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ABSTRACT
Drawing on the minority threat and focal concerns theoretical perspectives on criminal justice outcomes, the current study of arrests for firearm-related felony offenses in St. Louis examines the effect of neighborhood context on formal charges, bail, pretrial detention, and sentencing. The study finds that individuals charged with committing a firearm-related felony in More socioeconomically adVantaged neighborhoods receive significantly higher bail than those arrested for the same crimes in less advantaged neighborhoods. High bail increases the length of pretrial detention, which in turn raises the probability that the individual is sentenced to prison rather than placed on probation. The results highlight the importance of modeling the cumulative process of case disposition when assessing the influence of community context on criminal justice decision-making.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See Donnelly and Asiedu (Citation2020) for an extensive review of the theoretical understanding of how neighborhoods shape racial and ethnic differences in criminal case processing.
2. See, also, Einstein & Jacob (Citation1977); Lynch (Citation2011); Myers and Talarico (Citation1986); and Stuntz (Citation2011).
3. It is important to note that through the focal concern lens, the neighborhood where the crime occurred, not where the defendant lives, needs protection.
4. The sample includes all arrests that were flagged by St. Louis City police department as firearm-related offenses. Any missing arrests are due to random error in coding at the initial flagging stage, which was out of the purview of the researchers. If a prosecutor decided to add a gun charge against a defendant but the case was not flagged by the police department as gun-related at arrest, the arrest/court-filing would not be included in the sample. Further, for cases that included multiple charges, if the prosecutor dropped the gun-related charge(s), the case was excluded from the sample.
5. Data on defendant ethnicity (Hispanic, Non-Hispanic) were not available.
6. Violent crime is the sum of homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
7. Due to the limited variation in defendant race, multi-level models or cross-level interactions are likely to provide inaccurate estimates, and are therefore not used in the current study.
8. Results available on request from the first author.
9. This downgrade in charging was done at the discretion of the prosecutor.
10. Whether representation by a private attorney is legally relevant is debatable because it generally depends on the financial means of the defendant.
11. Judges in jurisdictions that require the judiciary to live within the city limits, such as those in St. Louis, may be acutely aware of the needs of such neighborhoods, as they are likely to reside within or near the most affluent areas (see Auerhahn et al. Citation2017).
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Notes on contributors
Joshua H. Williams
Joshua H. Williams is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri—St. Louis in 2018. His current research interests include pretrial detention, bail, sentencing, and politics and punishment.
Mica Deckard
Mica Deckard is an Assistant Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University. His research interests include racial disparities in the criminal justice system, alternative strategies for crime prevention, human ecology, and mixed methods research.
Richard Rosenfeld
Richard Rosenfeld is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. His research focuses on crime trends.