Gender, Race and Criminal Justice Legislation

• In Event: Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Why do legislators make policies that benefit social groups peripheral to the political process? The question is particularly important for criminal justice reform because while it aims to end mass incarceration and to promote rehabilitation in a punitive era, policymakers have no electoral incentives to confer benefits to criminals. However, there are no empirical studies examining the factors that affect policymakers’ criminal justice design at the individual level. Neither do studies at the aggregate level find consistent evidence for the influence of electoral competition specified by the literature. To answer this question, this study focuses on the legislative behavior of individual state legislators, particularly their policy deliberation on the floors and in correction/judiciary committees. I will examine whether and how state legislators’ gender, race and the intersection between the two affect their view of crime and their choice of approaches to dealing with crime. I argue that, compared to their white colleagues, both women and African American legislators are more likely to view crime as a result of circumstance. They are also more critical of the fairness of the criminal justice system, and more likely to speak on behalf of marginalized groups. To understand their perspectives, I will use automated content analysis of closed captioning of archived videos from six states – California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Utah, and Virginia. The paper thus not only sheds new light on how women and African American representatives contribute to deliberative democracy but also proposes a new approach to analyzing videos with political content.

Author

• Jielu Yao, University of Iowa