Federal and state felony collateral sanctions directly impact the opportunities and resources available to ex-felons and in turn their ability to successfully reenter society after conviction and possible incarceration. Because felony collateral sanctions vary greatly from state to state, we offer a state-level analysis of factors that produce differences in collateral sanctions levels adopted by U.S. states. Religion, political climate, and minority threat explanations have been linked to criminal penalty severity; however, no one to date has applied these explanations to felony collateral sanctions besides felony disenfranchisement at the macro level. With zero-truncated Poisson (ZTP) procedures, this study examines whether religion, political climate, and minority threat explanations result in states’ adopting greater collateral sanctions against convicted felons. Our research reveals that conservative climate, religiosity, and racial threat, but not ethnic threat or punitiveness, significantly affect state-level collateral sanctions. States with large minority and conservative populations are more likely to have more stigmatizing collateral sanction that can affect recidivism. We find that race rather than ethnicity is an important predictor of the collateral sanctions levels that states adopt; however, public ideology in the form of conservatism and religiosity has a greater effect on collateral sanctions. Policy implications are discussed.

Despite recent advances in prisoner reentry and felony collateral consequences literature, the literature on collateral sanctions—intended legal consequences of criminal conviction—remains underdeveloped and unorganized. This article aims to take stock of the collateral sanctions literature to determine what the field currently knows about adult felony collateral sanctions’ effects on criminal recidivism. The author conducted a literature review of publications related to the topic of collateral sanctions and recidivism between 1995 and 2014. From these findings, the author outlines the state of current collateral sanctions research, identifies existing gaps in the literature, and discusses future research’s needed directions and challenges. Collateral sanctions and their effects remain mostly “invisible” despite a growing body of literature indicating that, at least for some sanctions, recidivism may be an unintended consequence of intended collateral sanction policies.

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Correctional officers are critical members of the prison community. However, scholarship rarely considers how correctional officers contribute to prison outcomes instead largely focusing on importation (individual) and deprivation (organizational) factors related to the incarcerated population. This is also true regarding how scholars and practitioners approach suicide committed by incarcerated people, one of the leading causes of death in US carceral institutions. Using quantitative data from confinement facilities across the United States, this study answers the research question: What is the relationship between prison suicide rates and correctional officer gender? Results show that deprivation factors (variables related to the carceral environment) influence prison suicide. Additionally, gender diversity among correctional officers reduces the rate of prison suicide. Implications for future research and practice and limitations of the study are also discussed.