Public Ideology, Minority Threat, and Felony Collateral Sanctions

Abstract

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.

State variation in the drug felony lifetime ban on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: Why the modified ban matters

“…Given prior theory and research showing that minority threat is associated with more punitive collateral consequences (Ewald, 2012; Owens and Smith, 2012; Whittle and Parker, 2014), we include measures of racial and ethnic composition of adult TANF rolls in each state (percent African American and percent Hispanic) taken from the “Characteristics and Financial Circumstances of TANF Recipients,” produced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Family Assistance (2017). These variables measure the percentage of all individuals enrolled in the TANF program per year in each racial/ethnic category.…”

“…As shown in Table 2, incarceration rates ranged from about 101 per 100,000 to 881 per 100,000 over the study period. Given that incarceration rates are correlated with crime rates, we control for the violent crime rate per 100,000 taken from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for each state-year (Ewald, 2012; Owens and Smith, 2012; Whittle and Parker, 2014). Over our study period, the violent crime rate ranged from 66.9 to 990.3 per 100,000 people, as shown in Table 2.…”

“…Research to-date has shown that U.S. states with higher minority populations and more conservative ideology enact more restrictive collateral consequences (Ewald, 2012; Whittle and Parker, 2014). In one study, higher incarceration rates and location in the south are also associated with more restrictive collateral consequences but at lower levels of statistical significance in multivariate models (Ewald, 2012).…”

Social Exclusion as a State-Level Predictor of Changes in Collateral Sanctions

“…Whittle and Parker (2014) provides the most comprehensive empirical analysis in their study of state-level predictors of collateral sanctions using LAC scores from 2009. They hypothesized that racial threat and conservatism would correlate with higher LAC collateral sanction scores (harsher sanctions).…”

“…Likewise, we know little about what motivates the adoption and maintenance of collateral sanction policies in the face of research suggesting that they are counteractive as a form of deterrence. Using report cards from the LAC, Whittle and Parker (2014) found that indicators of political conservatism, religiosity, and racial threat are predictive of more restrictive collateral sanctions at the state level; however, little other research contributes meaningfully to understanding the determinants of state-level decisions about collateral sanctions. This study advances prior research by exploring new variables related to a social exclusion framework and by attending to changes in LAC collateral sanctions scores over time.…”