Crime and Delinquency 56(1)

Gang Membership and Drug Involvement: Untangling the Complex Relationship
Beth Bjerregaard

Previous research has consistently demonstrated a relationship between gang membership and involvement in illegal substances. In addition, researchers have noted that gang members are frequently more heavily involved in drug sales, which often lead to increases in violent behaviors. Most of this research, however, is either cross-sectional or ethnographic in nature, and therefore does not reveal the causal nature of these relationships. This research attempts to establish the temporal ordering of these relationships while controlling for a variety of relevant variables and to determine whether the relationships between drug involvement and violence differ for gang members versus nongang members. The findings indicate that gang membership is weakly associated with drug involvement, including both usage and sales. This involvement, however, does not appear to be related to assaults. Results suggest that gang membership is not determinative of drug involvement among a national random sample of youth.

What Drives Juvenile Probation Officers?: Relating Organizational Contexts, Status Characteristics, and Personal Convictions to Treatment and Punishment Orientations
Geoff Ward and Aaron Kupchik

Data from surveys of juvenile court probation officers in four states are analyzed to understand professional orientations toward two seemingly contrasting goals of contemporary juvenile justice systems: punishment and treatment. These self-reported juvenile probation officer orientations are considered in relation to three clusters of variables representing somewhat distinct hypothetical bases of professional orientation: court context, decision-maker status characteristics, and resonance with legal, victim’s rights, and character issues. Although court context and status characteristics distinguish attitudes toward treatment and punishment, attitudinal resonance is an especially strong predictor of these orientations. Rather than mutually exclusive or static ideologies, treatment and punishment appear to be flexible, overlapping goals that appeal to officers according to their congruence with other personal convictions. Younger probation officers are also found to be more punitive, net of other influences, suggesting cohort replacement may accelerate the displacement of juvenile rehabilitative ideals. Implications for juvenile justice research and policy are considered.

The Impact of the Taser on Suspect Resistance: Identifying Predictors of Effectiveness
Michael D. White and Justin Ready

Despite the Taser’s increasing popularity among police agencies, questions have been raised concerning the weapon’s use and effectiveness as well as its potential to cause serious injury or death. This article examines all Taser deployments by the New York City Police Department from 2002 to 2005 (N = 375) and uses two multivariate approaches—logistic regression and chi-square automatic interaction detection—to identify predictors of Taser effectiveness, measured as continued suspect resistance and officer satisfaction. Findings indicate that several factors are associated with reduced effectiveness, including suspect body weight (more than 200 pounds), drug and alcohol use, physical violence, and close distance (3 feet or less) between the officer and the suspect. Although this study represents a preliminary effort at identifying predictors of Taser effectiveness, there are clear training and policy implications for police departments.

Conviction Offense and Prison Violence: A Comparative Study of Murderers and Other Offenders
Jon Sorensen and Mark D. Cunningham

The characteristics of, and 2003 disciplinary data on, 51,527 inmates in the Florida Department of Corrections, including 9,586 inmates who had been convicted of some degree of homicide, were examined for rates and correlates of prison misconduct and violence. Disciplinary misconduct and institutional acts of violence committed by an admissions cohort (N = 14,088) and a subset of Close custody inmates (N = 4,113) also were considered. Regardless of conviction offense, the prevalence and rate of violent prison misconduct fell markedly as the severity of assault increased. Comparative data showed that convicted murderers did not account for a disproportionate share of prison violence, however defined. Furthermore, negative binomial regression models revealed that convicted murderers were not significantly more likely to engage in disciplinary misconduct or commit acts of institutional violence than were inmates serving time for other offenses.

Courtroom Workgroups and Sentencing: The Effects of Similarity, Proximity, and Stability
Stacy Hoskins Haynes, Barry Ruback, and Gretchen Ruth Cusick

Sentencing decisions are the product of a group of courtroom actors, primarily judges and district attorneys. Although the structure of the courtroom workgroup and the interdependencies among members are assumed to be important determinants of sentencing decisions, the degree of this importance and the specific mechanisms through which workgroups affect these decisions have not been investigated. This study used data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS) for the years 1990 to 2000 to examine how three social psychological aspects of courtroom workgroups (similarity, proximity, and stability) affect sentencing decisions. Results indicated (a) that workgroups generally had very high levels of similarity in terms of race, gender, and political party but lower levels of similarity in terms of age, college education, and law school education and (b) that proximity and stability were generally high. Controlling for individual, case, and distal contextual factors, workgroup factors affected the decision to incarcerate, the decision to impose fines, and the decision to impose restitution. In particular, proximity increased the use of economic sanctions relative to incarceration and stability was associated with a decrease in the imposition of economic sanctions. Similarity had inconsistent effects.

Crime and Delinquency, January 2010: Volume 56, Issue 1