In a related project, we study contemporary patterns of social exclusion with a focus on hidden sentences’ role. Hidden sentences create barriers for people with criminal records across multiple dimensions: from bans on jobs, licenses, and welfare to restricted housing, judicial, or parental rights. They apply not only to people who have been convicted of felonies, but also to those charged with lower-level offenses or even those arrested but not convicted. This project centers hidden sentencing as a crucial, underlying driver of social inequalities stemming from contact with the penal system. It traces the full body of U.S. hidden sentence laws across state jurisdictions over time and measures their economic and social impacts on individuals and communities. The project will analyze 1) the extent to which these laws apply disproportionately by race and class; 2) the distinctive role they play in the life chances of people with criminal records; and 3) how they contribute to concentrated and cyclical experiences of disadvantage in American communities. This research will contribute new data and evidence to the national policy conversation on mass punishment, incarceration, and the adverse effects of criminal records.
This project examines hidden sentencing as a systemic source of social exclusion: an aggregation of formal, state-based restrictions that collectively and cyclically shapes individual and community disadvantage. Interdisciplinary research has long debated whether penal inequalities stem primarily from selection into justice contact, the transformative effects of punishment, or the stigma of criminal records. This project argues that formal exclusion by state hidden sentence regimes represents a fourth, undertheorized mechanism that operates across both individual and community levels. To test the role of hidden sentences compared to other factors in penal inequality, this study will first develop estimates of people with arrest and conviction records across the U.S. since 1980, including disparate patterns by race and class. Second, it will use novel data on spatial and temporal patterns in hidden sentence regimes to hierarchically model these laws’ impacts on individual inequalities. Third, it will combine these unique data sources via hierarchical modeling and natural experiments to analyze aggregate, cyclical exclusion at the community level. Results will show how hidden sentences systemically produce social exclusion, compared to the other three, individual-level mechanisms; how their effects vary by race, class, and type of criminal record; and how hidden sentences themselves produce the other mechanisms, shaping selection into justice contact, amplifying the transformative effects of punishment, and preempting or increasing vulnerability to informal stigma and control.