Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 46(4)

Controlling Violent Offenders Released to the Community: An Evaluation of the Boston Reentry Initiative
Anthony A. Braga, Anne M. Piehl, and David Hureau

Despite the high level of funding and policy interest in prisoner reentry, there is still little rigorous scientific evidence to guide jurisdictions in developing reentry programs to enhance public safety, particularly for managing those who pose the greatest safety risks. The Boston Reentry Initiative (BRI) is an interagency initiative to help transition violent adult offenders released from the local jail back to their Boston neighborhoods through mentoring, social service assistance, and vocational development.This study uses a quasi-experimental design and survival analyses to evaluate the effects of the BRI on the subsequent recidivism of program participants relative to an equivalent control group. The authors find that the BRI was associated with significant reductions—on the order of 30 percent—in the overall and violent arrest failure rates.

   
Individual and Environmental Effects on Assaults and Nonviolent Rule Breaking by Women in Prison
Benjamin Steiner and John Wooldredge

Drawing from micro- and macro-level theories of social control, the authors examined inmate and facility effects on the prevalence of assaults and nonviolent rule infractions committed by female inmates housed in state correctional facilities during 1991 and 1997. Analyses of national samples of more than 2,200 women confined in roughly 40 facilities produced results favoring a control perspective. Characteristics of both inmates (e.g., family status, history of physical or sexual abuse, drug use immediately prior to incarceration, and mental ill health) and facilities (e.g., crowding and security level) were relevant for understanding differences among female inmates in the odds of both assault and nonviolent misconduct.

   
Predicting Trajectories of Offending over the Life Course: Findings from a Dutch Conviction Cohort
Bianca E. Bersani, Paul Nieuwbeerta, and John H. Laub

Distinguishing trajectories of criminal offending over the life course, especially the prediction of high-rate offenders, has received considerable attention over the past two decades. Motivated by a recent study by Sampson and Laub (2003), this study uses longitudinal data on conviction histories from the Dutch Criminal Career and Life-Course Study (CCLS) to examine whether adolescent risk factors predict offending trajectories across the life span. The CCLS is particularly well suited to study developmental offending trajectories as it contains detailed information on individual criminal offending careers for a representative sample of all individuals convicted in the Netherlands in 1977 (n = 4,615) beginning at 12 years of age and continuing into late adulthood. To assess predictive ability, the authors employ two different analytical approaches. First, the authors examine whether offending trajectories can be prospectively differentiated by risk factors identified in adolescence. Second, the authors use group-based trajectory analysis to retrospectively identify distinct developmental offending trajectories and employ a cross-validation technique to examine the ability to predict the probability of an individual’s membership in a particular trajectory group. Overall, the results support the notion that it is difficult to predict long-term patterns of criminal offending using risk factors identified early in the life course.

   
Household Structure, Coupling Constraints, and the Nonpartner Victimization Risks of Adults
Carolyn Yule and Elizabeth Griffiths

Victimization studies consistently find that household structure influences the risk of personal and property victimization among adult household members, with those in "traditional" homes enjoying the most protection from victimization and lone parents experiencing the greatest vulnerability. Drawing on the concept of coupling constraints , which represents space-time limitations on adults’ routine activities, this study builds upon and extends research on the household structure— victimization relationship by considering how the presence and age of children shapes adult victimization risk. Data from 11,952 urban respondents in the Canadian General Social Survey (1999) confirm that adults’ life course stage, captured in age-graded responsibilities to children, has an independent and direct influence on nonpartner victimization. The heightened victimization risk experienced by lone parents relative to other types of households is largely explained by their parental coupling constraints.

   
Whites’ Concern about Crime: The Effects of Interracial Contact
Daniel P. Mears, Christina Mancini, and Eric A. Stewart

In recent decades, crime has emerged as a prominent policy focus nationally. Accordingly, a large literature on public views about crime has developed, one strand of which highlights the racialization of crime as a factor central to public opinion and policy discourse. Drawing on this work and studies on the effects of interracial contact, the authors seek to advance theory and research on public opinion about crime.To this end, they draw on data from an ABC News and  Washington Post poll to test competing hypotheses about the effects of interracial friendship among Whites on concern about local and national crime. The results suggest that interracial contact increases concern about crime among urban Whites.The authors discuss the implications of these findings for theory, research, and policy.

   
Assessing the Relationship between Violent and Nonviolent Criminal Activity among Serious Adolescent Offenders
John M. MacDonald, Amelia Haviland, and Andrew R. Morral

Understanding the progression of violent and nonviolent criminal activity remains a matter of theoretical debate. In the present study, the authors build on criminological theory and assess the extent to which the progression of violent and nonviolent criminal behaviors follows different trajectories. The authors rely on semiparametric mixture models to examine these comorbidities of offending in a longitudinal sample of delinquent adolescents. The results suggest that the trajectories of violent and nonviolent criminal offending follow similar paths over time and that membership in the chronic violent and nonviolent offender groups are associated with overlapping sets of risk factors. However, the results also indicate that at the individual level, membership in a particular nonviolent offending group does not share high concordance with membership in a particular violent offender group. These findings raise questions about the adequacy of general theories of crime progression and suggest the need to continue investigating behavioral theories that discriminate between different forms of offending.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2009: Volume 46, Issue 4