ASRXXX10.1177/0003122414543659American Sociological ReviewLight et al. 5436592014 American Sociological Review 2014, Vol. 79(5) 827 –849 Citizenship and Punishment: © American Sociological Association 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0003122414543659 The Salience of National http://asr.sagepub.com Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts Michael T. Light,a Michael Massoglia,b and Ryan D. Kingc Abstract When compared to research on the association between immigration and crime, far less attention has been given to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and criminal punishment. As such, several fundamental questions about how noncitizens are sanctioned and whether citizenship is a marker of stratification in U.S. courts remain unanswered. Are citizens treated differently than noncitizens—both legal and undocumented—in U.S. federal criminal courts? Is the well-documented Hispanic-white sentencing disparity confounded by citizenship status? Has the association between citizenship and sentencing remained stable over time? And are punishment disparities contingent on the demographic context of the court? Analysis of several years of data from U.S. federal courts indicates that citizenship status is a salient predictor of sentencing outcomes—more powerful than race or ethnicity. Other notable findings include the following: accounting for citizenship substantially attenuates disparities between whites and Hispanics; the citizenship effect on sentencing has grown stronger over time; and the effect is most pronounced in districts with growing noncitizen populations. These findings suggest that as international migration increases, citizenship may be an emerging and powerful axis of sociolegal inequality. Keywords citizenship, punishment, social control During the past two decades, the United 2005), and deportation (King, Massoglia, and States has experienced its largest wave of Uggen 2012). The steep rise in immigration immigration since the turn of the twentieth also coincides with a growing body of case century. The foreign-born population has nearly doubled since 1990 and now stands at approximately 38 million, and the estimated aPurdue University number of unauthorized immigrants has more bUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison than tripled, from 3.5 to 10.8 million (Kandel cThe Ohio State University 2011). These trends coincide with a growing Corresponding Author: body of research on immigrants, including Michael T. Light, 700 W. State Street, Purdue work on immigrant family relations (Dreby University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 2010), assimilation (Waters and Jiménez E-mail: [email protected] 828 American Sociological Review 79(5) law related to states’ rights and due process consideration of citizenship paints an incom- (e.g., Padilla v. Kentucky 2009; U.S. v. State plete picture, and we test whether differential of Arizona 2011), along with intense political treatment of Hispanics is attributable to citi- wrangling and calls for tough legislation, as zenship status. exemplified by the passage of Arizona’s con- Third, to the extent that noncitizens are tentious SB 1070. Yet normative arguments treated differently than citizens, has this asso- about the proper role of immigrants in society ciation changed over time? Immigration has (e.g., Huntington 2004) and their entitlement become an increasingly divisive issue and the to due process and equal legal protection public discourse has been vitriolic at times. In (Kanstroom 2007) have outpaced empirical 2010, 63 percent of Americans viewed undoc- research on how noncitizens are treated under umented immigration as a “very” or U.S. criminal law. The present work takes a “extremely” serious threat to the future well- step toward addressing this gap by investigat- being of the United States (Sourcebook of ing the relationship between punishment and Criminal Justice Statistics 2010), and the citizenship status in U.S. federal courts. proportion of Americans viewing immigra- We are primarily concerned with four related tion as a “bad thing” increased from 31 to 36 questions. First, are citizens and noncitizens percent between 2001 and 2009 (Morales punished differently in criminal courts? The 2009). Given that prior research indicates vast literature on sentencing tells us much judges—including unelected judges—are about race and ethnicity but comparatively less often influenced by shifts in public opinion about the punishment of noncitizens. Although (Mishler and Sheehan 1993), we investigate national membership and racial/ethnic bounda- whether sentencing practices follow a pattern ries often overlap, with more than 30,000 non- that reflects the trend in anti-immigrant U.S. citizens from approximately 150 countries sentiment. sentenced each year since 2008, the federal Finally, we consider the demographic con- courts provide an opportunity to assess the text around the punishment of noncitizens. independent influence of race, ethnicity, and The group threat perspective (Blalock 1967; citizenship on punishment for a diverse group Blumer 1958) suggests dominant group mem- of criminal offenders. bers feel threatened—economically, politi- Second, we know almost nothing about cally, criminally, or culturally—and will step whether citizenship mediates the sentencing up efforts to maintain social control when penalty paid by some racial and ethnic groups. minority group populations are increasing. Of particular interest is the perceived His- We link court files to demographic data on panic penalty that some contemporary schol- noncitizen population changes over the past arship has found. For instance, Steffensmeier decade to test whether this thesis, which has and Demuth (2000, 2001) find that Hispanics been widely supported in the study of race are sentenced more harshly than whites, and and punishment, helps explain the punish- national data indicate substantially higher ment of noncitizens as well. incarceration rates for Hispanics relative to This investigation is timely for several whites (Oliver 2011). At the same time, the reasons. For one, the sociology of punishment influx of noncitizens into the federal criminal has seemingly elided a sustained focus on justice system far outpaced overall prison growth citizenship at a time when the number of non- in recent decades (Scalia 1996; Sourcebook citizens caught up in the federal criminal of Criminal Justice Statistics 2011b). Today, justice system has reached an all-time high approximately half of all offenders sentenced (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics in federal courts are non-U.S. citizens (U.S. 2011a). As the single largest system of formal Sentencing Commission [USSC] 2010), and a social control in the United States, punish- large proportion are from Latin America.1 We ment decisions made within federal courts are suggest that an analysis of ethnicity, in par- consequential to individuals and theoretically ticular one focused on Hispanics, absent a informative.2 Light et al. 829 Second, and more generally, this work Steffensmeier and Demuth 2000, 2001). Mind- contributes to debates about contemporary ful of some inconsistencies in prior work, the stratification and assimilation processes in the weight of the evidence suggests that blacks and United States. Citizenship, aside from defin- Hispanics are disadvantaged at sentencing com- ing group membership, can confer or deny pared to whites, particularly when determining life opportunities (Smith 1997), and legal whether a defendant is incarcerated. These find- categories that define membership create a ings generally hold when controlling for legal stratified system of rights and belonging factors such as offense severity and prior crimi- (Portes and Zhou 1993). As a result, these nal record, although research suggests the effects categories can become markers of exclusion of offender characteristics are often more subtle and suggest that citizenship may be an axis of and indirect than legally prescribed measures stratification in the contemporary United (for a review, see Mitchell and MacKenzie States (Massey 2007; Menjivar 2006). In this 2004). article, we empirically test whether citizen- Only recently has research on citizenship ship, like other markers of stratification such and punishment garnered attention, and that as race and class, has implications for differ- work serves as a springboard for our inquiry. ential treatment under the law. One line of work suggests noncitizens are Finally, we contribute to three lines of the- disadvantaged at sentencing. Using federal oretical work: the focal concerns perspective, data, Wolfe, Pyrooz, and Spohn (2011) find Black’s theory of law, and group threat theory. evidence of a citizenship penalty at incarcera- Each has been instrumental in the study of tion. In an analysis of federal drug offenders, race and punishment, but they are less fre- Demuth (2002) reaches similar conclusions. quently employed in the study of immigration, He finds that documented and undocumented citizenship, and law. We derive specific immigrants are more likely than citizen hypotheses about whether and how citizenship offenders to be incarcerated, but he finds no matters, for whom it matters most, and whether difference in their sentence lengths (see also any citizenship effect is context-specific. In Albonetti 1997). Other work suggests non- the discussion we also speak about the impli- citizens are disadvantaged with respect to cations of our work for the broader study of sentence length and departure decisions citizenship in an era of globalization. Has