Daniel Nagin

This supplement contains the Appendix of the paper.

Group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) identifies groups of individuals following similar trajectories of one or more repeated measures. The categorical nature of GBTM is particularly well suited to clinical psychology and medicine, where patients are often classified into discrete diagnostic categories. This review highlights recent advances in GBTM and key capabilities that remain underappreciated in clinical research. These include accounting for nonrandom subject attrition, joint trajectory and multitrajectory modeling, the addition of the beta distribution to modeling options, associating trajectories with future outcomes, and estimating the probability of future outcomes. Also discussed is an approach to selecting the number of trajectory groups. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 20 is May 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal …

Deterrence research has evolved in two distinct, nonoverlapping literatures. One literature is evaluative in nature and examines issues such as: How do police numbers and patrol tactics affect crime rates? Do higher rates of imprisonment reduce crime? Does the experience of incarceration decrease or increase recidivism? This literature generally finds that police numbers and proactive policing tactics such as hot spot policing are effective in preventing crime but that increases in already lengthy prison sentences have modest deterrent or incapacitation effects at best. Concerning the effect of the experience of incarceration on reoffending, most studies find either no effect or a criminogenic effect. The perceptual deterrence literature focuses on the underlying perceptual mechanism by which sanction threats may affect behavior, an issue that the evaluative literature largely leaves in the background. The findings of …

Guardianship, a key element of informal social control, is central to two influential theories in criminology and sociology: routine activity theory and collective efficacy. A variety of underlying mechanisms inform individual choices to serve as a guardian. Two distinct forms, reactive and proactive, should be distinguished. In reactive guardianship, an individual or a small group responds to an ongoing criminal incident or a potentially harmful situation. People balance prosocial motivation to help others against safety and social costs associated with intervening. The psychological literature on bystander intervention and prosociality, along with research on personal safety, physical prowess, and social and moral attitudes, can illuminate the complex decision-making processes underlying reactive guardianship. In proactive guardianship, community members come together to improve public safety, such as by organizing …

The causal link between victimization and violence later in life is largely accepted but has been understudied for victimized adolescents. In this work we use the Add Health dataset, the largest nationally representative longitudinal survey of adolescents, to estimate the relationship between victimization and future offending in this population. To accomplish this, we derive a new doubly robust estimator for the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) when the treatment and outcome are not always observed. We then find that the offending rate among victimized individuals would have been 3.86 percentage points lower if none of them had been victimized (95% CI: [0.28, 7.45]). This contributes positive evidence of a causal effect of victimization on future offending among adolescents. We further present statistical evidence of heterogeneous effects by age, under which the ATT decreases according to the age at which victimization is experienced. We then devise a novel risk-ratio-based sensitivity analysis and conclude that our results are robust to modest unmeasured confounding. Finally, we show that the found effect is mainly driven by non-violent offending.

EconPapers: Racial Disparities in Criminal Sentencing Vary Considerably across Federal Judges EconPapers Economics at your fingertips EconPapers Home About EconPapers Working Papers Journal Articles Books and Chapters Software Components Authors JEL codes New Economics Papers Advanced Search EconPapers FAQ Archive maintainers FAQ Cookies at EconPapers Format for printing The RePEc blog The RePEc plagiarism page Racial Disparities in Criminal Sentencing Vary Considerably across Federal Judges Daniel S. Nagin Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 2023, vol. 179, issue 1, 114-117 Date: 2023 References: Add references at CitEc Citations: Track citations by RSS feed Downloads: (external link) https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/racial-disp ... 101628jite-2023-0006 Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version. Related works: This item …

This special issue is the result of a workshop held on 22 October 2021 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany. The reason for organizing the workshop was that in spite of its ubiquitous influence on human judgment and decision making, the study of context has not yet reached center stage in research on criminal choice. The workshop addressed this hiatus and set the stage for novel research that revisits the multidisciplinary roots of the study of criminal decision making and expands its rational choice foundations. To this end, participants to the workshop were invited to examine how context shapes criminal decision processes. More specifically, they were encouraged to do so in ways that move beyond the axiomatic construct of rational decision making underlying neoclassical economics to incorporate findings and theoretical perspectives from several decades of …

Risk assessment instruments (RAIs) are widely used to aid high-stakes decision-making in criminal justice settings and other areas such as health care and child welfare. These tools, whether using machine learning or simpler algorithms, typically assume a time-invariant relationship between predictors and outcome. Because societies are themselves changing and not just individuals, this assumption may be violated in many behavioral settings, generating what we call cohort bias. Analyzing criminal histories in a cohort-sequential longitudinal study of children, we demonstrate that regardless of model type or predictor sets, a tool trained to predict the likelihood of arrest between the ages of 17 and 24 y on older birth cohorts systematically overpredicts the likelihood of arrest for younger birth cohorts over the period 1995 to 2020. Cohort bias is found for both relative and absolute risks, and it persists for all racial …