Journal of Quantitative Criminology 29(3)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, September 2013: Volume 29, Issue 3

The Consequences of Maladaptive Coping: Integrating General Strain and Self-Control Theories to Specify a Causal Pathway Between Victimization and Offending
Jillian J. Turanovic & Travis C. Pratt

Objectives Drawing from general strain and self-control perspectives, the role of maladaptive coping (i.e., substance use) in the causal pathway between victimization and offending is explored. Specifically, the present study investigates: (1) the extent to which self-control influences substance use in response to victimization, and (2) whether victims with low self-control and who engage in substance use are more likely to commit violent offenses in the future. Methods Three waves of panel data from the Gang Resistance Education and Training program are used (N = 1,463), and negative binomial regression models are estimated to explore the interactive effects of low self-control, victimization, and substance use on violent offending. Results Victims with low self-control are more likely to engage in substance use post-victimization, and low self-control and substance use are found to exert significant conditional effects on the pathway between victimization and offending. These results remained robust even after controlling for prior violent offending, peer influences, prior substance use, and other forms of offending. Conclusions The causal pathway between victimization and offending can be explained by drawing upon key concepts drawn from self-control (i.e., how self-control shapes coping responses) and general strain (i.e., how those responses influence offending above and beyond self-control) theories, indicating that these two perspectives can and should be integrated more explicitly to explain the dynamics of victimization and offending.

Differential Effects of Parental Controls on Adolescent Substance Use: For Whom is the Family Most Important?
Abigail A. Fagan , M. Lee Van Horn , J. David Hawkins & Thomas Jaki

Objective Social control theory assumes that the ability of social constraints to deter juvenile delinquency will be invariant across individuals. This paper tests this hypothesis and examines the degree to which there are differential effects of parental controls on adolescent substance use. Methods Analyses are based on self-reported data from 7,349 10th-grade students and rely on regression mixture models to identify latent classes of individuals who may vary in the effects of parental controls on drug use. Results All parental controls were significantly related to adolescent drug use, with higher levels of control associated with less drug use. The effects of instrumental parental controls (e.g., parental management strategies) on drug use were shown to vary across individuals, while expressive controls (e.g., parent/child attachment) had uniform effects in reducing drug use. Specifically, poor family management and more favorable parental attitudes regarding children’s drug use and delinquency had stronger effects on drug use for students who reported greater attachment to their neighborhoods, less acceptance of adolescent drug use by neighborhood residents, and fewer delinquent peers, compared to those with greater community and peer risk exposure. Parental influences were also stronger for Caucasian students versus those from other racial/ethnic groups, but no differences in effects were found based on students’ gender or commitment to school. Conclusions The findings demonstrate support for social control theory, and also help to refine and add precision to this perspective by identifying groups of individuals for whom parental controls are most influential. Further, they offer an innovative methodology that can be applied to any criminological theory to examine the complex forces that result in illegal behavior.

“Fixed” Sentencing: The Effect on Imprisonment Rates Over Time
Mark G. Harmon

Objective Sentencing guidelines, statutory presumptive sentencing, determinate sentencing, truth in sentencing, and three strikes are important components of the criminal justice system. The main purpose behind a relatively-fixed sentence is to remove judicial discretion by insuring that convicted felons receive a reasonably-assumed sentence depending on the crime committed. The current study assessed shifts in year-to-year changes in incarceration rates within all 50 states from the years 1965–2008 due to the adoption of sentencing reforms. Methods The study tests two competing theories, a normative theory and critical theory of the expected effects of reforms on imprisonment. Data was analyzed using panel regression with unit-specific fixed effects, conditional change scores, panel corrected standard errors, and a new measure of reforms. Results This study, possibly due to differences in model specification, ran counter to a number of previous studies and suggests some “front-end” sentencing reforms and “back-end” release changes are, on average, related to changes in imprisonment. Conclusions The study concluded, that when significant, reforms increased more than decreased prison growth in comparison to indeterminate sentencing. Additionally, the analysis concludes that changes in release mechanisms and parole decision structures are driving increased growth more than changes in sentencing structures.

Seasonal Variation in Violent Victimization: Opportunity and the Annual Rhythm of the School Calendar
Kristin Carbone-Lopez & Janet Lauritsen

Objectives This study draws on an underused source of data on seasonality—victim surveys—to assess whether violent crime occurs with greater frequency during summer months or whether it simply becomes known to police more often, and to examine the extent to which seasonal patterns in violent crime are differentiated based on victim characteristics and location of crime. Methods Data used come from the 1993–2008 National Crime Victimization Survey. Time series regression models are estimated to describe seasonal differences in violent crime victimization and reporting rates. Results Seasonal trends in youth violence stand in contrast to the trends for young and older adults, primarily due to their high risk of victimization at and near school. No evidence of seasonality is found in the extent to which serious violence becomes known to the police. However, simple assault is significantly more likely to come to the attention of the police during the summer months, primarily due to increases in the reporting of youth violence. Conclusions Our findings confirm some of the previous work on seasonal patterns in violent crime, but also show that these patterns vary across age groups, locations, and type of violence.

The Efficacy of Ideographic Models for Geographical Offender Profiling
David Canter , Laura Hammond , Donna Youngs & Piotr Juszczak

Objectives Current ‘geographical offender profiling’ methods that predict an offender’s base location from information about where he commits his crimes have been limited by being based on aggregate distributions across a number of offenders, restricting their responsiveness to variations between individuals as well as the possibility of axially distorted distributions. The efficacy of five ideographic models (derived only from individual crime series) was therefore tested. Methods A dataset of 63 burglary series from the UK was analysed using five different ideographic models to make predictions of the likely location of an offenders home/base: (1) a Gaussian-based density analysis (kernel density estimation); (2) a regression-based analysis; (3) an application of the ‘Circle Hypothesis’; (4) a mixed Gaussian method; and (5) a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) analysis. These tests were carried out by incorporating the models into a new version of the widely utilised Dragnet geographical profiling system DragNetP. The efficacy of the models was determined using both distance and area measures. Results Results were compared between the different models and with previously reported findings employing nomothetic algorithms, Bayesian approaches and human judges. Overall the ideographic models performed better than alternate strategies and human judges. Each model was optimal for some crime series, no one model producing the best results for all series. Conclusions Although restricted to one limited sample the current study does show that these offenders vary considerably in the spatial distribution of offence location choice. This points to important differences between offenders in the morphology of their crime location choice. Mathematical models therefore need to take this into account. Such models, which do not draw on any aggregate distributions, will improve geographically based investigative decision support systems.

Self-Control Theory and Nonlinear Effects on Offending
Daniel P. Mears , Joshua C. Cochran & Kevin M. Beaver

Objectives This paper examines Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (A general theory of crime. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990) self-control theory and develops theoretical arguments for why self-control may have a differential effect on offending depending on the level of self-control. Methods We test the argument that the association between self-control and violent offending (n = 5,681) and non-violent offending (5,672) is nonlinear by using generalized propensity score analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results The results indicate that self-control and offending are nonlinearly related in a manner that involves two thresholds. Specifically, among individuals at the high end of the self-control spectrum, there was little evidence of an association between variation in self-control and offending. However, among individuals in the middle part of the self-control spectrum, a positive association obtained—that is, the greater the level of low self-control, the greater the likelihood of offending. Finally, among individuals at the low end of the self-control spectrum, there was, once again, little evidence of an association. Conclusions A nonlinear association between self-control and offending may exist and have implications for self-control theory and tests of it. Studies are needed to investigate further the possibility of a nonlinear association and to test empirically the mechanisms that give rise to it.

Criminology 51(3)

Criminology, August 2013: Volume 51, Issue 3

The 2012 Sutherland Address: Penality And The Penal State
David Garland

The sociology of punishment has developed a rich understanding of the social and historical forces that have transformed American penality during the last 40 years. But whereas these social forces are not unique to the United States, their penal impact there has been disproportionately large, relative to comparable nations. To address this issue, I suggest that future research should attend more closely to the structure and operation of the penal state. I begin by distinguishing penality (the penal field) from the penal state (the governing institutions that direct and control the penal field). I then present a preliminary conceptualization of “the penal state” and discuss the relationship between the penal state and the American state more generally.

“Seeing” Minorities And Perceptions Of Disorder: Explicating The Mediating And Moderating Mechanisms Of Social Cohesion
Rebecca Wickes, John R. Hipp, Renee Zahnow And Lorraine Mazerolle

Research shows that residents report high levels of disorder in places with greater concentrations of minorities even after controlling for objective indicators of crime or disorder. Less understood, however, are the mechanisms that explain this relationship. Drawing on a survey of nearly 10,000 residents nested within 297 neighborhoods across two cities, we use a multiple indicators–multiple causes model to examine the cues that lead individuals to distort the presence of minorities in neighborhoods. We then employ multilevel models to test whether these distortions influence perceptions of disorder. Furthermore, we assess whether living in a socially cohesive neighborhood mediates and/or moderates the relationship between “seeing” minorities and perceiving disorder. We find that when residents overestimate the proportion of minorities living in their neighborhood, perceptions of disorder are heightened. Yet social cohesion moderates and partially mediates this relationship: Residents living in socially cohesive neighborhoods not only report less disorder than those living in less cohesive communities, but also they “see” fewer minorities when compared with residents living in less socially cohesive neighborhoods. These results suggest that social cohesion is an important mechanism for explaining how residents internalize the presence of minorities in their neighborhoods and how this then leads to perceived neighborhood disorder.

Examining The Generality Of The Unemployment–Crime Association
Mikko Aaltonen, John M. Macdonald, Pekka Martikainen And Janne Kivivuori

This article examines whether the relationship between unemployment and criminal offending depends on the type of crime analyzed. We rely on fixed-effects regression models to assess the association between changes in unemployment status and changes in violent crime, property crime, and driving under the influence (DUI) over a 6-year period. We also examine whether the type of unemployment benefit received moderates the link to criminal behavior. We find significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime but not on other types of crime. Our estimates also suggest that unemployed young males commit less crime while participating in active labor market programs when compared with periods during which they receive standard unemployment benefits.

Is Being “Spiritual” Enough Without Being Religious? A Study Of Violent And Property Crimes Among Emerging Adults
Sung Joon Jang And Aaron B. Franzen

Although prior research has had a tendency to confirm a negative association between religiousness and crime, criminologists have been slow to incorporate new concepts and emergent issues from the scientific study of religion into their own research. The self-identity phrase “spiritual but not religious” is one of them, which has been increasingly used by individuals who claim to be “spiritual” but disassociate themselves from organized religion. This study first examines differences in crime between “spiritual-but-not-religious” individuals and their “religious-and-spiritual,” “religious-but-not-spiritual,” and “neither-religious-nor-spiritual” peers in emerging adulthood. Specifically, we hypothesize that the spiritual-but-not-religious young adults are more prone to crime than their “religious” counterparts, while expecting them to be different from the “neither” group without specifying whether they are more or less crime prone. Second, the expected group differences in crime are hypothesized to be explained by the microcriminological theories of self-control, social bonding, and general strain. Latent-variable structural equation models were estimated separately for violent and property crimes using the third wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The overall results tend to provide a partial support for the hypotheses. Implications for criminology and future research are discussed.

Modeling The Association Between Academic Achievement And Delinquency: An Application Of Interactional Theory
John P. Hoffmann, Lance D. Erickson And Karen R. Spence

Many studies have addressed whether delinquent behavior is associated with various aspects of schooling and academics. However, this research has been limited to examining unidirectional effects. Building on Thornberry's interactional theory, we develop a conceptual model that posits reciprocal associations among delinquent behavior, school attachment, and academic achievement. The model is tested with two waves from the Add Health data set (n = 9,381) that include measures of transcript grade point average (GPA). The results of a set of structural equation models provide evidence that academic achievement is associated with less delinquent behavior over time, as well as with higher school attachment. However, the effects of delinquency are limited to an attenuating effect on subsequent school attachment; delinquency does not directly influence academic achievement. Thus, we find only partial support for interactional theory.

Masculinities, Persistence, And Desistance
Christoffer Carlsson

In life-course criminology, when gender has been the focus of study, it has predominantly been treated as a variable. Studies that explore the gendered nature of criminal careers through the lived experiences of offenders are rare, even though these studies can make important contributions to our understanding of crime and the life course. Analyzing qualitative data, this article uses life-history narratives of a small sample of male juvenile delinquents (N = 25), born in 1969–1974, to explore the possible link among masculinities, persistence, and desistance from crime. The findings of the study suggest that processes of persistence and desistance are imbued with age-specific norms of what it means to “be a man” and successfully do masculinity in different stages of life. Analyzing these gender-specific practices gives a deepened understanding of processes that underlie the offenders’ lives as they go through stages of continuity and change in crime. The findings of the study further suggest a complex intersection between gendered biographies and gendered structures, with fruitful contributions to life-course criminology. The implications of these findings are discussed.

The Code Of The Street And Inmate Violence: Investigating The Salience Of Imported Belief Systems
Daniel P. Mears, Eric A. Stewart, Sonja E. Siennick And Ronald L. Simons

Scholars have long argued that inmate behaviors stem in part from cultural belief systems that they “import” with them into incarcerative settings. Even so, few empirical assessments have tested this argument directly. Drawing on theoretical accounts of one such set of beliefs—the code of the street—and on importation theory, we hypothesize that individuals who adhere more strongly to the street code will be more likely, once incarcerated, to engage in violent behavior and that this effect will be amplified by such incarceration experiences as disciplinary sanctions and gang involvement, as well as the lack of educational programming, religious programming, and family support. We test these hypotheses using unique data that include measures of the street code belief system and incarceration experiences. The results support the argument that the code of the street belief system affects inmate violence and that the effect is more pronounced among inmates who lack family support, experience disciplinary sanctions, and are gang involved. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Vulnerable Victims, Monstrous Offenders, And Unmanageable Risk: Explaining Public Opinion On The Social Control Of Sex Crime
Justin T. Pickett, Christina Mancini And Daniel P. Mears

With the possible exception of terrorists, sex offenders in the United States experience a greater degree of punishment and restriction than any other offender group, nonviolent or violent. Members of the public overwhelmingly support “get tough” sex crime policies and display an intense hostility toward persons labeled “sex criminals.” The theoretical literature has identified three models potentially explaining public opinion on the social control of sex crime: the victim-oriented concerns model, the sex offender stereotypes model, and the risk-management concerns model. However, empirical work that directly tests these models is absent. This article addresses that gap by analyzing national survey data that includes measures of the key concepts outlined in the different theoretical models and items gauging support for punitive sex crime laws as well as support for sex offender treatment. The findings provide partial support for all three models but suggest that extant theories can better explain support for punitive sex crime policies than views about sex offender treatment.

Peaceful Warriors: Codes For Violence Among Adult Male Bar Fighters
Heith Copes, Andy Hochstetler And Craig J. Forsyth

Considerable theoretical and empirical inquiry has focused on the role codes for violence play in generating crime. A large part of this work has examined the attitudes and codes condoning retaliation and violence as well as the prevalence of these among minorities residing in impoverished neighborhoods. Much about the nature of codes remains unknown, however, and this may in part reflect a narrow interest in beliefs about provocation and uses of violence among the inner-city poor. In this study, we elaborate on a code of violence as part of a system of order and honor as articulated by a network of White, working-class males in a southern U.S. city who participate in bar fights. The findings suggest that the code these men use prohibits predatory violence, puts exclusive limitations on situations that warrant violence, and constrains the level of violence in a fight. We detail the contours of this code (e.g., purpose of fighting, the rules of honorable fighting, and justifications for violating these rules) and discuss the code as both a cause and a consequence of behavior.

Crime & Delinquency 59(6)

Crime & Delinquency, September 2013: Volume 59, Issue 6 

Reporting Error in Household Gun Ownership in the 2000 General Social Survey
Richard L. Legault

The use of surveys is one of the few ways to determine the extent and character of firearms ownership in the United States. The findings from such surveys have implications for both firearms research and firearms policy. Using data from the 2000 General Social Survey, the author examines the possibility of error in the reporting of household firearm ownership. Strong and significant differences in ownership reporting are found between married men and women, especially for those who were not socialized in part of a traditional “gun culture.”

Accumulated Strain, Negative Emotions,and Crime: A Test of General Strain Theory in Russia
Ekaterina Botchkovar and Lisa Broidy

Drawing on a random sample of 340 adults, this study examines the relationships between strain, negative emotions, and criminal coping in the context of Russia. Extending the argument of general strain theory (GST), it also assesses the criminogenic potency of strain accumulation and raises the possibility that negative affect, accumulating from stressors closely grouped in time, heightens individual’s sensitivity to concurrent or subsequent strains. Although the data suggest that the core variables of GST are operant in Russia, support for the theory is mixed. Strain appears to be generally associated with negative emotions, but negative emotions are not uniformly criminogenic. Negative emotions do not appear to mediate the association between strain and crime but moderate the strain–crime link and, in some cases, increase the enabling effects of strains on illegal coping. Overall, the findings suggest that negative affect likely produced by accumulation or clustering of negative events and conditions may heighten the crime-generating potency of other, less criminogenic strains.

Judges’ Reactions to Ohio’s "Jessica’s Law"
Timothy Griffin and John Wooldredge

In 2007, Ohio lawmakers passed that state’s version of “Jessica’s law” (Senate Bill [SB] 260), which mandates severe prison terms for sex offenses against very young children. Using data from a survey of Ohio judges administered right after SB 260’s passage, the authors found that a majority opposed the new law, as predicted. However, no relationship between political party preference and overall assessment of SB 260 was found, challenging the assumption that judicial “leniency” would explain opposition to the harsh penalties. Instead, quantitative and qualitative data showed that judges who disliked SB 260 feared the loss of judicial discretion and excessively harsh sentences for relatively less serious sex offenders. Opposing judges also perceived SB 260 as derived from cynical politics and popular ignorance. The potential value of consulting practitioner perspectives on sentencing enhancements and considerations for addressing moral panic–driven crime legislation in the long run are explored.

General Strain Theory As a Basis for the Design of School Interventions
Byongook Moon and Merry Morash

The research described in this article applies general strain theory to identify possible points of intervention for reducing delinquency of students in two middle schools. Data were collected from 296 youths, and separate negative binomial regression analyses were used to identify predictors of violent, property, and status delinquency. Emotional punishment by teachers and youths’ prior victimization are significant predictors of delinquency. Strained youths are especially likely to commit various delinquent behaviors if they associate with delinquent peers, while they are less likely to be involved in violent and property-related delinquency if they report a positive relationship with parents. The findings suggest the need for programmatic attention to youths’ criminal victimization and teachers’ use of emotional punishment as well as youths’ relations with parents and involvement with delinquent peers in the two schools studied.

Associations Between Order Maintenance Policing and Violent Crime: Considering the Mediating Effects of Residential Context
Robert J. Kane and Shea W. Cronin

The present study examined the relationships between order maintenance arrests and violent crime across and within communities in a major metropolitan setting. Integrating the macro-deterrence and systemic model perspectives, the research tested the direct effects of vigorous disorder arrests on robbery and assault with a deadly weapon (i.e., violent street crime), as well as the interactive effects of Disorder Arrests × Residential Integration (mobility and owner-occupied dwelling) on violent crime. The research found no direct relationship between disorder arrests and violent crime, but it found that disorder arrests in conjunction with decreased residential integration was associated with violent crime reductions. The results suggest that police disorder arrests may produce the strongest violence reduction results in areas of decreased residential attachment; however, as residential integration increases, the effects of order maintenance arrests on violent crime diminish. The study discusses the implications for shared social control agency in communities, as well as future research directions.

The Impact of Drug Treatment on Recidivism: Do Mandatory Programs Make a Difference? Evidence From Kansas’s Senate Bill 123
Andres F. Rengifo and Don Stemen

This study compares the recidivism of eligible drug possessors sentenced under Kansas’s mandatory drug treatment policy (SB 123) to those of similar offenders receiving other sentences. Using multinomial logistic regression, the authors found that participation in SB 123 was generally associated with a decrease in the likelihood of recidivism. However, models relying on matched samples of offenders generated via propensity scores showed that SB 123 did not have a significant impact on recidivism rates relative to community corrections and actually increased recidivism rates relative to court services. The authors argue that the limited effect of SB 123 on recidivism stems from the net-widening effects often encountered with mandatory sentencing policies rather than inherent problems with the delivery of treatment.

Elaboration on Specialization in Crime: Disaggregating Age Cohort Effects
Shachar Yonai, Stephen Z. Levine, and Joseph Glicksohn

To elaborate past research, this study examines the course of specialization and versatility with maturation and contends that specialization develops in a nonrandom manner, as suggested by the orthogenic principle of human development. To examine the development of specialization and versatility, forward specialization coefficients were disaggregated for three age cohorts over a 20-year follow-up period in a sample of high-risk youth (n = 3,652) with 54,175 arrests. Results show that forward specialization coefficients were generally of moderate magnitude and, across age cohorts, developed modestly in an age-graded manner for the youngest cohort. In conclusion, the results provide preliminary support for the orthogenic theory among early first-admission youth.

Sociological Theory 31(2)

Sociological Theory, June 2013: Volume 31, Issue 2

The Honored Outsider: Raymond Aron as Sociologist
Peter Baehr

Raymond Aron (1905–1983) assumed many guises over a long and fruitful career: journalist, polemicist, philosopher of history, counselor to political leaders and officials, theorist of nuclear deterrence and international relations. He was also France’s most notable sociologist. While Aron had especially close ties with Britain, a result of his days in active exile there during the Second World War, he was widely appreciated in the United States too. His book Main Currents in Sociological Thought was hailed a masterpiece; more generally, Aron’s books were extensively reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review (in earlier days, it hosted a review section), Contemporary Sociology, and Social Forces. And he was admired and cited by sociologists of the stature of Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and David Riesman. Yet despite appearing well poised to become a major force in international sociology, analogous to his younger collaborator, Pierre Bourdieu, Aron has almost vanished from the sociological landscape. This article explains why, offering in the process some observations on the conditions—conceptual and motivational—of reputational longevity in sociological theory and showing how Aron failed to meet them. Special attention is devoted to a confusing equivocation in Aron’s description of sociology and to the cultural basis of his ambivalence toward the discipline.

Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field
Vanina Leschziner and Adam Isaiah Green

Overemphasizing automatic, dispositional cognitive processes, research on social fields has tended to undertheorize the active, reflective dimensions of cognition that shape practice. This has occurred, at least in part, as a reaction to the overly instrumentalist premises of rational action theory. But redressing the errors of an excessively instrumentalist notion of action by overemphasizing the automatic nature of cognition leaves us with a similarly inadequate understanding of how cognition works to influence practice in a field and, as a consequence, the ways in which change may occur from pressures originating within the field itself. In this article, we draw from data on cognition and practice in two kinds of fields—a sexual and a culinary field—to demonstrate how inherent structural pressures encourage instances of deliberate nondispositional cognition and practice. These data suggest an expanded model of practice in field theory that moves beyond a dual-process model of cognition and toward a more nuanced understanding of the relationship of automaticity and deliberation, and habituality and nonhabituality, in the routine practices of a field.

The Practical Organization of Moral Transactions: Gift Giving, Market Exchange, Credit, and the Making of Diaspora Bonds
Dan Lainer-Vos

The fusion of gift giving and market exchange elements in economic transactions creates practical difficulties. How can the parties involved agree about the meaning of their engagement and the value of the exchanged objects? This article tackles the topic—an important one in economic sociology—by looking at moral transactions (i.e., transactions that combine pecuniary and ethical considerations). Through an empirical study of the issuance of Irish and Israeli diaspora bonds during the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, I identify practices that help actors overcome the difficulties inherent in moral transactions. Clarification practices allow actors to treat the exchange as either gift giving or market exchange. Blurring practices allow actors to complete a transaction without agreeing on its meaning. Blurring practices require creating a zone of indeterminacy, that is, a context in which the parties can cooperate without agreeing on their relationships. The broader implications of these practices are then discussed.

Copresence: Revisiting a Building Block for Social Interaction Theories
Celeste Campos-Castillo and Steven Hitlin

Copresence, the idea that the presence of other actors shapes individual behavior, links macro- and micro-theorizing about social interaction. Traditionally, scholars have focused on the physical proximity of other people, assuming copresence to be a given, objective condition. However, recent empirical evidence on technologically mediated (e.g., e-mail), imaginary (e.g., prayer), and parasocial (e.g., watching a television show) interactions challenges classic copresence assumptions. In this article we reconceptualize copresence to provide theoretical building blocks (definitions, assumptions, and propositions) for a revitalized research program that allows for the explicit assessment of copresence as an endogenous, subjective variable dynamically related to social context. We treat copresence as the degree to which an actor perceives mutual entrainment (i.e., synchronization of attention, emotion, and behavior) with another actor. We demonstrate the ramifications of this reconceptualization for classic theorizing on micro-macro linkages and contemporary research questions, including methodological artifacts in laboratory research and disparities in patient-provider rapport.

Annual Review of Sociology 39

Annual Review of Sociology, July 2013: Volume 39

Formations and Formalisms: Charles Tilly and the Paradox of the Actor
John Krinsky and Ann Mische

The Principles of Experimental Design and Their Application in Sociology
Michelle Jackson and D.R. Cox

The New Sociology of Morality
Steven Hitlin and Stephen Vaisey

Social Scientific Inquiry Into Genocide and Mass Killing: From Unitary Outcome to Complex Processes
Peter B. Owens, Yang Su, and David A. Snow

Interest-Oriented Action
Lyn Spillman and Michael Strand

Drugs, Violence, and the State
Bryan R. Roberts and Yu Chen

Healthcare Systems in Comparative Perspective: Classification, Convergence, Institutions, Inequalities, and Five Missed Turns
Jason Beckfield, Sigrun Olafsdottir, and Benjamin Sosnaud

Multiculturalism and Immigration: A Contested Field in Cross-National Comparison
Ruud Koopmans

Sociology of Fashion: Order and Change
Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart

Religion, Nationalism, and Violence: An Integrated Approach
Philip S. Gorski and Gülay Türkmen-Dervişoğlu

Race, Religious Organizations, and Integration
Korie L. Edwards, Brad Christerson, and Michael O. Emerson

An Environmental Sociology for the Twenty-First Century
David N. Pellow and Hollie Nyseth Brehm

Economic Institutions and the State: Insights from Economic History
Henning Hillmann

Demographic Change and Parent-Child Relationships in Adulthood
Judith A. Seltzer and Suzanne M. Bianchi

Gender and Crime
Candace Kruttschnitt

White-Collar Crime: A Review of Recent Developments and Promising Directions for Future Research
Sally S. Simpson

From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology
Hannah Landecker and Aaron Panofsky

Racial Formation in Perspective: Connecting Individuals, Institutions, and Power Relations
Aliya Saperstein, Andrew M. Penner, and Ryan Light

The Critical Sociology of Race and Sport: The First Fifty Years
Ben Carrington

The Causal Effects of Father Absence
Sara McLanahan, Laura Tach, and Daniel Schneider

International Migration and Familial Change in Communities of Origin: Transformation and Resistance
Patricia Arias

Trends and Variation in Assortative Mating: Causes and Consequences
Christine R. Schwartz

Gender and International Migration: Contributions and Cross-Fertilizations
Gioconda Herrera

LGBT Sexuality and Families at the Start of the Twenty-First Century
Mignon R. Moore and Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer

Housing: Commodity versus Right
Mary Pattillo

Migración Internacional y Cambios Familiares en las Comunidades de Origen. Transformaciones y Resistencias
Patricia Arias

Law & Society Review 47(3)

Law & Society Review, September 2013: Volume 47, Issue 3

Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City
Silvia Pasquetti

Recent sociolegal scholarship has explored the role of emotions in lawmaking and policymaking on security and crime issues. This article extends this approach to the relationship between law enforcement and affect by addressing the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of long-term emotions, which bind a collective and fuel ethnonational division. An ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This emotional climate is the product of the subterranean ties of Lod Palestinians with the Israeli security agencies as well as their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I embed the initial creation and relative stability of this emotional climate in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. The article concludes with a discussion of how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and by arguing for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Paradoxes of Urban Housing Informality in the Developing World
Jean-Louis van Gelder

This article addresses a series of paradoxes regarding informal settlements in cities in the developing world and their relation with the legal system. The first paradox regards the penalization of illegal land occupations on the one hand versus the legalization of that same practice on the other. Second, it looks at the relationship between land occupations as systematic violations of property rights, but with the goal of forming new property rights and thus paradoxically supporting private property as a substantive principle. Third, the reasoning behind the fact that the same system that denies legal access to housing for poor sectors simultaneously attempts to incorporate informal settlements in an ad hoc manner through legalization schemes is examined. It is shown that there is a logic to these paradoxes, which, although contradictory from standard legal perspectives, can be accommodated within a theoretical framework that distinguishes an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, from the state legal system, operative outside it. The proposed framework not only settles the paradoxes, but, this article concludes, can also guide attempts to deal with the enormous anticipated growth of informality in the developing world.

Taking Hold of the Wheel: Automobility, Social Order, and the Law in Mexico's Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE)
Keith Guzik

Across the globe, governments are implementing electronic vehicle registration programs capable of locating automobiles instantaneously. In order to understand the impact of such programs on contemporary governance, this article draws upon the extant literature on automobility, law and society and science and technology studies theory, and data collected from Mexico, where the government has been implementing the Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE). The central argument of the article rests on three concepts. First, the automobile has recurrently served as a disruptive technology in modern society, a technology whose adoption unsettles the social order by drawing users away from their usual modes of social interaction. In response, state authorities over the course of the twentieth century created a collection of legal rules, actors, and institutions designed to take hold of the wheel. By penetrating automobility with law, the state transformed the car into a legal enactment device, a technology whose operation pushes people to enact the law and, in so doing, constitutes the sociolegal order. In Mexico, a host of forces have conspired to weaken the state's hold on the wheel. The REPUVE promises to change this by “delegating” policing duties to radio-frequency identification stickers affixed to vehicles and scanners placed on roadways. Rather than enforcing the law through corruptible humans sanctioning irresponsible drivers, the REPUVE opens the possibility of doing so through a “surveillant assemblage” denying roadway access to suspicious vehicles. In the REPUVE then, the automobile passes from a legal enactment device, a technology whose operation pushes users to enact the law, to a legal prescription device, a technology whose operation requires them to do so. By demonstrating the role of vehicular regulation in the “mutual becoming” of society and technology, this study contributes to the growing research on the intersection of law and technology and provides a glimpse into the changing nature of legal power in the contemporary state.

Conceptualizing Semi-Legality in Migration Research
Agnieszka Kubal

What is semi-legality, and why does it offer a viable alternative to the legality–illegality binary divide? Semi-legality, as a heuristic device, is useful to frame the various “in-between” statuses and not resorting to illegality every time ambiguities arise as this casts the net of potential fraud far too wide. It could be viewed as a multidimensional space where migrants' formal relationships with the state interact with their various forms of agency toward the law. As a sensitizing theoretical perspective, it helps to explain why many neoliberal regimes, which claim that law and order are the main features distinguishing them from others, actually engage in perpetuating the legally ambiguous modes of incorporation. Delineating the conditions of semi-legality, I use data from 360 qualitative interviews with migrants in four European countries. I discuss: (1) “incomplete” responses to regularization programs (amnesties) – de facto fulfilling the legalization conditions, yet facing barriers to formally (de jure) corroborate this; (2) balancing between the temporality of residence in various EU countries—under-staying in some and overstaying in others; and (3) the nexus with employment—where migrants' residence in a country is lawful, but their work exceeds the restrictions permitted by their visas.

When Do Laws Matter? National Minimum-Age-of-Marriage Laws, Child Rights, and Adolescent Fertility, 1989–2007
Minzee Kim, Wesley Longhofer, Elizabeth Heger Boyle and Hollie Nyseth Brehm

Using the case of adolescent fertility, we ask the questions of whether and when national laws have an effect on outcomes above and beyond the effects of international law and global organizing. To answer these questions, we utilize a fixed-effect time-series regression model to analyze the impact of minimum-age-of-marriage laws in 115 poor- and middle-income countries from 1989 to 2007. We find that countries with strict laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 experienced the most dramatic decline in rates of adolescent fertility. Trends in countries that set this age at 18 but allowed exceptions (for example, marriage with parental consent) were indistinguishable from countries that had no such minimum-age-of-marriage law. Thus, policies that adhere strictly to global norms are more likely to elicit desired outcomes. The article concludes with a discussion of what national law means in a diffuse global system where multiple actors and institutions make the independent effect of law difficult to identify.

The Privatization of Public Safety in Urban Neighborhoods: Do Business Improvement Districts Reduce Violent Crime Among Adolescents?
John MacDonald, Robert J. Stokes, Ben Grunwald and Ricky Bluthenthal

The business improvement district (BID) is a popular economic development and urban revitalization model in which local property and business owners must pay an assessment tax that funds supplementary services, including private security. BIDs constitute a controversial form of urban revitalization to some because they privatize economic development and public safety efforts in public space. This study examines whether BIDs provide tangible benefits beyond their immediate boundaries to local residents in the form of reduced violence among adolescents. The empirical analysis advances an existing literature dominated by evaluation studies by introducing a theoretically driven dataset with rich information on individual and neighborhood level variables. The analysis compares violent victimization among youths living in BID neighborhoods with those in similarly situated non-BID neighborhoods. We find no effect of BIDs on violence. However, we do find that youth violence is strongly correlated with neighborhood collective efficacy and family-related attributes of social control. In conclusion, we argue that BIDs may be an agent of crime reduction, but this benefit is likely concentrated only in their immediate boundaries and does not extend to youths living in surrounding neighborhoods.

Basketball in the Key of Law: The Significance of Disputing in Pick-Up Basketball
Michael DeLand

While the conception of law as a constructive and constitutive force is often stated, we have relatively few concrete and grounded case studies showing precisely where and how social actors construct the meaning of their engagements through the invocation of legality. Drawing on Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis (1974), I use the concept of “keying” to articulate how basketball players in informal “pick-up” games transform the meaning of their activity through disputing. By playing in a legalistic way, players constitute the game as “real” and “serious” rather than “mere play.” The analysis tracks basketball players in the heat of action as they perceive the game, call rule violations, contest those violations, and ultimately give up. Players organize each phase of the dispute's natural history in the “key of law” by constructing and comparing cases, invoking and interpreting rules, setting precedent, arguing over procedure, and proposing solutions. Through these practices, players infuse the game with rich meaning and generate the motivational context demanding that the game be treated as significant. This analysis contributes to an understanding of legal ontology that envisions law's essence as potentiating rather than repairing normative social life.

Criminology & Public Policy 12(1)

Criminology & Public Policy, February 2013: Volume 12, Issue 1

CIVIL GANG INJUNCTIONS

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Civil Gang Injunctions
Finn-Aage Esbensen

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Improving Civil Gang Injunctions
Karen M. Hennigan and David Sloane

POLICY ESSAYS
The Practicalities of Targeted Gang Interventions
Chris Melde

The Importance of Cohesion for Gang Research, Policy, and Practice
Andrew V. Papachristos

LONER ATTACKS AND DOMESTIC EXTREMISM

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Lone-Offender Terrorists
Gary LaFree

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Distinguishing “Loner” Attacks from Other Domestic Extremist Violence
Jeff Gruenewald, Steven Chermak and Joshua D. Freilich

POLICY ESSAYS
Disaggregating Terrorist Offenders: Implications for Research and Practice
Paul Gill and Emily Corner

Informing Lone-Offender Investigations
Randy Borum

DAY REPORTING CENTERS FOR PAROLEES

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Day Reporting Centers
Beth M. Huebner

RESEARCH ARTICLE
An Evaluation of Day Reporting Centers for Parolees
Douglas J. Boyle, Laura M. Ragusa-Salerno, Jennifer L. Lanterman and Andrea Fleisch Marcus

POLICY ESSAYS
What's Inside the “Black Box”?
Grant Duwe

Why Didn't They Work? Thoughts on the Application of New Jersey Day Reporting Centers
Benjamin Steiner and H. Daniel Butler

Using Day Reporting Centers to Divert Parolees from Revocation
Michael Ostermann

American Sociological Review 78(4)

American Sociological Review, August 2013: Volume 78, Issue 4

The Historical Nature of Cities: A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation
James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel

Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containing geospatial and organizational information on more than 2,800 hazardous manufacturing sites operating between 1956 and 2006 in Portland, Oregon. We pair these site data with historical data from the U.S. population census and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to examine the historical accumulation of hazardous parcels in relation to changing patterns of industrial land use, neighborhood composition, new residential development, and environmental regulation. Results indicate that historical accumulation of hazardous sites is scaling up in ways that exhibit little regard for shifting neighborhood demographics or existing regulatory policies as sites merge into larger, more contiguous industrialized areas of historically generated hazards, creating the environmental conditions of urban risk society.

Leading Associations: How Individual Characteristics and Team Dynamics Generate Committed Leaders
Matthew Baggetta, Hahrie Han, and Kenneth T. Andrews

Leaders make vital contributions to the survival and success of civic associations, but they vary widely in levels of commitment to those groups. Why are some leaders more committed than others? We draw from scholarship on civic participation, volunteering, social movements, and team management to develop an original explanation. Although theory suggests individual and organizational factors may explain differences, most prior empirical studies examine only individual-level hypotheses. We use data collected from 1,616 Sierra Club volunteer leaders and the 368 chapters and groups they led to conduct multilevel analyses of the determinants of behavioral commitment among leaders. At the individual level, we find that leaders with more applicable skills, available time, and aligned motivations are more committed to the organization. At the organizational level, we find that leaders whose organizations are more complex, and who are on teams that operate more interdependently, share work more equally, and devote smaller shares of time to meetings, are more committed. These findings have implications for scholars of leadership and commitment and for organizations seeking more committed leaders.

Deciding to Cross: Norms and Economics of Unauthorized Migration
Emily Ryo

Why are there so many unauthorized migrants in the United States? Using unique survey data collected in Mexico through the Mexican Migration Project, I develop and test a new decision-making model of unauthorized labor migration. The new model considers the economic motivations of prospective migrants, as well as their beliefs, attitudes, and social norms regarding U.S. immigration law and legal authorities. My findings show that perceptions of certainty of apprehension and severity of punishment are not significant determinants of the intent to migrate illegally; however, perceptions of availability of Mexican jobs and the dangers of border crossing are significant determinants of these intentions. In addition, individuals’ general legal attitudes, morality about violating U.S. immigration law, views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority, and norms about border crossing are significant determinants of the intent to migrate illegally. Perceptions of procedural justice are significantly related to beliefs in the legitimacy of U.S. authority, suggesting that, all else being equal, procedural fairness may produce greater deference to U.S. immigration law. Together, the results show that the decision to migrate illegally cannot be fully understood without considering an individual’s underlying values and norms.

Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities
Christopher J. Lyons, María B. Vélez, and Wayne A. Santoro

Using a multilevel comparative framework, we propose that politically receptive city contexts facilitate the viability of marginalized neighborhoods. To illustrate this proposition, we examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence. Drawing on political process and minority incorporation theories, we argue that favorable immigrant political opportunities will strengthen the often-found inverse relationship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level. Unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (Peterson and Krivo 2010a) provide demographic and violence information for Census tracts in a representative sample of 87 large cities. We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities, such as the extent of minority political incorporation into elected offices and pro-immigrant legislation. Multilevel instrumental variable analyses reveal that the inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violent crime is generally enhanced in cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities. We speculate that this occurs because favorable political contexts bolster social organization by enhancing trust and public social control within immigrant neighborhoods. Our findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across ethnicity and nativity are shaped by the responsiveness of political actors and structures to their concerns.

The Association of Social Class and Lifestyles: Persistence in American Sociability, 1974 to 2010
Ivaylo D. Petev

Despite the burgeoning research on lifestyles, we have surprisingly little evidence to answer one of the literature’s founding questions: Is the association between social class and lifestyles disappearing? I explore this inquiry with data from the past four decades. In analyzing the class-lifestyle association, I examine changes in the variability of lifestyles within and between social classes. Using data from the General Social Survey on informal social ties and formal membership ties to voluntary associations, I derive proxies for lifestyles and examine their relation to social class with latent class models. Results show that social classes’ contemporary sociability patterns are substantively similar to traditional descriptions from empirical studies on analogous data from as early as the mid-twentieth century. The association between social classes and sociability patterns shows no sign of having weakened over the past four decades. In fact, recent trends of civic disengagement and social isolation in contemporary U.S. society, which these data corroborate, reinforce class differences in sociability.

The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility: Evidence from British Birth Cohort Studies
Tak Wing Chan and Vikki Boliver

Using data from three British birth cohort studies, we examine patterns of social mobility over three generations of family members. For both men and women, absolute mobility rates (i.e., total, upward, downward, and outflow mobility rates) in the partial parents-children mobility tables vary substantially by grandparents’ social class. In terms of relative mobility patterns, we find a statistically significant association between grandparents’ and grandchildren’s class positions, after parents’ social class is taken into account. The net grandparents-grandchildren association can be summarized by a single uniform association parameter. Net of parents’ social class, the odds of grandchildren entering the professional-managerial class rather than the unskilled manual class are at least two and a half times better if the grandparents were themselves in professional-managerial rather than unskilled manual-class positions. This grandparents effect in social mobility persists even when parents’ education, income, and wealth are taken into account.

Pathways to Empowerment: Repertoires of Women’s Activism and Gender Earnings Equality
Maria Akchurin and Cheol-Sung Lee

This article examines how different repertoires of women’s activism influence gender earnings equality across countries. We develop a typology of three forms of mobilization—professionalized women’s activism, labor women’s activism, and women’s activism in popular movements—emphasizing distinct actors, patterns of claims-making, and inter-organizational ties among women’s organizations and other civil society groups in multi-organizational fields. Based on data on membership and co-membership ties built using World Values Surveys, we test the effects of different repertoires of women’s activism on earnings equality between women and men in 51 countries. We also consider a gendered development model and the role of welfare states as main explanatory variables in accounting for the gap in earnings. Our findings suggest that even in the presence of these alternative explanations, women’s activism matters. Furthermore, women’s organizations with access to institutional politics, through either direct advocacy or ties to unions or professional associations, have had the most success in promoting gender earnings equality. Our research contributes to prior work on social movement outcomes by conceptualizing women’s mobilization in the context of fields and further testing its effects on distributional outcomes in a comparative perspective.

Conditional Decoupling: Assessing the Impact of National Human Rights Institutions, 1981 to 2004
Wade M. Cole and Francisco O. Ramirez

National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation. Our first main finding is that all types of human rights institutions improve long-term physical integrity outcomes but not civil and political rights practices. This finding may reflect a greater worldwide focus on physical integrity violations such as torture, and also many countries’ propensity to resist Western civil and political rights standards. A second main finding is that time matters: in the cases we observe, initial increases in rated abuse levels were followed by improvements. These initial increases may be due to closer scrutiny or the expanded scope of what constitutes human rights abuses. Our results call for rethinking the concept of decoupling in the sociology of human rights and other focal areas.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 649

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, August 2013: Volume 649

Introduction

Organizational Challenges to Regulatory Enforcement and Compliance: A New Common Sense about Regulation
Susan S. Silbey

Framing and Interpreting the Regulatory Enterprise

Self-Regulation in the Regulatory Void: "Blue Moon"or "Bad Moon"?
Jodi L. Short

Three Risks, One Solution? Exploring the Relationship between Risk and Regulation
Fiona Haines

Voting with Your Fork? Industrial Free-Range Eggs and the Regulatory Construction of Consumer Choice
Christine Parker

The Scale, Circulation, and Connections among Contemporary Regulations

Innovation-Framing Regulation
Cristie Ford

Regulating Performance-Enhancing Technologies: A Comparison of Professional Cycling and Derivatives Trading
Nancy Reichman and Ophir Sefiha

Looking Within the Regulated Firms and Organizations

Enforcing Food Quality and Safety Standards in Brazil: The Case of COBRACANA
Salo Coslovsky

Resilience in the Middle: Contributions of Regulated Organizations to Regulatory Success
Carol A. Heimer

Constructing Consequences for Noncompliance: The Case of Academic Laboratories
Ruthanne Huising and Susan S. Silbey

Commentary

Is Democratic Regulation of High Finance Possible?
Matthew Desmond

Social Problems 60(3)

Social Problems, August 2013: Volume 60, Issue 3

New Jobs, New Workers, and New Inequalities: Explaining Employers' Roles in Occupational Segregation by Nativity and Race
Jill Lindsey Harrison and Sarah E. Lloyd

While sociologists have shown how employers contribute to occupational segregation along lines of race, gender, and nativity, little attention has been paid to unpacking why employers engage in those practices. We take on this gap through a case study of hired labor relations on Wisconsin dairy farms, which have become segregated along lines of nativity and race in recent years. We ask how these workplaces have become segregated, what employers' roles in this process have been, and why, in particular, employers have engaged in practices that contribute to workplace inequalities. We find that employers engage in practices that leave immigrant workers clustered in the low-end jobs for a complex array of reasons: to maintain profits within a changing industry context, meet their own middle-class aspirations, comply with their peers' middle-class lifestyle expectations, manage their own concerns about immigration policing, assert their own class identity, justify the privileges that they and their U.S.-born employees enjoy on the farm, and maintain the advantages they have gained. We argue that sociologists seeking to explain employers' roles in occupational segregation must examine not only the stories employers tell about different worker groups but also the stories they tell about themselves and the contexts that shape their aspirations and identities. Doing so provides more complete explanations for why occupational segregation occurs and does the important work of bringing whiteness into the spotlight and showing how privilege is quietly constructed and defended.

Constructing the Model Immigrant: Movement Strategy and Immigrant Deservingness in the New Sanctuary Movement
Grace Yukich

The model minority stereotype has been widely criticized for creating distinctions between racial groups by depicting some as more deserving than others. Immigration scholars have begun exploring similar distinctions among immigrant groups, with most research highlighting the role of anti-immigrant forces, the media, and policymakers in constructing divisions. Ethnographic research on the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of interfaith immigrant rights organizations, reveals that pro-immigrant activists also construct distinctions between “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants. Building on frame alignment theory, which often focuses on movement discourse, I use a dramaturgical approach to highlight the nonrhetorical framing practices involved in creating these distinctions: in particular, the casting of select members of stigmatized groups and their public and visual association with more powerful actors. Through a type of frame transformation I call the model movement strategy—the use of model cases to challenge negative stereotypes of members of disadvantaged groups—New Sanctuary activists drew distinctions between model immigrants and those who did not share their dominant-friendly characteristics, implicitly portraying certain undocumented immigrants as less deserving of legal residency and citizenship. These findings suggest that the model movement strategy, an approach used by a variety of contemporary social movements, may have insidious consequences for the most vulnerable movement constituents.

Economy and Disability: Labor Market Conditions and the Disability of Working-Age Individuals
Rourke L. O'Brien

Previous work on the link between macroeconomic conditions and disability has focused almost exclusively on changes in applications for disability benefit programs, not changes in individuals' self-perceived disability status. This article demonstrates that macroeconomic conditions may influence disability through a direct disabling pathway that is distinct from the reservation wage pathway highlighted in previous analyses of disability assistance. State-level analyses using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1982–2006 reveal a robust inverse relationship between state GDP per capita and disability among the working-age population. Analyses using individual-level data from the 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) find that currently employed persons are more likely to report a disability if they reside in a local area with higher unemployment rates and that this association exists across levels of education; and finally, a lagged regression model analyzing change in local unemployment from 2008 to 2009, the first year of the “Great Recession,” finds that an increase in local area unemployment in one year is associated with an increased self-reported disability rate among currently employed workers in the next year. Findings have implications for understanding how macroeconomic downturns influence perceptions of disability and how structural conditions shape individual identity more broadly.

Delinquency as a Consequence of Misperception: Overestimation of Friends' Delinquent Behavior and Mechanisms of Social Influence
Jacob T. N. Young and Frank M. Weerman

This article examines how actors' perceptions of other people's behavior may be exaggerated and how this inaccuracy may influence behavior. More specifically, we apply these issues to improve our understanding of the correlation between delinquency of friends and individual delinquency. This relationship is one of the most replicated findings in the social sciences. However, research has not distinguished misperceptions of friends' behavior from actual behavior of friends, leaving two empirical questions unanswered. First, why do youth overestimate their friends' level of delinquency? Second, does overestimation of friends' delinquency influence one's own delinquency? We examine these questions using data from two waves of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) School Project. These data include self-reports by school friends of their own delinquent behavior, as well as respondents' estimates of their friends' behavior, making them uniquely equipped to calculate how much respondents exaggerate the behavior of their school friends and to investigate the determinants and consequences of this overestimation. Findings indicate that youth who engage in delinquency, have attitudes supporting delinquency, and experience peer pressure are more likely to exaggerate the prevalence of delinquency in their friendship network. Also, overestimating friends' delinquency leads to more delinquency in a subsequent wave, net of actual delinquency of friends and individual and situational characteristics. Overestimating friends' delinquency has the strongest effect on individuals who value social approval, are unpopular in their school, and experience peer pressure from their friends. We conclude by discussing avenues for future research.

Does Violence toward Others Affect Violence toward Oneself? Examining the Direct and Moderating Effects of Violence on Suicidal Behavior
Gregory M. Zimmerman

Although interpersonal violence and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans, analyses focusing simultaneously on violence and suicide in sociological inquiry are sparse. Analyses also tend to be limited by their focus on either the individual-level predictors of suicidal behaviors or the aggregate-level predictors of suicide rates, despite the recognition that psychological and sociological forces contribute independently as well as interactively to facilitate suicide. To address these issues, I use data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) to examine the direct and moderating effects of individual- and neighborhood-level violence on attempted suicide. Estimates from hierarchical logistic regression models indicate that individual acts of violent aggression, but not neighborhood levels of violence, increase the likelihood of attempting suicide. Furthermore, the well-established relationship between depression and attempted suicide is conditioned by individual- and neighborhood-level violence, such that the effect of depression is (1) amplified for individuals living in neighborhoods characterized by violence and (2) attenuated for individuals engaging in violent behavior. Finally, the combined effect of neighborhood violence and individual violent aggression on the depression/suicide relationship is greater than the partial moderating effects of these variables.

The Role of Perceptions of the Police in Informal Social Control:
Implications for the Racial Stratification of Crime and Control
Kevin M. Drakulich and Robert D. Crutchfield

Recent research has established the importance of informal social control to a variety of aspects of neighborhood life, including the prevalence of crime. This work has described informal social control as rooted in a neighborhood's structural and social context, but has less frequently explored the interconnections between informal and formal social control efforts. Drawing on data from Seattle, this article suggests that perceptions of formal social control—specifically perceptions of police procedural injustice and police efficacy—directly influence both individual evaluations of informal social control efforts as well as neighborhood capacities for informal social control. We suggest a pragmatic mechanism to explain this relationship—that low evaluations of the police will influence perceptions of the effectiveness of and costs associated with informal social control efforts—and we control for alternative cultural explanations related to the desirability of social control. Most strikingly, we find that strong racial disparities in faith in the police help explain why neighborhoods with larger race-ethnic minority populations have lower capacities for informal social control. We conclude with a discussion of emerging accounts of the role of culture in local organizational processes and of the larger social implications of the race-ethnic stratification of perceptions of the police.

Theoretical Criminology 17(3)

Theoretical Criminology, August 2013: Volume 17, Issue 3

Power to the people: Violent victimization, inequality and democratic politics
Lisa L Miller

Contemporary scholarship on punishment, politics and society generally treats democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix. In this view, when crime comes onto democratic political agendas, it generates perverse political incentives that result in politicians pandering to and/or manipulating mass publics bent on harsh punishment. In this article, I argue that an examination of violent victimization complicates this conventional wisdom. Using violence as a framework, I challenge three fundamental assumptions about the relationship between democracy and crime. From there, I suggest how different democratic institutional arrangements might facilitate broader public participation in crime politics, and how that participation can lead to promoting less, rather than more punishment.

‘This is your face on meth’: The punitive spectacle of ‘white trash’ in the rural war on drugs
Travis Linnemann and Tyler Wall

This article engages the dynamic role of the crime image and more specifically the mug shot, in a contemporary anti-methamphetamine media campaign known as ‘Faces of Meth’. Understood here as a pedagogical policing program, Faces of Meth attempts to deter methamphetamine use through graphic ‘before meth’ and ‘after meth’ images of the faces of white meth users. Our objective is not to evaluate the actual effectiveness of these fear appeals. Rather we discuss how the photographs are largely structured by and embedded within already existing cultural anxieties about the figure of ‘white trash’, reflecting both the dominance and precariousness of white social position.

Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
Mona Lynch, Marisa Omori, Aaron Roussell, and Matthew Valasik

This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how historically embedded local politics shape the varied styles and structures of policing that result in racially discriminatory enforcement patterns. Our goal is to begin sketching out a robust framework of ‘place’ as an orientation for examining discretionary local policing practices, especially as they impact marginalized groups and communities of color.

Beware of notarios: Neoliberal governance of immigrants as crime victims
Jamie G Longazel and Benjamin Fleury-Steiner

Drawing on David Garland’s (1996, 2001) observations about the ‘limits of the sovereign state’, we seek in this article to develop a critical understanding of the recent response in the USA to ‘notario fraud’—an unlawful act committed when a non-lawyer poses as an immigration attorney. While efforts to protect immigrants from fraud on their surface represent a counter to recent anti-immigrant policies, our analysis of materials distributed by what we term an anti-notario fraud apparatus suggests that such activity amounts to neoliberal governance. Specifically, we study immigrant advocacy groups’ discourse around the issue and argue that anti-notario efforts are akin to responsibilization. We also study how law enforcement officials discuss the issue and theorize how a one-dimensional framing of notarios as villains supports the neoliberal regime by protecting the state’s sovereignty to manufacture what Nicholas De Genova (2002) has called ‘deportability’.

Asserting criminality and denying migrant belonging: The production of deportability in US judicial court hearings
Clare Newstead and Giovanna Maria Frisso

Recent interest in the securitization of immigration has highlighted a significant shift in immigration enforcement, from border regulation to the control of territorially present populations. Emphasis has focused on the production of migrant illegality and strategies that criminalize undocumented workers. In this article, we shift the focus of analysis to examine how legal residents convicted of non-immigration-related criminal offences are also actively produced as deportable subjects. Drawing on research examining records of appeal cases involving Jamaican nationals in removal proceedings consequent to a criminal conviction, we illustrate how deportability is produced by the deportation process itself, through legal practices that assert migrant criminality and alienage. We suggest ‘criminality’ not only comes to represent migrant subjectivity, at the expense of other forms of subjectivity based on belonging and territorial presences, but acts as affirmation of alienage.

A new risk management for prisoners in France: The emergence of a death-avoidance approach
Gaëtan Cliquennois and Brice Champetier

A new punitive approach in the French prison sector has emerged as a result of the European Court of Human Rights and the French administrative courts exerting pressure on prison governors in response to the complaints made by prisoners’ families, the demands of human rights groups and the requirements of human rights protection bodies. By publicizing cases of suicide and using strategic litigation based on the right to life, human rights groups and barristers have put the prison administration under pressure. The resultant risk management policy and death-avoidance approach are not linked to the decline of the welfare state, as claimed by new penology scholars, but rather to a shared risk management thinking between the prison administration and human rights groups.

British Journal of Criminology 53(5)

British Journal of Criminology, September 2013: Volume 53, Issue 5

Crime and Economic Downturn: The Complexity of Crime and Crime Politics in Greece since 2009
Sappho Xenakis and Leonidas K. Cheliotis

Description and explanation of the relationship between economic downturn and crime have to date been limited by the narrow scope of criminal activity characteristically selected as a focus by pertinent criminological scholarship. Efforts to examine the relationship have overwhelmingly approached it through the prism of common property and violent offences, or, and to a lesser degree, white-collar crime. As a consequence, appreciation has been impeded of the existence and heightened political significance of diverse and complex connections between a wider array of forms of criminality during times of economic downturn. To demonstrate the value of such connections to the study of the relationship between economic downturn and crime, we draw on the contemporary experience of crisis-hit Greece, where the political importance of associations between corruption, common property and violent offences, and illicit political violence, has made them indispensable components of any account of the linkages between economic downturn and crime in the Greek context.

The Myths and Realities of Deterrence in Workplace Safety Regulation
Steve Tombs and David Whyte

Given the proliferation of the use of deterrence in neo-liberal crime control policies, it is remarkable that this concept remains absent from the study and practice of corporate regulation. The paper explores this absence in the regulation literature, highlighting a series of widely accepted myths about deterrence in this literature, myths that have also been reproduced in British policy debates. Having discussed the enduring, if hidden, adherence to deterrence across this literature, we then go on to discuss the significant absences of deterrence and, in doing so, we focus specifically upon the dynamics of law enforcement, as it applies in the case of UK workplace health and safety law. The paper concludes that only through a careful consideration of the politics and praxis of law enforcement can we adequately grasp the context of the regulation of workplace safety—what the proper place of deterrence is and how it might be better secured.

Combating The Kidney Commerce: Civil Society against Organ Trafficking in Pakistan and Israel
Asif Efrat

Can civil society bring governments to curb transnational crime? The article answers this question by analysing a most-likely case for civil-society influence: organ trafficking. Physicians’ efforts to eliminate this practice are examined in Pakistan and Israel: two major participants in the global organ trade. In both countries, the physicians’ pressure resulted in the enactment of organ-trade prohibitions. These, however, were not fully enforced. The analysis suggests that, even under favourable conditions, civil society’s impact on transnational-crime policies is limited, yet not inconsequential: Pakistan’s involvement in organ trafficking, and even more so Israel’s, has declined. Beyond its contribution to understanding civil society’s role in the criminalization process, the article sheds light on the hitherto little-studied politics of the organ trade.

A Social Resistance Perspective For Delinquent Bahavior Among Non-Dominant Minority Groups
Roni Factor, David Mahalel, Anat Rafaeli, and David R. Williams

Non-dominant minorities, compared with majority groups, often have greater engagement in risky and delinquent behaviours. This study develops an innovative theoretical model for understanding risky/delinquent behaviour among non-dominant groups based on the social resistance framework, which suggests that power relations within society bring non-dominant minorities to actively engage in various forms of everyday resistance that can include delinquent behaviours. We tested this model on traffic violations, surveying 1,060 non-dominant and majority drivers in Israel. Structural equation models suggest that different mechanisms underlie delinquent behaviours in the two groups: social resistance plays a direct role in traffic violations among non-dominants, while, for the majority, procedural justice and non-commitment to the law have a stronger impact. Implications for understanding delinquent and risky behaviour and as an extension of the well-known procedural justice model are discussed.

Reflections on Risk, Anti-Social Behaviour and Vulnerable/Repeat Victims
Jane Donoghue

This article theorizes the adoption of risk assessment practices to inform criminal justice responses to ‘vulnerable’ and repeat victims of anti-social behaviour. Evidence suggests that some police forces have become highly risk-averse which has had consequences for the way in which minor incivilities have come to be viewed as perpetually requiring a formal police response. However, the development of victim risk assessment has also been very effective in enabling agencies to determine ‘high-risk’ victims with clarity and speed. It is argued that, rather than viewing risk in hegemonic terms, more attention ought to be given to conceptualizing risk in terms of the new opportunities it presents not simply for refining and improving the delivery of services, but also for the ways in which risk enables victims to develop new parameters of victimhood, and to subvert the traditional dominance of politics/policy in acting as primary definers on understanding(s) and accepted knowledge(s) of victimization and vulnerability.

‘Undoing’ Gender and the Production of Insecurity and Fear
Prashan Ranasinghe

While criminology has provided a wealth of knowledge about security and fear, it is hindered by a particular limitation, namely the failure to explore and explicate the manner in which space and place are crucial to their production and constitution. This paper seeks to highlight the importance of this line of inquiry for criminological analyses and does so by exploring and explicating the manner in which employees at an emergency shelter make sense of their (in)security and fear (or lack thereof) in their daily work lives. Attention is cast on the manner in which ‘(un)doing’ gender—biography being an important aspect in such thinking and acting—sheds light on the ways that the employees make sense of (in)security and fear and the ways that these feelings are informed by particular norms of security and fear that are inscribed into the space itself.

A Macro-Micro Integrated Theoretical Model of Mass Participation in Genocide
Olaoluwa Olusanya

Can general criminological theories of crime explain mass participation in genocide? Can seemingly conflicting theories be reconciled? And, if so, how? Only a small number of studies have attempted to explore the application of general criminological theories to international crimes. Also, there have been few attempts to integrate micro-level theories with macro-level theories. In this paper, I propose a macro–micro integrated theoretical model of mass participation in genocide. The proposed framework combines micro (e.g. social control theories) and macrolevel theories (e.g. strain theories), thereby recognizing that no single factor can explain people’s involvement in genocidal violence perpetration. Finally, the central element of my conceptual framework is the notion of cognitive dissonance (CD). I contend that CD can act as a structuring concept which allows for the development of a comprehensive criminological explanation for mass participation in genocide.

A Framework to Assess the Harms of Crimes
Victoria A. Greenfield and Letizia Paoli

Despite the centrality of harm to crime and criminalization and increasing interest in harm as a basis for crime-control policy, the criminological community has yet done little to systematically reflect on criminal harms or their identification, evaluation and comparison. This paper presents a newly developed framework with which to systematize the empirical assessment of such harms and address at least some of the attendant conceptual and technical challenges. It also suggests several roles for the framework in policy making. Our conclusions are twofold: it is possible to reliably evaluate the harms of criminal activities, as our examples suggest, but it is not possible—for both conceptual and technical reasons—to develop an encompassing estimate of the total harms of these activities.

Seeking ‘Civilianness’: Police Complaints and the Civilian Control Model of Oversight
Stephen P. Savage

The ‘civilian control’ model of police complaints systems is premised on a clear separation between ‘civilian-led’ and ‘police-led’ investigative processes. This paper examines the nature of ‘civilianness’ in civilian control-based oversight agencies by examining the cultural profiles and internal dynamics of three police oversight bodies within the British and Irish islands. Based on over 100 interviews, it presents findings relating to the motivations behind oversight work and the dynamics associated with the joint workings of investigators with both non-police and police backgrounds. It concludes that civilian control may be seen as a differentiated space with varying degrees of civilianness, including remnants from and continuities with police culture.

Social Disorganization and Crime in Rural Communities: The First Direct Test of the Systemic Model
Maria T. Kaylen and William Alex Pridemore

While there is considerable empirical evidence that social disorganization is positively associated with crime rates in urban areas, the empirical literature on rural social disorganization and crime faces three crucial limitations: inconsistent results, reliance on official crime statistics and the failure to test the full model. We overcome the two latter limitations via the British Crime Survey. Using data from respondents living in rural areas of 318 postcode sectors, we employed weighted least squares regression to estimate the effects of (1) the exogenous sources of social disorganization on our intervening measures of community organization and (2) all variables on victimization rates. This represents the first test of the full social disorganization model in the literature on rural crime and we find very little support for it. Our results suggest a reassessment of the conclusions drawn about how social disorganization and crime are related in rural communities.

Unintended Consequences of Neighbourhood Restructuring: Uncertainty, Disrupted Social Networks and Increased Fear of Violent Victimization Among Young Adults
Sara K. Thompson, Sandra M. Bucerius, and Mark Luguya

Concerns about high concentrations of poverty, social isolation and neighbourhood safety have made social housing developments the target of various interventions in recent decades. A current housing policy trend in many Western nations aims to de-concentrate poverty and other forms of disadvantage by engineering more socio-economically mixed residential environments. Based on 40 in-depth interviews, this paper examines the impact of neighbourhood ‘revitalization’ on young adult residents of Regent Park, Canada’s largest and oldest social housing project. We find that the large-scale displacement that attends this process has destabilizing effects on the neighbourhood, both in terms of social networks and supports, but also with respect to young people’s perceptions of their risk of violent victimization.

Social Disorganization, Social Capital, Collective Efficacy and the Spatial Distribution of Crime and Offenders: An Empirical Test of Six Neighbourhood Models for a Dutch City
Gerben J. N. Bruinsma, Lieven J. R. Pauwels, Frank M. Weerman, and Wim Bernasco

Six different social disorganization models of neighbourhood crime and offender rates were tested using data from multiple sources in the city of The Hague, in the Netherlands. The sources included a community survey among 3,575 residents in 86 neighbourhoods measuring the central concepts of the six models. The data were aggregated to ecologically reliable neighbourhood measures and combined with census data. Crime rates and offender rates were calculated on geo-coded police-recorded data on crimes and apprehended suspects. Spatial regression models were applied to test social disorganization theories in a Western-European city. The findings reveal that social disorganization models do not fit the data well, and indicate that crime rates and offender rates may be caused by distinct urban processes.