Law & Society Review 43(4)

Incarceration and the Legitimate Labor Market: Examining Age-Graded Effects on Employment and Wages
Becky Pettit, Christopher J. Lyons

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. inmate population has increased dramatically, and the penal system has acquired growing attention in accounts of recent trends in economic stratification. As the prison system has expanded, its population has aged; incarceration rates have risen sharpest among older age groups. A large body of research documents differences in criminal offending and incarceration over the life course, but little attention has been paid to how the effects of spending time in prison depend on the timing of incarceration in the life course. Using state administrative data that provide significant variance in the age of offenders, this article investigates how the timing of incarceration in the life course influences its effects on post-release employment and wages. We do not find consistent evidence that incarceration effects vary by age at admission. Instead, incarceration appears to have important consequences for employment and wage outcomes regardless of when individuals are admitted to prison. Even the most motivated offenders suffer sizeable and significant wage penalties and, over time, decreased likelihood of employment. These findings underscore the relevance of legal and institutional shifts associated with carceral expansion and the aging of the inmate population for life course theories of criminal desistance, accounts of labor market inequality, and prisoner reentry programs.

Does Racial Balance in Workforce Representation Yield Equal Justice? Race Relations of Sentencing in Federal Court Organizations*
Geoff Ward, Amy Farrell, Danielle Rousseau

Increasing racial and ethnic group representation in justice-related occupations is considered a potential remedy to racial inequality in justice administration, including sentencing disparity. Studies to date yield little evidence of such an effect; however, research limitations may account for the mixed and limited evidence of the significance of justice workforce racial diversity. Specifically, few studies consider group-level dynamics of race and representation, thus failing to contextualize racial group power relations in justice administration. To consider these contextual dynamics we combine court organizational and case-level data from 89 federal districts and use hierarchical models to assess whether variably "representative" work groups relate to district-level differences in sentencing. Using district-specific indexes of population and work group dissimilarity to define representation, we find no relationships between black judge representation and sentencing in general across districts, but that districts with more black representation among prosecutors are significantly less likely to sentence defendants to terms of imprisonment. We also find in districts with increased black representation among prosecutors, and to a lesser degree among judges, that black defendants are less likely to be imprisoned and white defendants are more likely to be imprisoned, with the effect of narrowing black-white disparities in sentencing. Consistent with the "power-threat" perspective, and perhaps "implicit racial bias" research, findings encourage modeling diversity to account for relative racial group power in processes of social control and suggest that racial justice may be moderately advanced by equal representation among authorities.

Status Disparities in the Capital of Capital Punishment
Scott Phillips

Numerous studies have examined the influence of victim race on capital punishment, with a smaller number focused on victim gender. But death penalty scholars have largely ignored victim social status. Drawing on Black's (1976) multidimensional theoretical concept, the current research examines the impact of victim social status on the district attorney's decision to seek the death penalty and the jury's decision to impose a death sentence. The data include the population of cases indicted for capital murder in Harris County (Houston), Texas, from 1992 to 1999 (n=504). The findings suggest that victim social status has a robust influence on the ultimate state sanction: Death was more likely to be sought and imposed on behalf of high-status victims who were integrated, sophisticated, conventional, and respectable. The research also has implications beyond capital punishment. Because victim social status has rarely been investigated in the broader sentencing literature, Black's concept provides a theoretical tool that could be used to address such an important omission.

Expertise, Experience, and Ideology on Specialized Courts: The Case of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Banks Miller, Brett Curry

What roles do prior expertise and accumulated experience play in shaping ideologically consistent voting on a specialized court? Using a dataset of obviousness patent cases from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spanning 1997–2007, we show that prior expertise enhances the influence of ideology on judicial decisionmaking, but that accumulated experience does not. In addition, we build on previous work and show that ideology is a factor in decisionmaking in technical areas of law, contrary to the received wisdom on patent cases.

Organizational Trust and the Limits of Management-Based Regulation
Neil Gunningham, Darren Sinclair

This article examines the relationship between management-based regulation and occupational health and safety through two case studies. The first describes how corporate occupational health and safety systems and standards were interpreted and implemented differently at different mine sites within the same company and examines the particular role of trust between workers and management in explaining variations in occupational health and safety performance. The second explores the difficulties of moving from a highly devolved system of responsibility to a more centralized approach, and the incapacity of externally mandated management-based regulation to change behavior at site level in the absence of a supportive workplace culture. The article argues that notwithstanding the heavy emphasis currently being placed on both internal (company-driven) and external (government-driven) management-based regulation, a commitment at corporate level does not necessarily percolate down to individual facilities where ritualistic responses or resistant subcultures may thwart effective change. The findings have important implications for the effectiveness of management-based regulation and meta-regulation more broadly.

Intraprofessional Competition and Earnings Inequalities Across a Professional Chasm: The Case of the Legal Profession in Québec, Canada
Fiona M. Kay

Intraprofessional rivalry has a long history. This article examines earnings disparities as a dimension of intraprofessional competition among avocats and notaires in the civil law system of Québec, Canada. Drawing on two large-scale surveys and in-depth interviews with legal professionals, I examine three competing perspectives of earnings inequalities: human capital, social-symbolic capital, and organizational-structural explanations. Through this analysis I seek to examine whether similar causal processes shape earnings across the two spheres of legal practice in Québec. The findings of this study clearly demonstrate that these two professional groups are equipped with differential stocks of capital, and conversion rates differ drastically. Avocats receive greater exchange on their investments in human and social-symbolic capitals. These disparities are most pronounced in sectors of the profession where jurisdictional frictions abound: among notaires and avocats working as solo practitioners and in small firms within competitive urban contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical extensions and future directions for the study of legal professionals in civil law systems and blended jurisdictions.

Law & Society Review, December 2009: Volume 43, Issue 4