Shadow Costs, Rehabilitation Programs, and Information Inequality in the California Criminal Legal System

• In Event: Long Term Effects of Criminal Legal System Contact

Abstract

Since the Great Recession, states have increasingly relied less on incarceration and imprisonment and more on diversionary and rehabilitative programs. At the same time, research shows that other types of punishment, like monetary sanctions, have also been placed on the criminal justice reform agenda, highlighting how known financial punishments imposed by courts and probation services continue to burden and entangle poor people in the criminal legal system. Yet, little empirical scholarship has examined how these two consequential areas of research and policy reform intersect in the lives of economically disadvantaged defendants, probationers, and parolees seeking to comply with their state-mandated rehabilitation. In this paper, we examine how indigent people attempt to search for rehabilitation treatment, in compliance with their court-orders, diversionary agreements, and community supervision conditions. Drawing on data from multiple sources, we find that the search for rehabilitation providers is marked by multiple information and entry barriers that inhibit the pursuit for treatment. Our findings illustrate how information inequality, in the presence of economic inequality, affects one’s ability to comply with state-mandated rehabilitation orders and reentry conditions, placing individuals at risk of longer and more entrenched criminal justice contact.

Authors

• Bryan L. Sykes, Cornell University

• Courtney Echols, University of California, Irvine

• Vicente Mata, University of California, Irvine

• Jahaira Pacheco, University of California, Irvine

• Xi Guan, Cornell University

• Patrick Kuehl, Cornell University

• Jillian Royal, Cornell University

• Clyde Lederman, Cornell University

• Jossanny Goris, Cornell University

• Ginny Oshiro, Independent Researcher