Abstract
This study examines race, space, perceptions of disorder, and nuisance crime prosecution in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Research has examined nuisance policing, yet little attention has been devoted to nuisance crime prosecutions, especially at the neighborhood level. Aggregating data on defendants arrested for nuisance offenses from 2012 to 2015 up to the neighborhood level, we estimate count models for pretrial detention, case acceptance, conviction, and sentencing outcomes in neighborhoods. We find two patterns of nuisance crime prosecution. Drug disorder prosecutions are concentrated in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with large Black defendant populations, suggesting a more suppressive treatment of these “marginalized” spaces. In contrast, greater enforcement of homelessness and alcohol nuisance crimes in White non-Hispanic neighborhoods suggests disorder prosecutions are also used to impose order and containment in more economically “prime” spaces. These countervailing patterns highlight the spatial contingency of nuisance enforcement, whereby prosecutors differentially enforce nuisance crimes in prime and marginalized spaces.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1250-1279 |
Number of pages | 30 |
Journal | Justice Quarterly |
Volume | 35 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 10 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019, © 2019 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Keywords
- courts and prosecution
- Neighborhood disorder
- neighborhoods and criminal justice
- nuisance crimes
- racial disparities
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Pathology and Forensic Medicine
- Law