The Contextual Determinants and Implications of Back-end Sentencing

This grant is funded under NIJ's 2012 Ph.D. Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) Program, which provides awards to accredited academic universities that offer research-based doctoral degrees in disciplines relevant to NIJ's mission. The goal of this project is to examine how offenders' neighborhood and county of residence affect back-end violations, sanctions, and the consequences of sanctions. The aims of this project are to investigate: the relationship between living in a disadvantaged neighborhood and variation in parole violations and sanctions; the impact of county-level punitiveness on sanctions; and how neighborhood of residence affects the individual consequences of sanctions. This project will use a dataset consisting of the population of prisoners released onto parole in Michigan in 2003 (N=11,064), a subset of a Michigan Department of Corrections data compiled by Drs. Morenoff and Harding under an NIJ grant. To estimate violation, sanction, and future recidivism outcomes, the project will employ multivariate methods including sequential logistic regression and multilevel models. Proposed deliverables include manuscripts to academic journals, presentations at professional conferences, press releases and podcasts, and a policy brief for local stakeholders. Findings from this project may inform State and local policymakers and practitioners on location- or behavior-specific allocation of resources, specialized programming, modified sanction practices, and targeted parole agent training. ca/ncf