycle: Exploring the situational context of the application of police discretion

Purpose – Through systematic observation of police decision-making behavior, the aim of this paper is to investigate what factors differentiate between citizens who receive a warning vs a ticket from police and whether the influence of those factors varies by race. The paper also explores the context of those decisions for both blacks and whites to further the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of any observed differences in the likelihood of receiving a ticket vs a warning. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected during police ridealongs conducted in a sample of cities within Cuyahoga County, Ohio. A total of 140 ridealongs were completed, yielding a total of 312 vehicle or citizen stops. Findings – The paper finds that black citizens are more likely to receive a ticket than white citizens. However, the paper also finds important differences in the situational context of traffic stops for blacks and whites and uncover evidence of a cycle of traffic tickets and license suspensions among ...

Structural Determinants of Municipal Police Force Size in Large Cities Across Canada Assessing the Applicability of Ethnic Threat Theories in the Canadian Context

Substantial theoretical and empirical attention has been directed at isolating the structural conditions that lead to shifts in the size of metropolitan police departments in the United States. These studies rely heavily on ethnic and racial threat explanations, which imply that larger police forces will be employed in jurisdictions with larger minority populations. It is entirely unclear, though, whether such accounts are applicable outside the United States. This study fills this void in the literature by assessing the extent to which ethnic threat hypotheses can explain variations in police strength using data on 40 large Canadian cities from 1996 to 2006. Results show that the size of the minority population significantly influences the size of metropolitan police departments.

The Racial Politics of Due Process Protection: Does partisanship or racial composition influence state-level adoption of recorded interrogation policies?

Discoveries of wrongful convictions have increased substantially over the last several decades. During this period, practitioners and scholars have been advocating for the adoption of policies aimed at reducing the likelihood of convicting a person for a crime they did not commit. Implementing such policies are vitally important not only because they help ensure that the innocent do not receive unwarranted sanctions or that the guilty go unpunished but also because cases of wrongful conviction can erode public confidence in the criminal justice system and trust in the rule of law. To avoid such outcomes, many states have adopted policies through legislation that aim to reduce system errors. It remains unclear, however, why some states appear more willing to provide due process protections against wrongful convictions than others. Findings suggest that dimensions of racial politics may help explain the reluctance of some states to adopt protections against wrongful convictions. Specifically, interaction terms show that states with a Republican governor and a large African American population are the least likely to adopt policies aimed at protecting against wrongful convictions. We thus identify important differences in the political and social context between U.S. states that influence the adoption of criminal justice policies.