Crime & Delinquency 58(1)

Crime & Delinquency, January 2012: Volume 58, Issue 1

Differential Deterrence: Studying Heterogeneity and Changes in Perceptual Deterrence Among Serious Youthful Offenders
Thomas A. Loughran, Alex R. Piquero, Jeffrey Fagan, and Edward P. Mulvey

Perceptual deterrence has been an enduring focus of interest in criminology. Although recent research has generated important new insights about how risks, costs, and rewards of offending are perceived and internalized, there remain two specific limitations to advancing theories of deterrence: (a) the lack of panel data to show whether issues of changes in perceptions over age and time are linked to changes in offending and (b) the lack of research on perceptual deterrence of active offenders, arguably the most policy-relevant group for these studies. Using longitudinal data on offending and perceptions of risks and punishment costs for a large sample of serious youthful offenders, the authors identify significant heterogeneity in sanction threat perceptions generally and across different types of offenders. These differences in perception reflect variation among offenders in the amount of prior information on offending on which individuals may be basing their perceptions. There likely exists a potential “ceiling” and “floor” of sanction threat perceptions, indicating that there are deterrence boundaries beyond which some types of offenders may be more amenable to sanction threats whereas others may be undeterred by sanction threats. Directions for future theoretical and empirical research are discussed.

Cultures of Violence and Acts of Terror: Applying a Legitimation–Habituation Model to Terrorism
Christopher W. Mullins and Joseph K. Young

Although uniquely positioned to provide insight into the nature and dynamics of terrorism, overall the field of criminology has seen few empirically focused analyses of this form of political violence. This article seeks to add to the understanding of terror through an exploration of how general levels of violence within a given society influence the probability of political dissidents within that society resorting to terror as a form of political action. Drawing on the legitimation–habituation thesis, the authors explore whether general levels of legitimate and illegitimate violence within a society predict terrorist violence (both internal and external in direction) within that society. To do so, the authors use zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to perform time series cross-sectional analysis on predictors of terrorist events from the Global Terrorism Database. The authors find support for their core hypothesis and provide a discussion of the implications for the findings within their data and for future criminological research on terrorism.

Crisis Intervention Teams and People With Mental Illness: Exploring the Factors That Influence the Use of Force
Melissa S. Morabito, Amy N. Kerr, Amy Watson, Jeffrey Draine, Victor Ottati, and Beth Angell

The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program was first developed to reduce violence in encounters between the police and people with mental illness as well as provide improved access to mental health services. Although there is overwhelming popular support for this intervention, scant empirical evidence of its effectiveness is available—particularly whether the program can reduce the use of force. This investigation seeks to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the factors that influence use of force in encounters involving people with mental illness and evaluating whether CIT can reduce the likelihood of its use.

Public Attitudes Toward Juveniles Who Commit Crimes: The Relationship Between Assessments of Adolescent Development and Attitudes Toward Severity of Punishment
Terrence T. Allen, Eileen Trzcinski, and Sheryl Pimlott Kubiak

In this article, the authors used a statewide survey to investigate the extent to which beliefs regarding the age at which youth reach maturity, the role of peer influences, and other factors, such as abuse during childhood, are associated with measures of how harshly juveniles should be treated by the justice system. The results of this study provide strong support for the hypothesis that assessments of adolescent development are important predictors of attitudes about how juveniles should be treated in the justice system. In all cases, variables measuring attitudes surrounding adolescent development explained substantially more of the variance in attitudes toward punishment than did demographic and socioeconomic variables.

Gender and Relational-Distance Effects in Arrests for Domestic Violence
William Lally and Alfred DeMaris

This study tests two hypotheses regarding factors affecting arrest of the perpetrator in domestic violence incidents. Black’s relational-distance thesis is that the probability of arrest increases with increasing relational distance between perpetrator and victim. Klinger’s leniency principle suggests that the probability of arrest is lower for male perpetrators assaulting female intimate partners, compared with other scenarios. The authors employed marginal logistic regression models using incident-based data from the National Survey of Violence and Threats of Violence Against Women and Men in the United States, 1994-1996, to test both effects. They found support for Black’s thesis: The likelihood of arrest was lower when the perpetrator was an acquaintance, a relative, or a romantic partner of the victim, versus a stranger. However, the authors’ results failed to support Klinger’s hypothesis. They found that men were more likely to be arrested when assaulting a female—regardless of relationship status—compared with assaulting another male.

Exploring Inmate Reentry in a Local Jail Setting: Implications for Outreach, Service Use, and Recidivism
Michael D. White, Jessica Saunders, Christopher Fisher, and Jeff Mellow

Although prisoner reentry has taken center stage in correctional research and policy discussions, there has been little emphasis on reentry among jail populations. This paper examines a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. This article explores these assumptions through an evaluation of a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. To determine program impact, the authors compare samples of participants with nonparticipants and program completers with noncompleters. The groups are matched using developmental trajectories derived from group-based trajectory modeling, in addition to propensity score matching. Findings show that participants perform no better than nonparticipants over a 1-year follow-up, but those who stay engaged for at least 90 days of postrelease services experience significantly fewer (and slower) returns to jail. The findings regarding program completion are tempered by several methodological concerns, however. The article concludes with a discussion of how the study may offer insights for program implementation and operation with this target population.

Reevaluating Interrater Reliability in Offender Risk Assessment
Leontien M. van der Knaap, Laura E.W. Leenarts, Marise Ph. Born, and Paul Oosterveld

Offender risk and needs assessment, one of the pillars of the risk–need-responsivity model of offender rehabilitation, usually depends on raters assessing offender risk and needs. The few available studies of interrater reliability in offender risk assessment are, however, limited in the generalizability of their results. The present study examined interrater reliability in Dutch offender risk assessment by 38 raters who independently assessed 75 offenders. The results show substantial reliability (Tinsley and Weiss’s T value ≥ .61) for risk of reconviction and moderate (T value ≥ .41) to substantial reliability for offender needs, such as accommodation, finances, or education. These results are discussed in light of a recent British study on the interrater reliability of a comparable risk assessment instrument. The results from the present study show similar to better reliability, leading to the conclusion that greater external validity does not negatively influence interrater reliability results.