The “Matthew Effect” in Punishment: Impacts of Community Supervision Revocations on Future Involvement with the System

• In Event: Criminal Justice Involvement and Cumulative Disadvantage: Impacts Inside and Beyond the System

Abstract

In his foundational work on cumulative dis/advantage, Robert Merton (1968) named this phenomenon the “Mathew Effect” in reference to the Matthew 25:29: “For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” The criminal justice system allocates people into a hierarchy of positions of threat and culpability and distributes criminal justice resources (supervision and punishment) accordingly. Regardless of individual characteristics, the structural position an individual occupies in the system substantively shapes the amount of supervision and punishment they receive, which can move that person further along the hierarchy of threat and culpability. This study examines the accumulating disadvantage created by revocations for those under community supervision as these same people encounter the system in the future. Being a probationer/parolee makes it possible for an individual to be incarcerated for violation of technical rules or minor offenses under supervision. Despite being the key alternative to incarceration, community supervision failure is the major source of imprisonment in many states. Using 30 years of public offender search records of North Carolina state prison inmates, probationers, and parolees, this study first describes patterns in community supervision revocation. A quasi-experiment is then used to reveal the causal effect of community supervision revocation on disadvantages in individual’s future involvement with the criminal justice system.

Author

• Yinzhi Shen, University at Albany, SUNY