Justice Quarterly 27(2)

Trafficking in Bodily Perfection: Examining the Late-Modern Steroid Marketplace and Its Criminalization
Peter B. Kraska;  Charles R. Bussard; John J. Brent

Illicit steroid and human growth hormone use by professional athletes has received significant media and political attention in the last five years. The resulting political pressure has compelled federal law enforcement to prosecute serious new control initiatives. To date, no academic research inquiring into the nature of this illicit industry exists. This study fills this void through the mixed methods approach—employing both ethnographic field research and quantitative content analysis. The ethnographic data demonstrate a fascinating late-modern trafficking scheme where the central informant established an apartment-based manufacturing operation, converting raw steroid chemical compounds ordered off the Internet into injectable solutions. Content analysis of 186 websites that supply anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) demonstrates that these grounded findings are indicative of a much larger phenomenon. Our final analysis examines the broader theoretical relevance of the ethnographic findings through contextualizing them within macro-structural (supply) and macro-cultural (demand) social forces.

The Necessary Conditions for Retaliation: Toward a Theory of Non-Violent and Violent Forms in Drug Markets
Scott Jacques

Research provides strong support for the theory that drug market participants are often involved in violent retaliation because they lack access to formal mediation. Yet retaliation is not always violent. The existing drug market literature offers few counts, estimates, or stories of non-violent retaliation, and no single theory specifies the variable conditions that determine which form of retaliation occurs. This paper contributes to criminology by drawing on the necessary conditions perspective and qualitative data obtained from drug dealers to provide the conceptual and theoretical foundation for future criminological work, including the development of theories that explain variability in retaliatory forms, research that demonstrates whether any given theory is supported by data, and criminal justice policies that draw on theoretical and empirical knowledge to reduce all forms of drug market retaliation—violent and non-violent.

Understanding Elder Sexual Abuse and the Criminal Justice System's Response: Comparisons to Elder Physical Abuse
Brian K. Payne

A great deal of research has considered the dynamics of sexual assault and the way that sexual assault cases are processed and handled in the criminal justice system. Most of this research has focused on sexual assault cases involving younger victims. Very little criminological research has considered the dynamics of elder sexual abuse. To fill this void, the current study uses a sample of 127 elder sexual abuse cases and 314 elder physical abuse cases to shed some light on the dynamics of elder sexual abuse and the way the justice system processes these cases. Attention is also given to the way that the processing of elder sexual abuse cases can be distinguished from the processing of elder physical abuse cases. Results show that a wide range of elder sexual abuse cases are committed and these cases are processed differently than elder physical abuse cases. Implications are provided.

Women Coming Home: Long-Term Patterns of Recidivism
Beth M. Huebner;  Christina DeJong; Jennifer Cobbina

Drawing on recent scholarship on prisoner reentry and gendered pathways to crime, this research explores how social relationships, incarceration experiences, and community context, and the intersection of these factors with race, influence the occurrence and timing of recidivism. Using a large, modern sample of women released from prison, we find that women who are drug dependent, have less education, or have more extensive criminal histories are more likely to fail on parole and to recidivate more quickly during the eight year follow-up period. We also observe racial variation in the effect of education, drug use, and neighborhood concentrated disadvantage on recidivism. This study highlights the importance of an intra-gender, theoretical understanding of recidivism, and has import for policy aimed at female parolees.

Procedural Justice and Order Maintenance Policing: A Study of Inner-City Young Men’s Perceptions of Police Legitimacy
Jacinta M. Gau; Rod K. Brunson

There is tension between the core tenets of procedural justice and those of order maintenance policing. Research has shown that citizens' perceptions of procedural justice influence their beliefs about police legitimacy, yet at the same time, some order maintenance policing efforts stress frequent stops of vehicles and persons for suspected disorderly behavior. These types of programs can threaten citizens' perceptions of police legitimacy because the targeted offenses are minor and are often not well-defined. Citizens stopped for low-level offenses may view such stops as a form of harassment, as they may not believe they were doing anything to warrant police scrutiny. This paper examines young men's self-described experiences with this style of proactive policing. Study findings highlight that order maintenance policing strategies have negative implications for police legitimacy and crime control efforts via their potential to damage citizens' views of procedural justice.

Further Evidence on the Discriminant Validity of Perceptual Incivilities Measures
Todd Armstrong; Charles Katz

Exploratory factor analysis tested the extent to which measures of incivilities and measures of both crime perceptions and victimization had distinct factor loadings in one- and two-factor models. Confirmatory factor analysis tested the fit of one- and two-factor structural equation models. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that perceptual incivilities measures and victimization reports tended to load on distinct factors, offering evidence of the discriminant validity of perceptual incivilities measures relative to victimization reports. Exploratory and confirmatory analysis of perceived incivilities measures and measures of perceptions of crime provided equivocal results. In exploratory factor analysis, perceived incivilities measures and measures of crime perceptions did not always load on distinct factors and confirmatory factor analysis models did not meet the specified thresholds for good model fit across all fit criteria.

Justice Quarterly, April 2010: Volume 27, Issue 2