Abstract
The analysis of a new dataset on state prisoners in the 1900 to 1930 censuses reveals that immigrants rapidly assimilated to native incarceration patterns. One feature of these data is that the second generation can be identified, allowing direct analysis of this group and allowing their exclusion from calculations of comparison rates for the “native” population. Although adult new arrivals were less likely than natives to be incarcerated, this likelihood was increasing with their years in the USA. The foreign born who arrived as children and second-generation immigrants had slightly higher rates of incarceration than natives of native parentage, but these differences disappear after controlling for nativity differences in urbanicity and occupational status. Finally, while the incarceration rates of new arrivals differ significantly by source country, patterns of assimilation are very similar.
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Notes
Women were most commonly imprisoned for prostitution and typically served short sentences. Many states during this period did not have separate facilities for women and housed women sentenced to longer terms in segregated housing in the same facilities as men or even in local jails. When the state prisons in our sample housed female inmates, we excluded them from the analysis.
Many states established juvenile courts as well as juvenile detention facilities during the period of our study. Including juvenile facilities in the prison sample, however, would lead to an overstatement of youth offending rates because many of the inmates in these facilities were committed for minor juvenile-specific offenses like truancy or for noncrime reasons such as having deceased or incapacitated parents. More problematic, though, is the variation over time and across states in the treatment of juveniles in the criminal justice system. A 16-year-old convicted of burglary may have been sentenced to a prison in one state but a juvenile detention center in another.
During this period, it was common to have the officers and workers of an institution live on the grounds. These individuals and their families were enumerated on the same schedules as the institutional inmates. Such individuals are easy to identify, though, by the data on their relationship to the head of household as well as their occupations, and we excluded them from the dataset.
The Myers’ Blended Index is only 1.8 for the male prisoners aged 18 to 87 compared to 4.1 for the males in the same age range in the nonprison sample.
IPUMS data and supporting documentation are available online at www.ipums.umn.edu.
To be precise, we dropped individuals coded as residing in the following types of correctional facilities: correctional institutions, n.s.; federal or state correctional facility; prison; penitentiary; reformatory; and camp or chain gang.
For some lesser crimes, such as having stolen property and larceny, the share of natives sentenced to state facilities is slightly larger (55 versus 46 % in the case of having stolen property and 35 versus 24 % for larceny) but at least some of this difference can be attributed to the different geographic distributions of natives and immigrants.
For the almost 38,000 commitments to state facilities in 1930 for which the Census Bureau could obtain data, almost 17,000, or 44 %, were first offenders. Of the remaining commitments involving recidivists, 70 % had previously been committed to state facilities.
This calculation assumes that 76 % of those deported would have been from the sample states. As shown in Table 2, this is the fraction of foreign-born state prisoners who were in the sample states in 1923.
We drop from the sample a small number of people who were born abroad to US parents. For the majority (over 70 %) of the second generation, both parents are foreign-born. Among the second generation, those with “father only” foreign born have lower incarceration rates than others in the second generation.
Note that literacy means able to read or write in any language.
We experimented with several ways to control for age and found that the quartic was sufficient to capture the age patterns in the data.
We also estimated a model including the dummy for missing arrival date but not years in the USA, and its square to see whether the observations with missing arrival dates affected the estimated effect of being foreign born in the models presented in column (2) of Table 4. Although the estimated marginal effect of having a missing arrival date was positive and substantial as found in the model presented in column (3) of Table 4, the estimated marginal effect of being foreign born did not change.
The positive effect of time in the USA on the likelihood of incarceration may have been even more pronounced if immigrants convicted of serious crimes had not been deported. The effect of return migration is more uncertain. If return migrants were negatively selected from the immigrant population and therefore represented those who were disappointed with their economic or social outcomes in the USA, then their departure would likely have served to lower the incarceration rate of the foreign born. But if return migrants were instead positively selected from the immigrant population, their departure may have actually increased the foreign-born incarceration rate. There is small literature on selection in return migration during this period, though the research suffers from incomplete availability of data. This literature considers labor market outcomes, not crime measures, so we hesitate to judge the direction of selection as it relates to the incarceration context (Biavaschi 2013; Abramitzky et al. 2012).
For this analysis, we define source country as country of birth. Some scholars prefer alternative definitions based on language as well. For the groups we study, such an alternative definition would only have an effect on the Central and Eastern European group.
Both age and literacy are controls in these specifications. If the literacy variable in part reflects some bias against the foreign born from southern Europe, then including this variable may overcontrol for some of the regional differences (to the extent that these groups have higher criminality or are subject to discrimination in law enforcement).
The “other immigrant” category includes the few immigrants from Africa and Oceania.
The predictions are calculated for New York State in 1910, with the urban and occupation variables set at the natives’ mean values. The models also include the average Duncan SEI and fraction living in cities with populations 25,000 or more for an observation’s reference group where this group is defined by source country, generation, year, state, and arrival cohort (for the foreign born). For the second generation, the reference group is defined by father’s birthplace. Rerunning the regressions using mother’s birthplace to define these reference groups has a very little effect on the results. In particular, even using mother’s birthplace to define these groups, the German second generation has much lower incarceration rates at all ages than natives of native parentage and the other second-generation groups.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this project was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation. Helpful comments were received from seminars at the University of Chicago, the University of California-Merced, CUNY, the NBER, and the annual meeting of the Royal Economic Society and the Population Association of America. The authors thank Costanza Biavaschi for her assistance through all stages of this project. We appreciate the data collection assistance of many Rutgers undergraduates, especially Lin Hong, Zofia Kaczmarczyk, and Philip Beals.
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Moehling, C.M., Piehl, A.M. Immigrant assimilation into US prisons, 1900–1930. J Popul Econ 27, 173–200 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-013-0476-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-013-0476-6