Noncongruent policymaking by cities for citizens with criminal records: Representation, organizing, and “Ban the Box”

Abstract

Generally, public (and private) policymakers adopt policies—laws, rules, and procedures—that encumber groups with negative social constructions and low political capital. Sometimes, however, they adopt policies beneficial, not burdensome, to them. We examine beneficial policy adoption for one disadvantaged group—U.S. citizens with criminal records. Our focus is the adoption of “Ban the Box” (BTB) policies that embargo criminal records questions on job applications and defer them during hiring by employers. We leverage extant data on annual BTB policy adoptions, novel annual city-level data on community organizing groups and descriptive representation (i.e., race and gender), and event history analysis for a sample of 256 U.S. cities to provide a comprehensive understanding of the city contexts associated with the spread of BTB policy adoptions by cities across the U.S. between 2004 and 2019. Although descriptive, the findings deepen and broaden the scholarship about the roles of civil society organizations and descriptive representation for beneficial policymaking for disadvantaged groups and the connection of interests and representation for abolishing some punitive policy designs by public (and private) actors.

The People’s Intervention: How #BlackLivesMatter Circumvented a Culture of Congruent Criminal Justice Policies in American States

“…They are well-organized, wellsupported by segments of the public, and have tremendous leverage over elements of both major political parties (Barkan and Cohn 1998;Bies 2017;Marks 2007;Wilson and Buckler 2010). Consequentially, criminal justice policies-like most policy designs-are also overwhelmingly congruent (Boushey 2016;Owens and Gunderson 2022). Punitive criminal justice policies are typically reserved for "deviants," and decisions to do so are supported by society (Chiricos, Welch, and Gertz 2004;Welch and Payne 2010).…”