Journal of Criminal Justice 41(3)

Journal of Criminal Justice, May 2013: Volume 41, Issue 3

Personal factors and substance abuse treatment program retention among felony probationers: Theoretical relevance of initial vs. shifting scores on impulsivity/low self-control
Liana Taylor, Matthew Hiller, Ralph B. Taylor

Purpose Although past work connects personal factors to substance abuse treatment retention, most studies have been atheoretical. The current work specifically examines impulsivity/low self-control and retention in substance abuse treatment using the General Theory of Crime () which anticipates a relationship between intake scores and retention. Methods Analyses examined 330 probationers in a modified therapeutic community. Four logistic regression models predicting treatment completion examined four aspects of impulsivity/low self-control. Each model included initial scores, while controlling for unexpected changes after 90 days and demographics. Model-fit was analyzed using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). Results Two best-fitting models emerged: sensation-seeking and volatile tendencies. Higher intake scores for sensation-seeking were related to significantly lower odds of completion. Unexpectedly increasing volatile tendencies was related to a significantly lower odds of completion. Models with impulsivity/low self-control indices provided significantly better fit than models with demographics alone. Conclusions Both measurement periods of impulsivity/low self-control were found to be associated with substance abuse treatment completion. These findings appear supportive of the General Theory of Crime and are directly applicable to Therapeutic Communities. They also may prove useful in future work examining how personal factors connect with treatment outcomes.

Perceptions of prosocial and delinquent peer behavior and the effect on delinquent attitudes: A longitudinal study
Dena C. Carson

Purpose This study uses social learning and balance theories to explore the relationship between a youth's perceptions of both prosocial and antisocial peer behavior and their own delinquent attitudes. Methods The current research examines both the contemporaneous and lagged relationships between peer behavior and a youth's delinquent attitudes, the relative effect of prosocial versus antisocial peer behavior on attitudes as well as the effects of changes in these variables. Relationships are examined using data from a multi-site longitudinal sample of 3,820 youth. Analyses are completed using random-effects regression techniques as well as change scores. Results Findings indicate that perceptions of prosocial peer behavior have a lasting protective effect on the formation of delinquent attitudes. However, when focusing on change over time, changes in perceptions of delinquent peer behavior produce a stronger change in delinquent attitudes. Conclusions The current study was able to make advancements to both social learning and balance theory by focusing on perceptions of peer behavior and delinquent attitudes. The results justify the significance of continuing to examine factors that relate to how peer associations matter for delinquent attitudes and behavior.

Adolescent parties and substance use: A situational approach to peer influence
Owen Gallupe, Martin Bouchard

Purpose This study takes a situational approach to testing criminogenic peer influence effects on substance use by examining audience characteristics at the last two parties that adolescents attended. We examine the applicability of situational approaches to social learning theory and symbolic interactionist perspectives on criminogenic peer group effects. Methods Using a sample of adolescents in a large Canadian city, we test the cross-sectional correlates of substance use at parties (n = 775) as well as how changes in audience characteristics relate to changes in substance use from one party to the next (n = 361). Results We found that higher levels of substance use are more likely to occur in smaller group settings. But having more friends use alcohol/cannabis and in larger amounts is strongly related to greater personal substance use. Further, it was found that increases in the amount that friends drink/smoke from one party to the next is related to increases in personal substance use. Conclusions There appears to be little support for a generalized audience effect; what is important is the behavior of peers in specific situations. Findings suggest that integrating a situational audience perspective provides valuable insights into peer influence dynamics.

Adult onset offending in a Swedish female birth cohort
Frida Andersson, Marie Torstensson Levander

Background In criminal career research, the existence of an adult onset trajectory has been identified more or less regularly over recent decades, providing indications of the existence of a group of serious offenders that resembles the early onset chronic offenders. Aims The aim of this study is to further explore the origins and development of the adult onset females with regard to familial and social predictors and life events. Methods Results are based on the Project Metropolitan data for 7,398 girls up to age 30 using logistic regression. Results The adult onset group showed a markedly higher prevalence of all covariates when compared with non-offenders and they are largely similar to the high level chronics. A logistic regression model including 11 covariates identified only two predictors on which the adult onsetters could be separated from the high level chronics. Conclusions The authors conclude that there is support for the actual existence of the adult onset group, and that the group is difficult to separate from the high level chronics on the basis of structural factors. Using additional variables, including individual factors, further research should focus on answering the question of how the delayed onset of this group might be explained.

Need drugs, will travel?: The distances to crime of illegal drug buyers
Lallen T. Johnson, Ralph B. Taylor, Jerry H. Ratcliffe

Purpose This study examines distances to crime among illegal drug buyers while controlling for buyer, drug, and destination characteristics. Methods Geocoded arrests for drug buyers in an urban municipality, over a three year period, spatially identify major drug markets. Negative binomial regression is used to model compositional characteristics of drug arrestees and contextual effects of markets on distance to arrest (n = 4,082). Results Trip distance to drug purchase arrest varies by drug market. Being white, and having prior contact with the criminal justice system correlated with longer trip distances. Additional compositional effects vary by drug type. Conclusions In line with prior journey to crime research and crime pattern theory, illicit drug buyers are arrested in close proximity of their homes. Future research should consider the extent to which short aggregate market distances reflect policing differentials and close social ties.

Two dopamine receptor genes (DRD2 and DRD4) predict psychopathic personality traits in a sample of American adults
Tong Wu, J.C. Barnes

Purpose Psychopathy is often defined as a personality disorder that manifests as a constellation of characteristics including a lack of affective emotions, manipulative and irresponsible interpersonal reactions, and impulsive and sometimes violent behaviors. Prior studies have shown that genetic factors may have some influence on the etiology of psychopathy, but there is little evidence on which specific genes may play a role. Methods This study examines the correlation between three dopamine genes—DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4—and psychopathic personality traits. Results The results of this study demonstrate that two of the examined genes predict psychopathic personality traits in the hypothesized direction (DRD2: b = .69 p < .05; DRD4: b = 1.02 p < .05). Conclusions These findings emphasize the importance of the dopaminergic system in the etiology of psychopathic personality traits, providing guidance for future researchers.

The effect of prison-based college education programs on recidivism: Propensity Score Matching approach
Ryang Hui Kim, David Clark

Purpose Most prior research reports that prison-based college education reduces recidivism, but fails to address the potential problem of self-selection bias. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the true treatment effect of prison-based college education on recidivism. Methods Using data acquired from New York State, we use the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method to control for self-selection bias. The recidivism rate is compared between the treatment and matched comparison group. Also, fixed-effects logistic regression and Cox regression models are utilized to measure the effect of prison-based college programs on recidivism. Results We find that the recidivism rates within three years after release for college program completers and a PSM derived comparison group were 9.4% and 17.1% respectively. However, the recidivism rate for a comparison group not derived by the PSM method was more than double the rate of the PSM derived comparison group. Fixed-effects logistic regression and Cox regression models also confirm that prison-based college programs have a positive effect on reducing recidivism. Conclusions The results of this study suggest that inflated estimates of the treatment effect may result when research does not take self-selection bias into account and apply appropriate methods to compensate for that bias.

Social Problems 60(2)

Social Problems, May 2013: Volume 60, Issue 2

Counting Care Work: The Empirical and Policy Applications of Care Theory
Mignon Duffy, Randy Albelda and Clare Hammonds

The adequate provision of quality care to the elderly, children, and those who are ill or disabled is one of the pressing social problems of our time. Despite the far-reaching formulations of care in the theoretical realm, advocacy and policy-making efforts around care work remain largely atomized. Translating the wide-ranging insights of care scholarship into tools for public policy solutions requires a practical application of the concept as well as empirical measurement. In this article, we integrate the insights of care theory with feminist economic analysis to conceptualize care as a single sector at the foundation of the state's human infrastructure. We then measure the scope of care work across paid work, unpaid labor, and government investment in one U.S. state. We estimate that the care sector in Massachusetts comprises 22 percent of the paid labor force, 20 percent of the average resident's daily time, and 57 percent of state and local government spending. Such data gives policy makers and advocates an empirical foundation to make a case for the human and economic impact of the care sector and to build on framing a broader vision of care policy. Strengthening the human infrastructure in Massachusetts and elsewhere is an economic and ethical imperative, and our goal is to provide both empirical data and a practically useful conceptual frame that can be used as tools by those working towards the social transformation of care.

Glass Cliffs and Organizational Saviors: Barriers to Minority Leadership in Work Organizations?
Alison Cook and Christy Glass

Racial/ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in positions of authority. While ample scholarship has identified barriers to mobility, much less scholarship has explored the conditions under which minorities are promoted to leadership positions. Relying on a unique data set that includes all transitions among NCAA men's basketball head coaches over a 30-year period, we analyze the promotion probability and post-promotion trajectory of minority coaches. First, we find that minority coaches are more likely to be appointed in historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) due to bottom-up ascription. Second, minorities are more likely than whites to be promoted to losing teams, a phenomenon termed the glass cliff. And third, when minority coaches are unable to generate winning records they are replaced by white coaches, a phenomenon we term the savior effect. By testing mechanisms related to the mobility chances of minorities, this analysis advances our understanding of the processes that shape racial/ethnic hierarchies in organizations.

A Test of the Temperance Hypothesis: Class, Religiosity, and Tolerance of Prostitution
Liqun Cao and Edward R. Maguire

Public attitudes toward prostitution are a neglected area of study. Temperance theory posits that end-of-the century political culture is characterized by the persistence of moral politics in which personal behavior is moralized and sanctioned. Driving this politics is the economic insecurity of the middle class to reassert status boundaries as markers of respectability in order to clearly separate classes physically and socially. This hypothesis has not been tested empirically and it contradicts hypotheses derived from post materialist theory or revised modernization theory, which proposes that there is a trend toward more tolerance of deviance in contemporary society, and that the traditional class-based cleavages have shifted and now focus more on value cleavages. This article tests these competing hypotheses, examining whether there is a trend toward greater intolerance of prostitution and whether the middle class became more intolerant in the 1990s. In addition, we test the effects of social class and religiosity on tolerance of prostitution. Results show that the U.S. pubic became more tolerant toward prostitution across social classes in the 1990s and that religiosity continues to serve as a powerful counterbalance to social acceptance of prostitution.

Limited Engagements? Women's and Men's Work/Volunteer Time in the Encore Life Course Stage
Phyllis Moen and Sarah Flood

Americans are living healthier and longer lives, but the shifting age distribution is straining existing and projected social welfare protections for older adults (e.g., Social Security, Medicare). One solution is to delay retirement. Another is an alternative to “total leisure” retirement—an “encore” stage of paid or unpaid engagement coming after career jobs but before infirmities associated with old age. We draw on gendered life course themes together with data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2009) to examine the real time American men and women ages 50 to 75 apportion to paid work and unpaid volunteer work on an average day, as well as factors predicting their time allocations. We find that while full-time employment declines after the 50s, many Americans allot time to more limited engagements—working part time, being self-employed, volunteering, helping out—through and even beyond their 60s. Caring for a child or infirm adult reduces the odds of paid work but not volunteering. While time working for pay declines with age (though more slowly for men than women), time volunteering does not. Older men and women in poor health, without a college degree, with a disability or SSI income are the least likely to be publicly engaged. This social patterning illustrates that while the ideal of an encore of paid or unpaid voluntary, flexible, and meaningful engagement is an emerging reality for some, it appears less attainable for others. This suggests the importance of organizational and public policy innovations offering all Americans a range of encore opportunities.

A Mark of Disgrace or a Badge of Honor?: Subjective Status among Former Inmates
Jason Schnittker and Valerio Bacak

Using the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, this study explores the effects of incarceration on the subjective status of men, based on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (or the “ladder”). The study makes several crucial distinctions. First, it distinguishes subjective status in one's community and subjective status in the United States generally, thereby exploring differences between the local and global meanings of incarceration. Second, it distinguishes crime, arrest, and incarceration, thereby exploring the added effects of contact with the criminal justice system, apart from offending. The results reveal that contact with the criminal justice system results in progressively lower status: those who committed a crime report lower subjective status than those who did not, those who were arrested report lower status than those who only committed a crime, and those who were incarcerated report lower status than those who were only arrested. Although these differences along the crime-to-sentencing continuum are strong, the effects of crime, arrest, and incarceration are, if anything, even stronger among African Americans than whites. The results also suggest that the effects of incarceration are similar to—if not greater than—those of other stigmatizing statuses, including having spent time in a psychiatric hospital. The effects of arrest and incarceration are not driven entirely by the social or economic consequences of incarceration, although these consequences further deflate subjective status among former inmates.

Broad Reciprocity, Elderly Poverty, and the Retiree/Nonretiree Cleavage in the Demand for Public Retirement Income Support
Juan J. Fernández

This article examines whether a structural or a neo-institutionalist approach best explains cross-national variations in the retiree/nonretiree cleavage regarding pension policy preferences. Prior research on welfare policy attitudes shows that in European countries retirees are more likely to support intensive public pension provision than are nonretirees, while in the United States both groups are as likely to support it. As an alternative to the increasingly predominant, neo-institutionalist approach, I propose a structural explanation that focuses on the role of elderly poverty. I argue that higher levels of elderly poverty induce nonretirees to establish their pension policy preferences based on a principle of broad reciprocity. First, in a context of high elderly poverty, nonretirees react to the demand for reciprocity by their impoverished elderly parents by supporting improvements in public pension protection. Second, in the same context, due to perceptions of retirees as highly deserving of public support, nonretirees feel more compelled to demand more public pension protection that improves the economic wellbeing of retirees. The results are consistent with this expectation. Using a sample of 30 OECD country years and multilevel models, countries with higher levels of elderly poverty present smaller retiree/nonretiree divides in support of public pension provision and pension spending increases.

Law & Society Review 47(2)

Law & Society Review, June 2013: Volume 47, Issue 2

New Perspectives from the Oldest Profession: Abuse and the Legal Consciousness of Sex Workers in China
Margaret L. Boittin

Although prostitution is illegal, millions of women sell sex in China. In the process, they experience significant abuse and harm at the hands of clients, madams, pimps, the police, and health officials. This article examines the legal consciousness of Chinese sex workers through their interpretations of these abusive experiences. It reveals how they think and talk about them, and how their reactions sometimes translate into concrete actions. My evidence shows that sex workers name abuse as harmful, blame others for it, and occasionally make claims. They also have strong opinions about prostitution policies, and the relationship between these regulations and their experiences of abuse. These findings place scope conditions on previous theories of marginalized people and the law, which suggest that powerless individuals perceive a more peripheral role of the law in their lives. In addition, this evidence enriches our understanding of legal consciousness in China by showing how debates around the concept apply more broadly than previously recognized.

Pragmatic Discourse and Gender Inequality in China
Xin He and Kwai Ng

Using courtroom dialogs from actual court trials in China as data, this article analyzes an emerging “pragmatic discourse,” deployed by judges to assist, but at the same time to constrain divorcing women. Through questions, statements, rebuttals, and other interactional devices, Chinese judges define the premises that underpin the law's understanding of gender equality and women's welfare. By looking at how discourses are deployed by judges and litigants, we link micro linguistic practices to more general social forces and processes. Despite their honest effort to protect women's rights, Chinese judges often inadvertently reinforce and reproduce the patriarchal norm. The data demonstrate how the hegemonic patriarchal order reasserts itself in an institutional forum that is meant to promote gender equality. The interaction of the discourses also highlights the tensions in Chinese society and displays the effect of changing social environment on the legal operation.

Bright-Line Fever: Simple Legal Rules and Complex Property Customs among the Fataluku of East Timor
Daniel Fitzpatrick and Andrew McWilliam

Recent law and economics scholarship has revived a debate on bright-line rules in property theory. Economic analysis asserts a baseline preference for bright-line property rules because of the information costs if “all the world” had to understand a range of permitted uses, or deal with multiple interest holders in a resource. A baseline preference for bright-line rules of property arises from the cost of communicating information: all else being equal, complex rules suit smaller audiences (e.g., contracting parties) and simple rules suit large audiences (e.g., property transactors, violators, and enforcers). This article explores the circumstances in which a simple rule, purportedly for a large audience, takes on interpretive complexity as it traverses specialized audience segments. The argument draws on two heuristic strands of recent sociolegal scholarship: systems theory notions of autopoiesis, and concepts of negotiability in plural property relations. The potential for complex interpretations of simple legal rules is illustrated through a case study of the Fataluku language group in the district of Lautem, East Timor.

Signaling Environmental Stewardship in the Shadow of Weak Governance: The Global Diffusion of ISO 14001
Daniel Berliner and Aseem Prakash

This article examines how the quality of domestic regulatory institutions shapes the role of global economic networks in the cross-national diffusion of private or voluntary programs embodying environmental norms and practices. We focus on ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world, which encourages participating firms to adopt environmental stewardship policies beyond the requirement of extant laws. We hypothesize that firms are motivated to signal environmental stewardship via ISO 14001 certification to foreign customers and investors that have embraced this voluntary program, but only when these firms operate in countries with poor regulatory governance. Using a panel of 129 countries from 1997 to 2009, we find that bilateral export and bilateral investment pressures motivate firms to join ISO 14001 only when firms are located in countries with poor regulatory governance, as reflected in corruption levels. Thus, our article highlights how voluntary programs or private law operates in the shadow of public regulation, because the quality of public regulation shapes firms' incentives to join such programs.

Militarized Justice in New Democracies: Explaining the Process of Military Court Reform in Latin America
Brett J. Kyle and Andrew G. Reiter

While a large body of literature emphasizes the importance of judicial reform in new democracies, few scholars have examined the reform of military justice systems in these settings—despite the potential for these courts to compete directly with civilian courts and subvert the rule of law. This article focuses on Latin America to empirically examine how the process of reforming military courts has played out in each democracy following authoritarian rule. We outline two distinct pathways: (1) unilateral efforts on the part of civilian reformers, and (2) strategic bargains between civilian reformers and the military. Within the unilateral category, we further distinguish efforts driven by civilian courts, those pursued by politicians, and those undertaken in the context of larger political transformations. Ultimately, we find that, absent a dramatic defeat of an authoritarian regime and its armed forces, reform efforts that do not engage and bargain with the military directly often fail to achieve long-term compliance and improvements in human rights practices. The success of such reform efforts, therefore, may come at a cost in other areas of democracy and civil-military relations. We conclude the article by summarizing our findings and reflecting on the lessons they provide for ongoing military justice reform efforts around the globe.

Institutional Paths to Policy Change: Judicial Versus Nonjudicial Repeal of Sodomy Laws
Udi Sommer, Victor Asal, Katie Zuber and Jonathan Parent

What variables lead judicial and nonjudicial decision-making bodies to introduce policy change? In the theoretical framework proposed, the path-dependent nature of law has a differential impact on courts and legislatures. Likewise, certain political institutions including elections and political accountability lead those bodies to introduce policy change under dissimilar circumstances. Global trends, however, affect both institutional paths equally. We test this theory with data for the repeal of sodomy laws in all countries from 1972–2002. Results from two disparate multivariate models overwhelmingly confirm our predictions. The unique institutional position of courts of last resort allows them to be less constrained than legislatures by either legal status quo or political accountability. Globalization, on the other hand, has a comparable effect on both. This work is path breaking in offering a theoretical framework explaining policy change via different institutional paths, systematically testing the framework comparatively and with respect to a policy issue still on the agenda in many countries.

American Journal of Sociology 118(5)

American Journal of Sociology, March 2013: Volume 118, Issue 5

Relative Deprivation and Internal Migration in the United States: A Comparison of Black and White Men
Chenoa Flippen

While the link between geographic and social mobility has long been a cornerstone of sociological approaches to migration, recent research has cast doubt on the economic returns to internal U.S. migration. Moreover, important racial disparities in migration patterns remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from the 2000 census, the author reappraises the link between migration and social mobility by taking relative deprivation into consideration. She examines the association between migration, disaggregated by region of origin and destination, and absolute and relative earnings and occupational prestige, separately by race. Findings lend new insight into the theoretical and stratification implications of growing racial disparities in migration patterns; while both blacks and whites who move north-south generally average lower absolute incomes than their stationary northern peers, they enjoy significantly higher relative social positions. Moreover, the relative “gains” to migration are substantially larger for blacks than for whites. The opposite patterns obtain for south-north migration.

Terrorist Events and Attitudes toward Immigrants: A Natural Experiment
Joscha Legewie

Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study examines the effect of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across 65 regions in nine European countries. It first elaborates a theoretical argument that explains the effect of events and points to economic conditions, the size of the immigrant population, and personal contact as mediating factors. This argument is evaluated using the fact that the terror attack in Bali on October 12, 2002, occurred during the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey. The findings from this natural experiment reveal considerable cross-national and regional variation in the effect of the event and its temporal duration. The analysis on the regional level supports the argument about contextual variations in the response to the event and a second analysis based on the 2004 Madrid bombing confirms the study’s conclusions. Implications of the findings for societal responses to terror attacks, the literature on attitudes toward immigrants, and survey research are discussed.

The Sacralization of the Individual: Human Rights and the Abolition of the Death Penalty
Matthew D. Mathias

In the latter half of the 20th century, countries abolished the death penalty en masse. What factors help to explain this global trend? Conventional analyses explain abolition by focusing primarily on state level political processes. This article contributes to these studies by analyzing world cultural factors that lend to the abolition trend. The main finding in three separate models on full, ordinary, and de facto cumulative measures of abolition show that the global sacralization of the individual, measured as the institutionalization of the human rights regime, represents a significant driver of states’ abolition. Countries’ predominant religion is also found to significantly affect the probability of abolition: predominantly Catholic nation-states are most likely to abolish the death penalty, and predominantly Muslim nation-states are least likely to abolish. These findings provide evidence for world cultural factors that structure the abolition trend globally.

Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970–2008
Ken-Hou Lin and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using time-series cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor’s share of income, increasing top executives’ share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. Net of conventional explanations such as deunionization, globalization, technological change, and capital investment, the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financialization could account for more than half of the decline in labor’s share of income, 9.6% of the growth in officers’ share of compensation, and 10.2% of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008.

The Payoff to Skill in the Third Industrial Revolution
Yujia Liu and David B. Grusky

Is the third industrial revolution indeed driven by rising payoffs to skill? This simple but important question has gone unanswered because conventional models of earnings inequality are based on exceedingly weak measurements of skill. By attaching occupational skill measurements to the 1979–2010 Current Population Surveys, it becomes possible to adjudicate competing accounts of the changing returns to cognitive, creative, technical, and social skill. The well-known increase in between-occupation inequality is fully explained when such skills are taken into account, while returns to schooling prove to be quite stable once correlated changes in workplace skills are parsed out. The most important trend, however, is a precipitous increase in the wage payoff to synthesis, critical thinking, and related “analytic skills.” The payoff to technical and creative skills, often touted in discussions of the third industrial revolution, is shown to be less substantial.

The Transformation of America’s Penal Order: A Historicized Political Sociology of Punishment
Michael C. Campbell and Heather Schoenfeld

Comparative historical methods are used to explain the transformation of the U.S. penal order in the second half of the 20th century. The analysis of multiple state-level case studies and national-level narratives suggests that this transformation has three distinct, but interconnected, historical periods and reveals that the complex interaction between national and state-level politics and policy helps explain the growth in imprisonment between 1970 and 2001. Specifically, over time, national political competition, federal crime control policy, and federal court decisions helped create new state-level political innovation and special interest groups that compelled lawmakers to increasingly define the crime problem as a lack of punishment and to respond by putting more people in prison for longer periods of time. In turn, state-level developments facilitated increasingly radical crime control politics and policies at the national level that reflected historical traditions found in Sun Belt states.

Theoretical Criminology 17(2)

Theoretical Criminology, May 2013: Volume 17, Issue 2

Special Issue: Crime and Control in Asia

Doing criminology from the periphery: Crime and punishment in Asia
Maggy Lee and Karen Joe Laidler

In responding to the rallying call to expand criminology’s geopolitical imagination and to ‘see from the peripheries’ (Aas, 2012: 11), this Special Issue takes East and South-East Asia as the point of departure and showcases criminological work undertaken in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan. 

Articles

Colonial responses to youth crime in Hong Kong: Penal elitism, legitimacy and citizenship
Michael Adorjan and Wing Hong Chui

This article examines colonial responses to youth crime in Hong Kong, focusing on the 1960s, when riots involving large numbers of youth drew concern among officials over spillover from the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China; and on the 1970s, when the Government initiated a program of state building focused on instilling citizen identification with Hong Kong, youth in particular. Elite reaction is examined through a series of Legislative Council debates, declassified official reports and governmental Annual Reports. The article argues that youth crime control in Hong Kong’s colonial context could best be understood using a penal elitist framework, one which remains influential today.

Consuming private security: Consumer citizenship and defensive urbanism in Singapore
Choon-Piew Pow

Recent scholarship in criminology has suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of an uneven patchwork of urban policing and security provision, increasingly determined by the ability and willingness of consumers to pay for private security goods and services. In particular, it has been argued that the commodification of urban policing and private security has given rise to new forms of ‘consumer citizenship’ and identity and alongside these, the creation of new secured spaces of consumption. This article seeks to examine one specific manifestation of such a security product—the gated community. While the proliferation of gated communities and the frantic construction of such ‘architecture of fear’ (Ellin, 1997) have often been associated with an American-style ‘defensive urbanism’, the emergence of such security-enhanced urban landscapes is invariably time and place specific. Using the context of Singapore, a city-state with strong state control and relatively low crime rate, the article traces the development of such enclosed residential enclaves to show how the rise of private policing and security are bound up in the creation of fortified residential spaces in which an exclusive social-spatial order comes to be defined and enforced.

Networked regulation as a solution to human rights abuse in global supply chains? The case of trade union rights violations by Indonesian sports shoe manufacturers
Tim Connor and Fiona Haines

This article analyses the capacity of global networks of civil society actors to supplement effectively weak state regulation in reducing human rights abuse by multi-national companies (MNCs). The effectiveness of non-government organizations as part of a network of control finds support both in the radical criminological literature as well as those explicitly advocating for a networked regulatory approach. This case study of the Indonesian sport shoe industry demonstrates that networked regulation has had a positive short- to medium-term impact on respect for trade union rights among some manufacturers producing for western MNCs. However, inconsistent approaches by the MNCs and ongoing resistance by manufacturers has made this influence difficult to sustain. Critically, the Indonesian state apparatus emerges as a powerful and primarily—but far from completely—complicit set of actors: applying criminal sanctions for trade union rights violations but failing to enforce them, and influencing networked regulation in complex, contingent ways. This case study suggests both that advocates and practitioners of networked regulation need to find more effective ways to respond to the corporate drive to maximize profit and that networked regulation’s long-term usefulness will likely depend on the extent to which it draws from and operates to strengthen progressive regulatory elements within Asian states.

'Penal populism' and penological change in contemporary Japan
Mark Fenwick

This article examines whether the concept of penal populism can be useful in understanding contemporary developments in Japanese criminal justice. In addressing this issue it is suggested that we need to draw a clear distinction between different conceptions of penal populism and, in particular, we should avoid equating penal populism with intensification of the severity of state punishment. A discussion of the Japanese experience highlights the importance of focusing on populism as a process by which new voices emerge and influence criminal justice policy as a result of an unmet demand for justice and security. This perception of a lack of security and justice is a global phenomenon that, nevertheless, expresses itself in distinctive, culturally specific ways. Although the extent of this shift should not be exaggerated, at least in a Japanese context, penal populism has contributed to an opening up of criminal justice and a disaggregation of state sovereignty.

Capital punishment in China: A populist instrument of social governance
Michelle Miao

Contrary to the assumption that authoritarian authorities are insensitive to popular demands for justice, the Chinese penal regime has been highly attentive and responsive to public sentiments since its early days. As an instrument for the authorities to govern the country in the name of the people, capital punishment functioned as a tool for political struggles in Maoist China and later served as a tool to fight crimes in Deng’s reform era. Nowadays, the demands of the masses for revenge, justice and equality have been translated into a fervent passion for capital punishment for certain offences and offenders. By reaching out to satisfy these public demands and sentiments, the party-state hopes to enhance its political legitimacy. In this sense, the death penalty serves as a populist mechanism to strengthen the resilience of the authoritarian party-state by venting public anxiety and resentment towards social problems created in the processes of China’s rapid modernization and social fragmentation.

Research Notes

Ethnography at the periphery: Redrawing the borders of criminology's world-map
Alistair Fraser

In the current era of globalization, a paradox has developed in the field of criminology. In the context of the increasingly global nature of crime, there has been a firm recognition among criminologists of the need for comparative, transnational research; particularly that which moves beyond knowledge created in the global North. However, production of this knowledge remains clustered in a relatively narrow range of geographical sites—and understandings of crime and criminology in the South too often defined through the lens of the North. As processes of globalization confound and disrupt the traditional dualisms of East/West and North/South, there is a pressing need for an expansion of criminology’s world-map. This article explores the conceptual possibilities of one particular methodology—ethnography—as a means of explicating the deep-seated tensions, fragmented realities and hybridized identities that emerge from the margins of globalization. Drawing on cogent debates from the fields of sociology and anthropology, I argue that ethnographically informed ‘theory from the South’ can at once enrich the criminological imagination and provoke a more cosmopolitan global imaginary.

The hukou and traditional virtue: An ethnographic note on Taiwanese policing
Jeffrey T Martin

This research note suggests that traditional ideals of virtue in Taiwan enable an order-making dynamic to operate in the backstage of state record-keeping processes. These virtues coordinate cooperation by policemen, civilians and politically empowered elites, simultaneously facilitating local order-maintenance and ensuring that police records serve the interests of the established political economic structure. I focus on the ways that this arrangement is grounded in the historical institution of the population registry, or hukou. I argue that Taiwan’s hukou has effectively translated traditional virtues into policeable objects of modern administration: inscribed in the documentary practices of population registration, embedded in a naturalized division of social control labor, and institutionalized as collective habits of response to trouble.

Doing criminological ethnography in China: Opportunities and challenges
Jianhua Xu, Karen Joe Laidler, and Maggy Lee

This article reflects on the emerging criminological research enterprise in China. We provide a brief overview on the nature of criminological knowledge production in China, particularly in relation to practical and political constraints. We contend that while there are distinct challenges associated with doing criminology in China, there are also new possibilities for alternative methodologies and critical analyses to push the boundaries of administrative criminology. Through the example of a study of migrants and motorcycle taxi driving in a Chinese city, we argue that an ethnography of the periphery can facilitate our understanding of the nuances of the social and cultural construction of the migrant crime problem, bringing to the foreground globally as well as locally relevant tensions, fragmented realities and hybridized identities.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 50(2)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, May 2013: Volume 50, Issue 2

The Variable Impacts of Public Housing Community Proximity on Nearby Street Robberies
Cory P. Haberman, Elizabeth R. Groff, and Ralph B. Taylor

Objectives: Use crime pattern theory to investigate the proximity effects of public housing communities on robbery crime while taking into account the presence of nearby nonresidential facilities. Method: The study uses data describing 41 Philadelphia public housing communities and their surrounds. Surrounds are defined using two increments of street block-sized buffers. Multilevel models (buffer areas nested around public housing communities) allowing the proximity effect to vary across communities and predicting its shape with public housing level predictors are estimated. Results: The multilevel models show that the shape of proximity effects varies across public housing communities and depends on community size, even after factoring in presence of nonresidential facilities. Spatially, multiple public housing communities close to one another have more intense robbery patterns. Conclusions: Labeling all public housing communities as equally criminogenic robbery exporters is unwarranted. In fact, some communities have lower robbery counts than the areas surrounding them. Consequently, effectively addressing robbery in and around public housing communities will require careful consideration of where the problem is located. Locating public housing communities more than two blocks apart may reduce robbery.

Concentrated Disadvantage and the Incarceration of Youth: Examining How Context Affects Juvenile Justice
Nancy Rodriguez

Objectives: Attribution theory is used to frame a study on concentrated disadvantage and youth correctional confinement. Method: Population of delinquent referrals and a random sample of 50 youth case file records from a large urban juvenile court in the southwest are analyzed. Results: Black and Latino/Latina youth were more likely than their White counterparts to be institutionalized. Youth from areas with high levels of concentrated disadvantage were more likely to be confined than youth from more affluent areas. Court officials' perceptions of disadvantage play an important role when deciding whether youth should remain in the community or be incarcerated. Conclusions: Race, ethnicity, and concentrated disadvantage play a significant role in juvenile justice. Court officials perceive areas of disadvantage as high risk and dangerous for youth. Unfortunately, correctional confinement appears to be one way to address youths' vulnerable state. This study sheds light on the importance of economic landscapes in the administration of justice and the delivery of services.

Online Routines and Identity Theft Victimization: Further Expanding Routine Activity Theory beyond Direct-Contact Offenses
Bradford W. Reyns

Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to extend recent work aimed at applying routine activity theory to crimes in which the victim and offender never come into physical proximity. To that end, relationships between individuals' online routines and identity theft victimization were examined. Method: Data from a subsample of 5,985 respondents from the 2008 to 2009 British Crime Survey were analyzed. Utilizing binary logistic regression, the relationships between individuals' online routine activities (e.g., banking, shopping, downloading), individual characteristics (e.g., gender, age, employment), and perceived risk of victimization on identity theft victimization were assessed. Results: The results suggest that individuals who use the Internet for banking and/or e-mailing/instant messaging are about 50 percent more likely to be victims of identity theft than others. Similarly, online shopping and downloading behaviors increased victimization risk by about 30 percent. Males, older persons, and those with higher incomes were also more likely to experience victimization, as were those who perceived themselves to be at greater risk of victimization. Conclusions: Although the routine activity approach was originally written to account for direct-contact offenses, it appears that the perspective also has utility in explaining crimes at a distance. Further research should continue to explore the online and offline routines that increase individuals' risks of identity theft victimization.

Continuity and Change in Gang Membership and Gang Embeddedness
David C. Pyrooz, Gary Sweeten, and Alex R. Piquero

Objectives. Drawing from social network and life-course frameworks, the authors extend Hagan’s concept of criminal embeddedness to embeddedness within gangs. This study explores the relationship between embeddedness in a gang, a type of deviant network, and desistance from gang membership. Method. Data were gathered over a five-year period from 226 adjudicated youth reporting gang membership at the baseline interview. An item response theory model is used to construct gang embeddedness. The authors estimate a logistic hierarchical linear model to identify whether baseline levels of gang embeddedness alter the longitudinal contours of gang membership. Results. Gang embeddedness is associated with slowing the rate of desistance from gang membership over the full five-year study period. Gang members with low levels of embeddedness leave the gang quickly, crossing a 50 percent threshold in six months after the baseline interview, whereas high levels of embeddedness delays similar reductions until about two years. Males, Hispanics, and Blacks were associated with greater continuity in gang membership as well as those with low self-control. Conclusions. The concept of gang embeddedness broadens understanding of heterogeneity in deviant network immersion and is applicable to a wide range of criminal and delinquent networks. Gang embeddedness has implications for studying the parameters of gang careers and for a range of criminological outcomes.

The Effect of Interracial Contact on Whites' Perceptions of Victimization Risk and Black Criminality
Daniel P. Mears, Justin Pickett, Kristin Golden, Ted Chiricos, and Marc Gertz

Objectives. This article examines two questions. First, does interracial contact increase or decrease Whites' perceptions of Blacks' criminality? Second, does it affect Whites' perceived victimization risk, and, if so, is the effect mediated by the perceived criminality of Blacks as compared to the perceived criminality of different racial and ethnic groups? Methods. Multivariate regression analyses of data from a national public opinion poll that included measures of perceived victimization risk and the criminality of Whites and Latinos. Results. Interracial contact increases Whites' perceptions of the criminality of all racial and ethnic groups, not just Blacks. It also increases Whites' perceived risk of victimization, an effect that partially arises by increasing their perception of Whites and Latinos, and not just Blacks, as criminal. Conclusions. Although the identified effects may be due to Whites' stereotypes about Blacks, they are equally consistent with the notion that interracial contact may educate Whites about crime. Unfortunately, the present study could not investigate this possibility. Future research ideally will address this limitation, use additional measures of contact, and assess other explanations for any identified effects.

The Conditional Impact of Official Labeling on Subsequent Delinquency: Considering the Attenuating Role of Family Attachment
Dylan B. Jackson and Carter Hay

Objectives: Recent tests of labeling theory reveal a criminogenic effect of official labels. Drawing from Braithwaite and Sherman, the current study examines how the effects of a criminal label on recidivism vary by the degree of warmth and attachment found in the family environment. Method: Using ordinary least squares regression and product-term analysis, the authors tested their hypothesis using data from the Children at Risk program, which contains a sample of high-risk youths. Findings: Family attachment, examined across several waves of data, significantly diminishes the harmful effects of a criminal label. Conclusions: Results suggest that warm, supportive parents can reduce the likelihood that their children will reoffend. Their findings also imply that the labeling perspective may need further specification regarding the conditions under which a labeling effect is most likely to occur. Implications for juvenile justice policy are also discussed.  

Criminology 51(2)

Criminology, May 2013: Volume 51, Issue 2

 The Cycle Of Violence In Context: Exploring The Moderating Roles Of Neighborhood Disadvantage And Cultural Norms
Emily M. Wright And Abigail A. Fagan

Although the cycle of violence theory has received empirical support (Widom, 1989a, 1989b), in reality, not all victims of child physical abuse become involved in violence. Therefore, little is known regarding factors that may moderate the relationship between abuse and subsequent violence, particularly contextual circumstances. The current investigation used longitudinal data from 1,372 youth living in 79 neighborhoods who participated in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and it employed a multivariate, multilevel Rasch model to explore the degree to which neighborhood disadvantage and cultural norms attenuate or strengthen the abuse–violence relationship. The results indicate that the effect of child physical abuse on violence was weaker in more disadvantaged communities. Neighborhood cultural norms regarding tolerance for youth delinquency and fighting among family and friends did not moderate the child abuse–violence relationship, but each had a direct effect on violence, such that residence in neighborhoods more tolerant of delinquency and fighting increased the propensity for violence. These results suggest that the cycle of violence may be contextualized by neighborhood structural and cultural conditions.

Target Choice During Extreme Events: A Discrete Spatial Choice Model Of The 2011 London Riots
Peter Baudains, Alex Braithwaite And Shane D. Johnson

Riots are extreme events, and much of the early research on rioting suggested that the decision making of rioters was far from rational and could only be understood from the perspective of a collective mind. In the current study, we derive and test a set of expectations regarding rioter spatial decision making developed from theories originally intended to explain patterns of urban crime when law and order prevail—crime pattern and social disorganization theory—and consider theories of collective behavior and contagion. To do this, we use data for all riot-related incidents that occurred in London in August 2011 that were detected by the police. Unlike most studies of victimization, we use a random utility model to examine simultaneously how the features of the destinations selected by rioters, the origins of their journeys, and the characteristics of the offenders influence offender spatial decision making. The results demonstrate that rioter target choices were far from random and provide support for all three types of theory, but for crime pattern theory in particular. For example, rioters were more likely to engage in the disorder close to their home location and to select areas that contained routine activity nodes and transport hubs, and they were less likely to cross the Thames River. In terms of contagion, rioters were found to be more likely to target areas that had experienced rioting in the previous 24 hours. From a policy perspective, the findings provide insight into the types of areas that may be most vulnerable during riots and why this is the case, and when particular areas are likely to be at an elevated risk of this type of disorder.

Egohoods As Waves Washing Across The City: A New Measure Of “Neighborhoods”
John R. Hipp And Adam Boessen

Defining “neighborhoods” is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes. Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of “neighborhood,” we argue that previous strategies relying on nonoverlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed. The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods: egohoods. These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with nonoverlapping boundaries. This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities: Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson. The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts. The results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the nonoverlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by using our egohood approach.

Punitive Sentiment
Mark D. Ramirez

Scholarship has long noted the importance of understanding the changes that occur over time in aggregate public support for punitive criminal justice policies. Yet, the lack of a reliable and valid measure of this concept limits our understanding of this aspect of the criminal justice system. This research develops a measure of public support for punitive policies from 1951 to 2006 using 242 administrations of 24 unique survey indicators. It argues that punitive sentiment is politically constructed via frames focusing on the permissiveness of the criminal justice system. Punitive sentiment is estimated with an error-correction model showing both the short- and long-term relationships between punitive sentiment and presidential framing of crime, public dissatisfaction with social welfare policies, and perceptions of racial integration. The results highlight the complex dynamics responsible for the change over time in punitive sentiment as well as the possibilities of obtaining public support for alternative solutions to crime.

A Multilevel Framework For Understanding Police Culture: The Role Of The Workgroup
Jason R. Ingram, Eugene A. Paoline Iii And William Terrill

Relying on a well-established theoretical paradigm from organizational psychology, the aim of the current inquiry is to apply a multilevel approach to the study of police culture that identifies workgroups as important entities that influence officers’ occupational outlooks. More specifically, we propose that police culture be assessed in a way similar to concepts in criminology, such as collective efficacy and street culture, whereby the shared features of individuals’ environments are considered. Within this framework, we draw on survey data from five municipal police agencies to examine how strongly officers within 187 separate workgroups share culture, as well as the extent to which culture differs across these workgroups. Collectively, the findings suggest that the workgroup serves as a viable context that patterns culture in police organizations. As such, the study provides a way to move beyond conceptualizations of police culture as either a purely monolithic or an individual-level phenomenon.

When The Ties That Bind Unwind: Examining The Enduring And Situational Processes Of Change Behind The Marriage Effect
Bianca E. Bersani And Elaine Eggleston Doherty

Despite the continued growth of research demonstrating that marriage promotes desistance from crime, efforts aimed at understanding the mechanisms driving this effect are limited. Several theories propose to explain why we observe a reduction in offending after marriage including identity changes, strengthened attachments, reduced opportunities, and changes to routine activities. Although mechanisms are hard to measure, we argue that each proposed mechanism implies a specific change process, that is, whether the change that ensues after marriage is enduring (stable) or situational (temporary). Drawing on a medical model framework, we cast the role of marriage as a treatment condition and observe whether the effect of marriage is conditional on staying married or whether the effect persists when the “treatment” is taken away (i.e., divorce). We use 13 years of monthly level data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), a nationally representative sample containing close to 3,000 individuals with an arrest history, to examine changes in relationship status and arrest from adolescence into young adulthood. Estimates from multilevel within-individual models reveal greater support for situational mechanisms in that divorce is detrimental particularly for those in longer marriages; yet they also reveal important caveats that suggest a closer examination of the marriage effect. This research adds to the growing body of knowledge regarding the marriage effect by redirecting desistance research away from asking if marriage matters to asking how marriage affects desistance. A better understanding of this change process has important implications for criminal justice policy.

A Dual-Systems Approach For Understanding Differential Susceptibility To Processes Of Peer Influence
Kyle J. Thomas And Jean Marie Mcgloin

The distinct peer-based perspectives of deviant normative influence and unstructured/unsupervised socializing with friends contend that adolescents rely on different information when deciding to offend, with the former positing that individuals offend after considering the longer term consequences of behavior, and the latter positing that decisions to offend derive from situational stimuli. We argue that these processes can be organized under a dual-systems framework of decision making, which leads to the hypothesis that individuals at the edges of impulsivity should be differentially vulnerable to these peer influence processes because of their tendency to rely on only one system of decision making. We use two large data sets to test this hypothesis: a nationally representative sample of adolescents from the AddHealth study (N = ~9,000) and a pooled panel data set of adolescents from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) evaluation (N = 1,172). The results of longitudinal negative binomial analyses indicate that normative influence by deviant peers has a stronger effect on delinquency for adolescents with low impulsivity than it does for individuals with high impulsivity. Differences in the informal socializing with peers coefficients are less clear and offer minimal support for our predictions.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology 29(2)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, June 2013: Volume 29, Issue 2

Gangs and Violence: Disentangling the Impact of Gang Membership on the Level and Nature of Offending
Chris Melde, Finn-Aage Esbensen

To determine whether membership in youth gangs provides a unique social forum for violence amplification. This study examines whether gang membership increases the odds of violent offending over and above involvement in general delinquent and criminal behavior. Five waves of data from a multi-site (seven cities) panel study of over 3,700 youth originally nested within 31 schools are analyzed. We estimate four level repeated measures item response theory models, which include a parameter to differentiate the difference in the log of the expected event-rate for violent offense items to the log of the expected event-rate for nonviolent offense items. Depending on the comparison group (gang youth, overall sample), periods of active gang membership were associated with a 10 or 21% increase in the odds of involvement in violent incidents. When the sample is restricted to youth who report gang membership during the study, the proportionate increase in the odds of violence associated with gangs is statistically similar for males and females. After youth reported leaving the gang their propensity for violence was not significantly different than comparison group observations, although levels of general offending remain elevated. While results are limited by the school-based sampling strategy, the importance of gang prevention and intervention programming for violence reduction is highlighted. Preventing youth from gang membership or shortening the length of gang careers through interventions may reduce absolute levels of violence.

The Age Structure-Crime Rate Relationship: Solving a Long-Standing Puzzle
Patricia L. McCall, Kenneth C. Land, Cindy Brooks Dollar, Karen F. Parker

Develop the concept of differential institutional engagement and test its ability to explain discrepant findings regarding the relationship between the age structure and homicide rates across ecological studies of crime. We hypothesize that differential degrees of institutional engagement—youths with ties to mainstream social institutions such as school, work or the military on one end of the spectrum and youths without such bonds on the other end—account for the direction of the relationship between homicide rates and age structure (high crime prone ages, such as 15–29). Cross sectional, Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses using robust standard errors are conducted using large samples of cities characterized by varying degrees of youths’ differential institutional engagement for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The concept is operationalized with the percent of the population enrolled in college and the percent of 16–19 year olds who are simultaneously not enrolled in school, not in the labor market (not in the labor force or unemployed), and not in the military. Consistent and invariant results emerged. Positive effects of age structure on homicide rates are found in cities that have high percentages of disengaged youth and negative effects are found among cities characterized with high percentages of youth participating in mainstream social institutions. This conceptualization of differential institutional engagement explains the discrepant findings in prior studies, and the findings demonstrate the influence of these contextual effects and the nature of the age structure-crime relationship.

The Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Changes in Neighborhood Crime Rates
John M. MacDonald, John R. Hipp, Charlotte Gill

This study investigated the extent to which immigrant concentration is associated with reductions in neighborhood crime rates in the City of Los Angeles. A potential outcomes model using two-stage least squares regression was estimated, where immigrant concentration levels in 1990 were used as an instrumental variable to predict immigrant concentration levels in 2000. The instrumental variables design was used to reduce selection bias in estimating the effect of immigrant concentration on changes in official crime rates between 2000 and 2005 for census tracts in the City of Los Angeles, holding constant other demographic variables and area-level fixed effects. Non-parametric smoothers were also employed in a two-stage least squares regression model to control for the potential influence of heterogeneity in immigrant concentration on changes in crime rates. The results indicate that greater predicted concentrations of immigrants in neighborhoods are linked to significant reductions in crime. The results are robust to a number of different model specifications. The findings challenge traditional ecological perspectives that link immigrant settlement to higher rates of crime. Immigration settlement patterns appear to be associated with reducing the social burden of crime. Study conclusions are limited by the potential for omitted variables that may bias the observed relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood crime rates, and the use of only official crime data which may under report crimes committed against immigrants. Understanding whether immigrant concentration is an important dynamic of changing neighborhood patterns of crime outside Los Angeles will require replication with data from other U.S. cities.

Strain, Coping, and Socioeconomic Status: Coping Histories and Present Choices
Ekaterina V. Botchkovar, Charles R. Tittle, Olena Antonaccio

Using household survey data from three major cities in foreign countries, we add to research concerning General Strain Theory (GST) by focusing on aspects that have been ignored or under-researched. First, we address questions concerning SES variations in the operation of the processes of GST, with particular focus on whether various relationships specified by the theory are more likely in the lower SES group. Second, we explore the extent to which prior coping strategies influence subsequent coping choices. Finally, we seek to determine the links between SES, coping histories, and subsequent coping choices. The study analyzes the effects of past and contemporaneous strain/negative emotions and prior coping efforts on various coping strategies across three SES groupings using negative binomial, ordered logit, and OLS regression. We find that, with some variations, the basic processes of GST are operative across all SES categories. However, whereas strain appears to have a moderate association with alcohol-related and criminal coping strategies, avoidant coping appears to be largely irrelevant for anybody who faces strain. Our data also demonstrate that specific forms of prior coping partially influence the types of coping employed later. But, with few exceptions, these effects are not more pronounced among those of lower SES. In sum, our findings suggest that individuals in various SES groupings may prefer certain types of coping, whereas different types of attempted coping may predispose individuals to specific forms of subsequent adaptation.

Delinquent Behavior, Violence, and Gang Involvement in China
David C. Pyrooz, Scott H. Decker

This study examines the relationship between delinquent behavior and gang involvement in China. We assess the feasibility of self-report methodology in China and whether established findings in US and European settings on the relationship between gang involvement, violence specialization, and delinquent behavior extend to the Chinese context. Data were gathered from 2,245 members of a school-based sample in Changzhi, a city of over 3 million people in Northern China. Drawing from a detailed survey questionnaire that measures prominent theoretical constructs, multi-level item response theory modeling was used to examine the association of gang involvement with general and specific forms of delinquency, notably violence specialization. Over half of the sample engaged in some form of delinquency over the prior year. Eleven percent of the sample reported gang involvement. Large bivariate differences in overall delinquency and violence specialization between gang and non-gang youth were observed. Multivariate analyses with measures of low self-control, household strains, family and school attachment, parental monitoring, and peer delinquency reduced the bivariate effect sizes, but current and former gang members had higher log odds of overall delinquency and violence specialization. In helping fill gaps of knowledge on gangs and delinquency in the world’s most populous country, this study observed self-reported rates of delinquency and gang involvement not unlike Western countries. Findings on the relationship between gangs and delinquency, particularly violence, are consistent with the current literature and support the invariance hypothesis of gang involvement.

Does Spending Time in Public Settings Contribute to the Adolescent Risk of Violent Victimization?
Richard B. Felson, Jukka Savolainen, Mark T. Berg, Noora Ellonen

Using data from a nationally representative survey of adolescents in Finland this research examined the influence of spending time in public settings on the risk of physical assault and robbery victimization. Binary and multinomial regression models were estimated to disaggregate associations between hours spent in public settings and characteristics of the victimization incident. The amount of causality/spuriousness in the association was examined using a method of situational decomposition. Our findings indicate that: (1) an active night life (any time after 6 pm) has a strong effect on victimization for boys, whereas much of the association between night life and victimization is spurious for girls; (2) after-school activity is not a risk factor; (3) adolescents who frequent public places at night increase their risk of victimization by people they know as well as strangers; and (4) much of the risk of night time activity in public settings is alcohol-related. Our research suggests that a good deal of the risk associated with spending time in public settings is a function of the victim’s own risky behavior rather than inadvertent physical contact with motivated offenders in the absence of capable guardians. In addition, this lifestyle is significantly more victimogenic for males.

Terrorism Risk, Resilience and Volatility: A Comparison of Terrorism Patterns in Three Southeast Asian Countries
Gentry White, Michael D. Porter, Lorraine Mazerolle

This article explores patterns of terrorist activity over the period from 2000 through 2010 across three target countries: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. We use self-exciting point process models to create interpretable and replicable metrics for three key terrorism concepts: risk, resilience and volatility, as defined in the context of terrorist activity. Analysis of the data shows significant and important differences in the risk, volatility and resilience metrics over time across the three countries. For the three countries analysed, we show that risk varied on a scale from 0.005 to 1.61 “expected terrorist attacks per day”, volatility ranged from 0.820 to 0.994 “additional attacks caused by each attack”, and resilience, as measured by the number of days until risk subsides to a pre-attack level, ranged from 19 to 39 days. We find that of the three countries, Indonesia had the lowest average risk and volatility, and the highest level of resilience, indicative of the relatively sporadic nature of terrorist activity in Indonesia. The high terrorism risk and low resilience in the Philippines was a function of the more intense, less clustered pattern of terrorism than what was evident in Indonesia. Mathematical models hold great promise for creating replicable, reliable and interpretable “metrics” to key terrorism concepts such as risk, resilience and volatility.