Desistance and Legitimacy: The Impact of Offender Notification Meetings on Recidivism among High Risk Offenders

Abstract

Legitimacy-based approaches to crime prevention assume that individuals will comply with the law when they believe that the law and its agents are legitimate and act in ways that are “fair” and “just.” Currently, legitimacy-based programs are shown to lower aggregate levels of crime; yet, no study has investigated whether such programs influence individual offending. Using quasi-experimental design and survival analyses, this study evaluates the effectiveness of one such program—Chicago’s Project Safe Neighborhoods’ (PSN) Offender Notification Forums—at reducing individual recidivism among a population of returning prisoners. Results suggest that involvement in PSN significantly reduces the risk of subsequent incarceration and is associated with significantly longer intervals that offenders remain on the street and out of prison. As the first study to provide individual-level evidence promoting legitimacy-based interventions on patterns of individual offending, out study suggests these interventions can and do reduce rates of recidivism.

Keywords:

• legitimacy
• recidivism
• high risk offenders
• procedural justice

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the members of the Chicago PSN Working Group and Tony Cheng. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. The points of view in this article are those of the authors and in no way express the opinion of the members of the PSN Working Group, the City of Chicago, The State of Illinois, the United States Attorney’s Office of the Northern District Illinois, or any of the funding agencies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There is one focused deterrence program that examines the effect of such programing on individual outcomes: the Hawaii HOPE Program (Hawken & Kleiman, 2009).

2 For a recent meta-analysis of focused deterrence programs that utilized some kind of experimental evaluation, see Braga and Weisburd (2012). See also, Durlauf and Nagin (2011).

3 The Forums were conducted in several police districts and each district had slight variations in forum structure due to the space available within the district (i.e. the Forum location) but also the varying actors that were involved. Overall, though, the variations across Forums are slight.

4 The PSN team was vigilant of the structure and implementation of the Forums, often conducting “re-boot” sessions when new individuals joined the efforts to ensure the consistency of the message and its delivery.

5 The following quotes are taken from the ethnographic field notes of the second author whom observed dozens of these meetings during the study period.

6 All data analysis represents the views of the authors, not the state of Illinois or the IDOC.

7 The life course literature (i.e. Sampson and Laub (1995) suggests that certain life changes, such as marriage, cohabitation, and having children, act as turning points in an offender’s criminal career that facilitate desistance). As such, we control for some of these turning points.

8 No controls are displayed since they behave similar to models already discussed. Controls in the model include: Black, Age, High School Educated, Children, Married, Cohabiting, Gang Member, and Number of Illinois Incarcerations. Additionally, for the within-neighborhood models, we include a control for the PSN experimental group while for the between-neighborhood models, we include both the variables for the PSN experimental group and the PSN neighborhood group.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance [grant number 2006-GP-CX-0017] through the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

Notes on contributors

Danielle Wallace

Danielle Wallace is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on neighborhoods, policing and crime, as well as crime and health. Her work has been published in leading criminology journals like the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, as well as top health journals like Social Science and Medicine. Currently, she is working on evaluating the impact of health on recidivism among serious offenders and the evaluation of racial discrimination in traffic stops in Maricopa County, AZ.

Andrew V. Papachristos

Andrew V. Papachristos is an associate professor of sociology at Yale University. His research applies the growing field of network science to understanding patterns of gunshot victimization in U.S. cities. Much of this work has focused on street gangs, illegal gun markets, and interpersonal violence. His recent writing has appeared in The American Journal of Sociology, The American Sociological Review, The American Journal of Public Health, Social Science & Medicine, and The Journal of Quantitative Criminology, among other outlets.

Tracey Meares

Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale University. Professor Meares has worked extensively with the federal government, having served on the Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council Standing Committee of the National Academy of Sciences from 2004–2011. Additionally, she has served on two National Research Council Review Committees: one to review research on police policy and practices, which produced the book, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence (2004, Skogan and Frydl, eds.) and another to review the National Institute of Justice, Strengthening the National Institute of Justice, (2010, Welford, Chemers and Schuck, eds). In November of 2010, Meares was named by Attorney General Eric Holder to sit on the Department of Justice’s newly-created Science Advisory Board. And in December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Jeffrey Fagan

Jeffery Fagan is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. His research and scholarship examines policing, the legitimacy of the criminal law, capital punishment, legal socialization of adolescents, neighborhoods and crime, and juvenile crime and punishment. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, and served on the ASC Executive Board for three years. He is past Editor of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals on criminology and law.