R Apel
Biographic Data
| ID | 137958 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Apel |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Apel |
| SIGNATURE | APEL R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-6235-2333 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 392 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Can Social Safety Net Spending Prevent Crime
This review considers recent evidence on the impact of the social safety net on crime and recidivism. The social safety net comprises means-tested public assistance (e.g., cash welfare, food assistance, disability assistance, public health insurance) and contributory social insurance (e.g., unemployment insurance). Dozens of recent studies, largely outside of criminology, evaluate the impact of shocks to the scope or generosity of social safety n…
Recorded Justice or Procedural Justice? A Randomized Controlled Experiment of the Influence of Body Worn Cameras and Officer Behavior on Citizen Attitudes
We implement cluster randomization to test the impact of procedurally just and unjust police behavior during a hypothetical traffic stop (versus procedurally neutral behavior), in addition to the impact of BWC notification (versus BWC absence). The findings from post-vignette surveys administered to a random sample of 750 respondents indicate procedural justice has a pronounced effect on citizens’ perceptions of the officer’s behavior, their atti…
The mark or trace of a criminal record: A survey experiment of race and criminal record signaling
Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experiments—comprising in‐person audits, online audits, and opt‐in surveys—to describe patterns over time in employer receptivity to applicants of different races with criminal records. In Part 2, we use a novel experimental survey of 1080 employers to meas…
Estimating effects of short-term imprisonment on crime using random judge assignments
Noncustodial sanctions may present an attractive way to reduce the prison population rate, but only when noncustodial sanctions meet custodial ones in terms of deterring recidivism. Using administrative criminal records data of all individuals convicted in the Netherlands in 2012, this study examines the effects of short-term imprisonment versus noncustodial sanctions on crime. We employ an instrumental variables approach to account for selection…
Is Work Associated With More or Less Criminal Involvement in the Short-Term? New Evidence of the Former Among a Justice-Involved Sample
We inquire whether commitment to employment has an immediate suppressive effect (i.e., in the next month) on street crime. Analysis of retrospective monthly calendar data drawn from a random sample of prisoners reveals that it does not. In contrast, paycheck work co-occurs with income generating crime in almost half of the months in which participants are employed. Second, paycheck work is associated with an increase in the likelihood of subseque…
Societal gender inequality and the gender gap in safety perceptions: Comparative evidence from the International Crime Victims Survey
This study considers whether societal gender inequality moderates the relationship between gender and perceptions of personal safety. Pooled 1992–2005 rounds of the International Crime Victims Survey, comprising more than 285,000 respondents from 75 countries, are used to estimate multilevel models of safety perceptions, with a cross-level interaction specified between gender and gender inequality. We find that the gender gap in safety perception…
Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime
The interplay of sanctions, perceptions, and crime has special significance in criminology and is central to a long tradition of perceptual deterrence research as well as to more recent scholarship on crime decision-making. This article seeks to review this body of research as it pertains to three basic questions. First, are people's perceptions of punishment accurate? The evidence indicates that people are generally but imperfectly aware of puni…
Police fairness and legitimacy across the post-communist divide in Europe
In the present study, we compared two European regions with deeply contrasting policing traditions—post-communist countries and established democracies—to explore whether political history may have long-term consequences for police–public interactions. Using data from 26 countries that participated in the 2010 European Social Survey, we first measured and compared the prevalence of police-initiated contact and satisfaction with contact once it to…
Effects of police body‐worn cameras on citizen compliance and cooperation: Findings from a quasi‐randomized controlled trial
Research Summary This study tests the effect of body‐worn cameras (BWCs) on stopped drivers’ perceptions of complying with police directives, obeying traffic laws, and cooperating with the police. A quasi‐randomized controlled trial was conducted with drivers stopped at routine traffic checkpoints. Drivers in the treatment group encountered police officers wearing BWCs, and drivers in the control group encountered police officers without BWCs. Su…
Level of Criminal Justice Contact and Early Adult Wage Inequality
Robert Apel, Kathleen Powell, Level of Criminal Justice Contact and Early Adult Wage Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality (February 2019), pp. 198-222
The thin blue line of health: Police contact and wellbeing in Europe
Perceptual Deterrence
In theory, deterrence is a behavioral response to an individual’s perceptions about the certainty and/or severity of criminal justice sanctions. The perceptual underpinnings of compliance with the law are therefore of long-standing interest in perceptual deterrence scholarship. This chapter provides an overview of the broad scope of this scholarship. After reviewing the basic perceptual elements of crime decision-making models, attention turns to…
In Pursuit of Standards for Ban the Box Policies
How and Why Does Work Matter? Employment Conditions, Routine Activities, and Crime Among Adult Male Offenders
An inverse relationship between employment and crime is well established, although the mechanisms that account for the correlation remain poorly understood. In the current study, we investigate the role of work quality, measured objectively (hours, income) as well as subjectively (commitment). A routine activities perspective is proposed for the work–crime relationship, and it inspires hypotheses about the way that work reduces crime indirectly, …
And We Wonder Why Criminology Is Sometimes Considered Irrelevant in Real‐World Policy Conversations
The Effects of Jail and Prison Confinement on Cohabitation and Marriage
This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to explore the relationship between incarceration and the stability of cohabiting and marital relationships. Self-report dates of relatively short confinement in jail or prison (median one month) are linked with data on cohabitation and residential partnerships, by month, from ages 18 to 32. I estimate the effects of incarceration on transitions into and out of cohabitation and marria…
Deterrence
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment. Studies of changes in police presences, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Three high priority areas for future research are identified: developing and te…
Deterrence: Sanction Perceptions
Deterrent Effect of Police and Prisons
On the Deterrent Effect of Stop, Question, and Frisk
Work, Income Support, and Crime in the Dutch Welfare State: A Longitudinal Study Following Vulnerable Youth Into Adulthood
Life‐course criminological research has consistently suggested that employment can reduce criminal behavior. However, it is unclear whether the financial aspects of employment or the social control that inheres in employment best explains the relationship between employment and reduced offending. By using longitudinal information on a sample of men and women (N = 540) who were institutionalized in a Dutch juvenile justice institution in the 1990s…
Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress
This book stands as a correction to conventional survey approaches and assumptions that form the evidential basis of social policy towards, and social research about, the conditions of poor African
A Situational Model of Displacement and Diffusion Following the Introduction of Airport Metal Detectors
Much of the discourse surrounding counterterrorism centers on the inevitability of displacement, or the substitution of another form of terrorist attack in place of the one that has been thwarted. Yet a longstanding tradition of research in situational crime prevention finds that displacement is far from inevitable, and often depends crucially on the specific features of the incidents in question. In fact, crime prevention efforts are often follo…
Imprisonment Length and Post‐prison Employment Prospects
This study considers the relationship between imprisonment length and employment outcomes. The data are a unique prospective, longitudinal study of Dutch pretrial detainees (N = 702). All subjects thus experience prison confinement of varying lengths, although the durations are relatively short (mean = 3.8 months; median = 3.1 months). This contrasts with prior research that was limited to the study of American prison sentences spanning an averag…
Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence
The Impact of Incarceration on Employment during the Transition to Adulthood
The research findings with respect to the relationship between incarceration and employment are consistent enough that it is tempting to conclude that incarceration causes deterioration in ex-inmates' employment prospects. Yet, causality remains tenuous for several reasons. For one, studies frequently rely on samples of nonincarcerated subjects that are not truly "at risk" of incarceration, which undermines their use as comparison samples and pot…
A Signaling Perspective on Employment‐Based Reentry Programming: Training Completion as a Desistance Signal
How and Why Does Work Matter? Employment Conditions, Routine Activities, and Crime Among Adult Male Offenders
An inverse relationship between employment and crime is well established, although the mechanisms that account for the correlation remain poorly understood. In the current study, we investigate the role of work quality, measured objectively (hours, income) as well as subjectively (commitment). A routine activities perspective is proposed for the work–crime relationship, and it inspires hypotheses about the way that work reduces crime indirectly, …
Unpacking the Relationship Between Adolescent Employment and Antisocial Behavior: A Matched Samples Comparison
A large body of research has consistently found that intensive employment during the school year is associated with heightened antisocial behavior. These findings have been influential in prompting policy recommendations to establish stricter limits on the number of hours that students can work during the school year. We reexamine the linkage between first‐time work at age 16 during the school year and problem behaviors. Our analysis uses group‐b…
Imprisonment Length and Post‐prison Employment Prospects
This study considers the relationship between imprisonment length and employment outcomes. The data are a unique prospective, longitudinal study of Dutch pretrial detainees (N = 702). All subjects thus experience prison confinement of varying lengths, although the durations are relatively short (mean = 3.8 months; median = 3.1 months). This contrasts with prior research that was limited to the study of American prison sentences spanning an averag…
The Effects of Jail and Prison Confinement on Cohabitation and Marriage
This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to explore the relationship between incarceration and the stability of cohabiting and marital relationships. Self-report dates of relatively short confinement in jail or prison (median one month) are linked with data on cohabitation and residential partnerships, by month, from ages 18 to 32. I estimate the effects of incarceration on transitions into and out of cohabitation and marria…
The Effect of Teenage Employment on Delinquency and Problem Behaviors
What happens to high school youths when they take on jobs during the school year, sometimes working long hours, while trying to maintain the role of student? There is a consensus in the empirical literature that teenage employment, particularly what is termed “intensive” employment, results in a constellation of detrimental consequences: lower school grades, diminished educational ambitions, and emotional alienation from parents. There is even mo…
On the Relationship Between Family Structure and Antisocial Behavior: Parental Cohabitation and Blended Households
In the last several decades, the American family has undergone considerable change, with less than half of all adolescents residing with two married biological parents. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we construct an elaborate measure of family structure and find considerable heterogeneity in the risk of antisocial and delinquent behavior among groups of youth who reside in what are traditionally dichotomized as intact and n…
An Exploratory Study of the Violent Victimization of Women: Race/Ethnicity and Situational Context
Although much has been learned in recent years about the victimization experiences of women, there remains a considerable knowledge gap with respect to the victimization of women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In order to confront this issue, we use the large number of cases available in the National Crime Victimization Survey (1992–2000) to examine the risk and protective factors associated with violent victimization among non‐Hispa…
Level of Criminal Justice Contact and Early Adult Wage Inequality
Robert Apel, Kathleen Powell, Level of Criminal Justice Contact and Early Adult Wage Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality (February 2019), pp. 198-222
The thin blue line of health: Police contact and wellbeing in Europe
Effects of police body‐worn cameras on citizen compliance and cooperation: Findings from a quasi‐randomized controlled trial
Research Summary This study tests the effect of body‐worn cameras (BWCs) on stopped drivers’ perceptions of complying with police directives, obeying traffic laws, and cooperating with the police. A quasi‐randomized controlled trial was conducted with drivers stopped at routine traffic checkpoints. Drivers in the treatment group encountered police officers wearing BWCs, and drivers in the control group encountered police officers without BWCs. Su…
And We Wonder Why Criminology Is Sometimes Considered Irrelevant in Real‐World Policy Conversations
Work, Income Support, and Crime in the Dutch Welfare State: A Longitudinal Study Following Vulnerable Youth Into Adulthood
Life‐course criminological research has consistently suggested that employment can reduce criminal behavior. However, it is unclear whether the financial aspects of employment or the social control that inheres in employment best explains the relationship between employment and reduced offending. By using longitudinal information on a sample of men and women (N = 540) who were institutionalized in a Dutch juvenile justice institution in the 1990s…
Transitional jobs program Putting employment-based reentry programs into context: Transitional Jobs Program
The Differential Risk of Retaliation by Relational Distance: A More General Model of Violent Victimization
This research attempts to elaborate a routine activity model of violent victimization by incorporating an explicit rational choice perspective on potential targets’ decision making to avoid violent encounters. We propose that the costs associated with a violent attack and the probability of offender retaliation depend on whether the offender's targeting strategy is opportunistic or deliberate—a function of the relational distance between the offe…
A Situational Model of Displacement and Diffusion Following the Introduction of Airport Metal Detectors
Much of the discourse surrounding counterterrorism centers on the inevitability of displacement, or the substitution of another form of terrorist attack in place of the one that has been thwarted. Yet a longstanding tradition of research in situational crime prevention finds that displacement is far from inevitable, and often depends crucially on the specific features of the incidents in question. In fact, crime prevention efforts are often follo…
Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime
The interplay of sanctions, perceptions, and crime has special significance in criminology and is central to a long tradition of perceptual deterrence research as well as to more recent scholarship on crime decision-making. This article seeks to review this body of research as it pertains to three basic questions. First, are people's perceptions of punishment accurate? The evidence indicates that people are generally but imperfectly aware of puni…
On the Deterrent Effect of Stop, Question, and Frisk
In Pursuit of Standards for Ban the Box Policies
The mark or trace of a criminal record: A survey experiment of race and criminal record signaling
Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experiments—comprising in‐person audits, online audits, and opt‐in surveys—to describe patterns over time in employer receptivity to applicants of different races with criminal records. In Part 2, we use a novel experimental survey of 1080 employers to meas…
Police fairness and legitimacy across the post-communist divide in Europe
In the present study, we compared two European regions with deeply contrasting policing traditions—post-communist countries and established democracies—to explore whether political history may have long-term consequences for police–public interactions. Using data from 26 countries that participated in the 2010 European Social Survey, we first measured and compared the prevalence of police-initiated contact and satisfaction with contact once it to…
Overview of: “A Signaling Perspective on Employment‐Based Reentry Programming: Training Completion as a Desistance Signal”
Research Summary This study argues that employment programs for individuals exiting prison can benefit society even if they do not directly reduce recidivism, by helping to identify quickly and efficiently those desisters who are ready to work. We make the following basic claims: Individuals exiting prison have poor work experience, low levels of education, and generally qualify for only low‐skill, entry‐level jobs. Moreover, the majority will re…
An Exploratory Study of the Violent Victimization of Women: Race/Ethnicity and Situational Context
Although much has been learned in recent years about the victimization experiences of women, there remains a considerable knowledge gap with respect to the victimization of women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In order to confront this issue, we use the large number of cases available in the National Crime Victimization Survey (1992–2000) to examine the risk and protective factors associated with violent victimization among non‐Hispa…
The Effect of Teenage Employment on Delinquency and Problem Behaviors
What happens to high school youths when they take on jobs during the school year, sometimes working long hours, while trying to maintain the role of student? There is a consensus in the empirical literature that teenage employment, particularly what is termed “intensive” employment, results in a constellation of detrimental consequences: lower school grades, diminished educational ambitions, and emotional alienation from parents. There is even mo…
The Differential Risk of Retaliation by Relational Distance: A More General Model of Violent Victimization
This research attempts to elaborate a routine activity model of violent victimization by incorporating an explicit rational choice perspective on potential targets’ decision making to avoid violent encounters. We propose that the costs associated with a violent attack and the probability of offender retaliation depend on whether the offender's targeting strategy is opportunistic or deliberate—a function of the relational distance between the offe…
Unpacking the Relationship Between Adolescent Employment and Antisocial Behavior: A Matched Samples Comparison
A large body of research has consistently found that intensive employment during the school year is associated with heightened antisocial behavior. These findings have been influential in prompting policy recommendations to establish stricter limits on the number of hours that students can work during the school year. We reexamine the linkage between first‐time work at age 16 during the school year and problem behaviors. Our analysis uses group‐b…
On the Relationship Between Family Structure and Antisocial Behavior: Parental Cohabitation and Blended Households
In the last several decades, the American family has undergone considerable change, with less than half of all adolescents residing with two married biological parents. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we construct an elaborate measure of family structure and find considerable heterogeneity in the risk of antisocial and delinquent behavior among groups of youth who reside in what are traditionally dichotomized as intact and n…
The Impact of Imprisonment on Marriage and Divorce: A Risk Set Matching Approach
Propensity Score Matching in Criminology and Criminal Justice
The Impact of Incarceration on Employment during the Transition to Adulthood
The research findings with respect to the relationship between incarceration and employment are consistent enough that it is tempting to conclude that incarceration causes deterioration in ex-inmates' employment prospects. Yet, causality remains tenuous for several reasons. For one, studies frequently rely on samples of nonincarcerated subjects that are not truly "at risk" of incarceration, which undermines their use as comparison samples and pot…
Het incapacitatie-effect van de eerste gevangenisstraf: Een gematchte vergelijking
The incapacitation effect of first-time imprisonment: A matched samples comparison .One sure way that imprisonment prevents crime in the community is by incapacitating offenders. We used official criminal records data of all individuals convicted in the Netherlands in 1997 to provide estimates of the incapacitation effect of first-time imprisonment. Two different analytical strategies were applied for the estimation of the incapacitation effect. …
Transitional jobs program Putting employment-based reentry programs into context: Transitional Jobs Program
A Signaling Perspective on Employment‐Based Reentry Programming: Training Completion as a Desistance Signal
Overview of: “A Signaling Perspective on Employment‐Based Reentry Programming: Training Completion as a Desistance Signal”
Research Summary This study argues that employment programs for individuals exiting prison can benefit society even if they do not directly reduce recidivism, by helping to identify quickly and efficiently those desisters who are ready to work. We make the following basic claims: Individuals exiting prison have poor work experience, low levels of education, and generally qualify for only low‐skill, entry‐level jobs. Moreover, the majority will re…
Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence
Werk, uitkeringen en criminaliteit - Kwetsbare jongeren gevolgd van 18 tot 32 jaar
This study examines effects of employment as well as different types of income support on crime, using longitudinal information on a sample of vulnerable men and women (N = 540) who were institutionalized in a Dutch juvenile justice institution in the 1990s. Results show that, although the vast majority of the sample is employed at least once during the observation period, a large number of men and women receive income support at some point durin…
Imprisonment Length and Post‐prison Employment Prospects
This study considers the relationship between imprisonment length and employment outcomes. The data are a unique prospective, longitudinal study of Dutch pretrial detainees (N = 702). All subjects thus experience prison confinement of varying lengths, although the durations are relatively short (mean = 3.8 months; median = 3.1 months). This contrasts with prior research that was limited to the study of American prison sentences spanning an averag…
Deterrence
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment. Studies of changes in police presences, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Three high priority areas for future research are identified: developing and te…
Deterrence: Sanction Perceptions
Deterrent Effect of Police and Prisons
On the Deterrent Effect of Stop, Question, and Frisk
Work, Income Support, and Crime in the Dutch Welfare State: A Longitudinal Study Following Vulnerable Youth Into Adulthood
Life‐course criminological research has consistently suggested that employment can reduce criminal behavior. However, it is unclear whether the financial aspects of employment or the social control that inheres in employment best explains the relationship between employment and reduced offending. By using longitudinal information on a sample of men and women (N = 540) who were institutionalized in a Dutch juvenile justice institution in the 1990s…
Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress
This book stands as a correction to conventional survey approaches and assumptions that form the evidential basis of social policy towards, and social research about, the conditions of poor African
A Situational Model of Displacement and Diffusion Following the Introduction of Airport Metal Detectors
Much of the discourse surrounding counterterrorism centers on the inevitability of displacement, or the substitution of another form of terrorist attack in place of the one that has been thwarted. Yet a longstanding tradition of research in situational crime prevention finds that displacement is far from inevitable, and often depends crucially on the specific features of the incidents in question. In fact, crime prevention efforts are often follo…
And We Wonder Why Criminology Is Sometimes Considered Irrelevant in Real‐World Policy Conversations
The Effects of Jail and Prison Confinement on Cohabitation and Marriage
This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to explore the relationship between incarceration and the stability of cohabiting and marital relationships. Self-report dates of relatively short confinement in jail or prison (median one month) are linked with data on cohabitation and residential partnerships, by month, from ages 18 to 32. I estimate the effects of incarceration on transitions into and out of cohabitation and marria…
Perceptual Deterrence
In theory, deterrence is a behavioral response to an individual’s perceptions about the certainty and/or severity of criminal justice sanctions. The perceptual underpinnings of compliance with the law are therefore of long-standing interest in perceptual deterrence scholarship. This chapter provides an overview of the broad scope of this scholarship. After reviewing the basic perceptual elements of crime decision-making models, attention turns to…
Psychology (33 works) · Political science (32 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (31 works) · Criminology (28 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Criminal justice (13 works) · Economics (13 works)