Punishment by Place: The Relationship between Neighborhood Conditions and Case Processing Outcomes for Felony Drug Offenders

• In Event: Housing and Crime

Abstract

A small but growing literature focuses on how neighborhood context not only influences the causes of crime but also court processing outcomes for defendants. To date, these studies have concentrated on disparate outcomes for juvenile offenders and, to a much lesser extent, violent offenders based on the characteristics of neighborhoods in which offenses occur. Yet felony drug activity is even more tightly coupled with place, in geographically-bounded and identifiable markets, than are other types of crime and delinquency. Therefore, neighborhood conditions should be less salient as a source of disparity in case processing and outcomes for felony drug cases. Using Contexts of Drug Enforcement (CODE) data, this study explores whether and how local neighborhood socioeconomic conditions and the physical features of place relate to the discretionary decisions of prosecutors in both filing and final case dispositions among defendants arrested on felony drug offenses in a highly urbanized county of Georgia.

Author

• Elizabeth Griffiths, Rutgers University