Harmon M. Hosch - US grants

Our knowledge of the nature of prejudice can be deepened by examining how jury decisionmaking is affected by ethnicity and by seeking to understand the nature of any differential treatment. This research will investigate the influence of ethnic identity on the processing of Anglo-American and Hispanic felony defendants. Specifically, the study examines the impact of jury composition on conviction and sentencing patterns in felony cases adjudicated in Texas District Courts. Archival data will be analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques that will permit the examination of such factors as how the social status and socioeconomic composition of juries influence their dispositional decisions. Notably, Texas is one of only a few states that permit jury determination of guilt and sentencing in cases other than capital trials. Part of the importance of the research stems from the dearth of extant data concerning the legal treatment of Hispanic defendants. A more important gap in our knowledge of differential justice that will be filled is the consideration in this project of heretofore unexamined aspects of the problem, such as the social status of jurors. This is the first research to examine this issue with respect to the dispositions of Hispanic defendants. The project has the potential not only to contribute to an understanding of the legal treatment of Hispanic defendants, but also more broadly to the development of a model of differential justice that considers the social characteristics of legal decision makers in articulating the impact of law.

Contrary to popular opinion and the predictions of some long-established criminological theories, over the last decade a growing body of research shows that crime is much lower than expected in immigrant neighborhoods, especially given high rates of poverty and other sources of disadvantage in these neighborhoods. Moreover, this relationship is robust, appearing across a range of different immigrant groups and cities and, as suggested by longitudinal research, may be causal in nature. However, there are two key gaps in knowledge that the proposed project will address. First, tests of the immigration-crime relationship are limited to serious violent crime, primarily homicide, meaning that the generality of this relationship is unknown. Second, theoretical explanations developed to explain the inverse association between neighborhood immigration and crime are largely untested owing to the lack of direct measures of theoretical variables. Thus, the overarching goal of the proposed project is to address these two shortcomings in knowledge by: (1) assessing the generality of the relationship between neighborhood-level immigration and crime using a variety of crime measures; and (2) directly testing a number of important theories regarding this relationship. This will be accomplished through analyses of survey data collected from random samples of adults who reside in a random sample of neighborhoods in El Paso County, Texas, which is located on the U.S.-Mexico border and possesses a number of recent, as well as long-established, immigrant neighborhoods, making it highly desirable for this project.

The results of the proposed project will impact a variety of audiences, including governments, NGOs and criminal justice agencies, by enhancing their understandings of how immigration, which represents a substantial source of social change over the past two decades, has influenced neighborhoods and American society as a whole. In addition, the research will be conducted at a Hispanic Serving Institution and will involve a number of undergraduate and graduate research assistants, thus broadening their participation in scientific endeavors.