Crime & Delinquency 60(2)

Crime & Delinquency, March 2014: Volume 60, Issue 2

An Analysis of Prisoner Reentry and Parole Risk Using COMPAS and Traditional Criminal History Measures
Sheldon X. Zhang, Robert E. L. Roberts, and David Farabee

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has adopted Correctional Offender Management and Profiling Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), an actuarial risk- and needs-assessment instrument, as part of its reentry supervision and parole planning procedure. A large-scale 3-year prospective study was conducted to assess the instrument with regard to how well it predicted whether a parolee would be rearrested for (a) any crime and (b) a violent offense. This study followed, for up to 2 years, a total of 91,334 parolees who had been assessed with COMPAS prior to reentry into the community. The instrument achieved an acceptable level of predictive validity in general rearrests with an area under the curve value of 0.70, but its predictive power for subsequent violent offenses fell short of this conventional threshold. Moreover, a parsimonious model using four known risk factors from existing official records (i.e., gender, age, age of first arrest, and the number of prior arrests) performed just as well in predicting subsequent arrests. Findings from this study illustrate the challenges in applying group-based attributes to predict individual criminal behavior and suggest that, although COMPAS has other attractive features such as case management capability, existing official records may offer a lower cost alternative for assessing the risk of reoffending for community reentry purposes.

Preentry Substance Abuse Services: The Heterogeneity of Offender Experiences
Philip R. Magaletta, Pamela M. Diamond, Beth M. Weinman, Ashley Burnell, and Carl G. Leukefeld

Surprisingly little is known about the types of substance abuse services offenders receive prior to incarceration and the differences in demographics, criminality and drug involvement between those who received services and those who did not. This study provides estimates of these substance abuse services—treatment, self-help, and psycho education—received by federal offenders before their commitment to the Bureau of Prisons. Estimates indicate that among newly committed offenders, nearly one third (30%) received substance abuse services. Offense category, prior records and histories of violence each predicted service receipt. Also, offenders involved with drugs before incarceration were more likely to have received services as well, but those who used both drugs and alcohol prior to their most recent arrest were much more likely to have received services. Interestingly, gender was only significant when predicting inpatient substance abuse treatment services. Recommendations for training, research, and practice are made.

Reactive Versus Proactive Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence: A Comparison of Taiwanese Male and Female Police Officers
Doris C. Chu and Ivan Y. Sun

Although there has been a growing research interest in examining factors associated with police arrest decisions and victims’ perceptions of the police in handling domestic violence, very few studies have empirically assessed female and male officers’ attitudes toward domestic violence. Using survey data collected from 272 male and female officers from two metropolitan police departments in Taiwan, this research compared male and female police officers’ reactive and proactive attitudes toward handling domestic violence incidents. The findings indicated that male officers were more likely than female officers to support minimum police involvement and to tolerate domestic violence. With regard to proactive attitudes, there was no significant gender difference in officers’ endorsement of proarrest policy and the importance of domestic violence in police work. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Evidence-Based Prosecution of Intimate Partner Violence in the Post-Crawford Era: A Single-City Study of the Factors Leading to Prosecution
Jill Theresa Messing

The Crawford v. Washington decision has prompted changes in the way that intimate partner violence (IPV) is prosecuted. This research uses logistic regression to examine the victim, offender, and offense characteristics associated with the decision to prosecute a sample (N = 904) of domestic violence arrestees under an evidence-based prosecution strategy post-Crawford. Documentation of injury and police taking the perpetrator into custody at the scene of the crime have the greatest effect on the decision to prosecute, although the victim’s willingness to assist with prosecution is also a significant factor. Future researchers should seek to replicate these findings, better understand current prosecution strategies, and determine the criminal justice and social service interventions best equipped to combat IPV in the post-Crawford era.

Examining Diffusion and Arrest Avoidance Practices Among Johns
Thomas J. Holt, Kristie R. Blevins, and Joseph B. Kuhns

Research from the rational choice perspective found that some offenders adapt to law enforcement strategies using various tactics to decrease the risk of detection. Few have considered the effect that this has for criminals who engage in high and low visibility offending, as well as the ways in which arrest avoidance practices are communicated between and among offenders. In this qualitative study, the authors explore these issues using a sample of posts from Web forums for the customers of prostitutes in 10 cities in the United States. This analysis finds that johns openly discussed, shared, and used a variety of methods to decrease the risk of arrest as well as informal threats, such as assault or theft. Implications for law enforcement and rational choice theory are also discussed.

Morality, Self-Control, Deterrence, and Drug Use: Street Youths and Situational Action Theory
Owen Gallupe and Stephen W. Baron

Utilizing a sample of homeless street youth, the authors apply Wikström’s situational action theory (SAT) to explaining drug use. The article examines the assertion that morality is the most important factor in explaining crime and that self-control and deterrence are key factors in understanding criminal behavior only at moderate levels of morality. Results reveal that morality has a strong effect on hard but not soft drug use, whereas the impact of deterrence on both forms of behavior is stronger than self-control. The proposed conditioning effects outlined in SAT do not have significant associations with drug use. Implications for the theory and avenues for future research are offered.

Adjusting for Design Effects in Disproportionate Stratified Sampling Designs Through Weighting
Paul E. Tracy and Danielle Marie Carkin

This article validates the necessity of adjusting for the design effects in disproportionate stratified sampling designs through the use of sample weights. Using data from the 1958 Birth Cohort study, we demonstrate that complex sampling designs introduce sampling error and even sampling bias into sample data. Such sample data are a poor representation of population parameters. These design effects can be addressed through the application of sample weights.

Critical Criminology 22(1)

Critical Criminology, March 2014: Volume 22, Issue 1

Introduction to the Special Issue on Queer/ing Criminology: New Directions and Frameworks
Matthew Ball, Carrie L. Buist & Jordan Blair Woods

Queer Contestations and the Future of a Critical “Queer” Criminology
Jordan Blair Woods

It is intuitive to include critical criminologists in early conversations about “queering” criminology given that the paradigms and methods of critical criminology can be employed to challenge subordination and inequality in its several dimensions. The first part (and main focus) of this article problematizes this intuition, which is easy to accept at face value, by reflecting backwards and explaining how early influential critical criminological views perpetuated damaging stereotypes and representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people as sexual deviants. The second part reflects forward, and discusses the difficulties of carving a space in the discipline for critical queer perspectives. Drawing on critical and critical race theories, this article advocates a relational, intersectional approach to conceptualize sexual orientation and gender identity in criminological theory and research. This approach considers the connections among sexual orientation or gender identity and other differences (e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, gender, etc.) without assuming or attaching fixed meanings to those differences.

Queer Criminology, Critique, and the “Art of Not Being Governed”
Matthew Ball

This article builds on previous work that argues that a useful path for a “queer/ed criminology” to follow is one that takes “queer” to denote a position. It suggests that one way of developing such an approach is to adopt a particular understanding of critique—specifically one that draws from Michel Foucault’s view of critique as “the art of not being governed.” It then charts some of the possible directions for such a “queer/ed criminology.” While such an approach to critique has previously been discussed within critical criminologies, this article suggests that it is useful for queer criminologists to explore the opportunities that it affords, particularly in order to better appreciate how “queer/ed criminology” might connect to, draw from, or push against other currents among critical criminologies, and help to delineate the unique contribution that this kind of “queer/ed criminology” might make.

Transgender Victims and Offenders: Failures of the United States Criminal Justice System and the Necessity of Queer Criminology
Carrie L. Buist & Codie Stone

The purpose of this article is to highlight the experiences of transgender people within the criminal justice system as both victims and offenders. We contend that queer criminology is both needed and can assist in exploring the experiences of this unique population who face discrimination within the US criminal justice system and who are often ignored within criminological research. The article will provide an overview of transgender people’s general experiences within the criminal justice system and explore influences of cultural stereotypes about transgender people by examining the cases of three transgender victims of violence—Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo, and Cece McDonald. This article highlights the importance of concepts such as sex, gender, transpanic, transphobia, victim-blaming, and the responses by key players in the criminal justice system (police, courts, and corrections) to transgender victims and offenders.

“I Don’t Know Where it is Safe”: Trans Women’s Experiences of Violence
Barbara Perry & D. Ryan Dyck

Scholars are only beginning to take account of how trans people experience violence motivated by their gender identity and expression. Based on a series of focus groups and interviews across Canada, this article aims to further this area of inquiry. The fear of victimization, and thus hyper-vigilance, seems to be particularly acute among trans women. Many of them spoke of the multiple and complex layers through which they defined “safety” and lack thereof. We share their experiences and perceptions of the threat of hate motivated violence, and their subsequent reactions.

“We’re Not Like These Weird Feather Boa-Covered AIDS-Spreading Monsters”: How LGBT Young People and Service Providers Think Riskiness Informs LGBT Youth–Police Interactions
Angela Dwyer

Research has suggested that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people are “at-risk” of victimization and/or legally “risky.” Relatively few studies have examined the social construction of risk in “risk factor” research and whether risk as a concept influences the everyday lives of LGBT young people. This article reports how 35 LGBT young people and seven service provider staff in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia perceived LGBT youth–police interactions as reflecting discourses about LGBT riskiness and danger. The participants specifically note how they thought looking at-risk and/or looking risky informed their policing experiences. The article concludes with recommendations for improving future policing practice.

Accounting for Space, Place and Identity: GLBTIQ Young Adults’ Experiences and Understandings of Unwanted Sexual Attention in Clubs and Pubs
Bianca Fileborn

This article considers the role of space, place and identity in influencing gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) young adults’ experiences of unwanted sexual attention in licensed venues. It is argued in this article that the roles of space, place and identity are largely absent from theoretical understandings of sexual violence. Gender-based accounts of sexual violence, while important, are unable to fully account for sexual violence that is perpetrated within and against GLBTIQ communities. Drawing on data obtained through a mixed-methods study, in the first half of the article I establish the manner in which GLBTIQ young adults’ unique relationship with licensed venues appears to mediate the ways in which unwanted sexual attention occurring in these spaces is experienced and understood. The second half of this article is concerned with exploring the intersections between unwanted sexual attention and heterosexist violence and abuse in clubs and pubs. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for theoretical understandings of sexual violence and unwanted sexual attention.

Better Left Unsaid? The Role of Agency in Queer Criminological Research
Vanessa R. Panfil

In this article, I review the scant literature on gay men’s involvement in violence, gangs, and crime, which characterizes gay men as having little opportunity for agency. In discussing the popular culture, academic, and political reasons why this population has been neglected from study, I identify existing stereotypes that have shaped representations of gay men. I challenge our societal and disciplinary assumptions by presenting examples from my interview-based and partially ethnographic study of 53 gay gang- and crime-involved men, who both respond to and actively resist stereotypes about them. I also critically reflect on whether a continued lack of attention to queer populations in the criminological and related literatures is desirable today, but conclude the article by providing suggestions for scholars looking to conduct research with LGBT populations, especially within criminology and criminal justice.

Resisting Hate Crime Discourse: Queer and Intersectional Challenges to Neoliberal Hate Crime Laws
Doug Meyer

Hate crime laws have reinforced neoliberalism by expanding police and prosecutorial power, adding to the rapid expansion of incarcerated populations. Further, hate crime discourse associates anti-queer violence with notions of “stranger danger,” and thereby reproduces problematic race and social class politics in which an innocent, implicitly middle-class, person is suddenly and randomly attacked by a hateful, implicitly low-income, person. Thus, the author argues that queer and intersectional resistance should reject hate crime discourse and, instead, focus on the experiences of marginalized lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. By doing so, scholarship and activism concerned with reducing anti-queer violence can benefit a wide range of LGBT people without reinforcing inequalities based on race and social class.

Queering State Crime Theory: The State, Civil Society and Marginalization
Cara Gledhill

This article argues that criminology desperately needs to look at the ways in which states marginalize and persecute lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer (LGBTQ) identities. It critically examines the ways in which states reproduce hegemonic dictates that privilege those who adhere to gendered heterosexual norms over all others. This article further considers how the application of state crime theories, in particular Michalowski’s (State crime in the global age, pp. 13–30, Devon, Willan, 2010) tripartite framework, might further foreground the responsibility of the state in protecting LGBTQ identities. Examples of how this framework could be applied are given, with the case study of criminalization of same sex relations being focused on in depth. The article concludes by positing four key points to be considered in any analysis that attempts to critique the role of the state in the perpetuation of heterosexual hegemony.

“Delinquent Boys”: Toward a New Understanding of “Deviant” and Transgressive Behavior in Gay Men
Brian Jay Frederick

Cultural criminology suggests that crime, deviance, and transgression are often subcultural in nature. For this reason, cultural criminologists often focus on the simultaneous forces of cultural inclusion and social exclusion when explaining criminal, deviant, or transgressive behaviors. This is a particularly useful bricolage for examining contemporary gay deviance and transgression—behaviors that are perhaps closely linked to (if not directly caused by) the past isolation, marginalization and/or oppression of homosexuals by Western heteronormative societies. It is also useful for understanding behaviors that are the result of marginalization and oppression from other sources, namely, the gay community itself. Using subcultural theories of deviance—such as those favored by cultural criminologists—this article explores a perspective that can be used for exploring certain forms of gay deviance and transgression. First, some of the more ostensible criminological theories that satisfy a prima facie criminological inquiry will be presented and critiqued: labeling and stigma, and resistance to heteronormativity. To these will be added a new and potentially productive way of thinking that takes into consideration rule-breaking as a form of resistance to homonormative norms, values and rules.

The British Journal of Criminology 54(2)

The British Journal of Criminology, March 2014: Volume 54, Issue 2

Victim Attributes in Hate Crime Law: Difference and the Politics of Justice
Gail Mason

This article considers whether the targeted victimization of adults who sexually assault children should be recognized as a form of hate crime under the criminal law. Two recent Australian cases where the courts applied hate crime provisions to paedophiles raise important questions about which forms of social differentiation are protected under hate crime statutes. The article builds on recent proposals for more inclusive victim protection criteria, particularly around notions of vulnerability and difference, and argues that these characteristics must be tethered to a politics of justice that limits attributes to forms of difference that have a justifiable claim to affirmation, equality and respect for the attribute that makes them different.

Deconstructing Victim and offender Identites in Discourses on Child Sexual Abuse: Hierarchies, Blame and the Good/Evil Dialectic
Anne-Marie McAlinden

Contemporary social and political constructions of victimhood and offending behaviour lie at the heart of regulatory policies on child sexual abuse. Legislation is named after specific child victims of high-profile cases, and a burgeoning range of pre-emptive measures are enacted to protect an amorphous class of ‘all potential victims’ from the risk sex offenders are seen as posing. Such policies are also heavily premised on the omnipresent predatory stranger. These constructed identities, however, are at odds with the actual identities of victims and offenders of such crimes. Drawing on a range of literatures, the core task of this article is to confront some of the complexities and tensions surrounding constructions of the victim/offender dyad within the specific context of sexual offending against children. In particular, the article argues that discourses on ‘blame’—and the polarized notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’—inform respective hierarchies of victimhood and offending concerning ‘legitimate’ victim and offender status. Based on these insights, the article argues for the need to move beyond such monochromatic understandings of victims and offenders of sexual crime and to reframe the politics of risk accordingly.

Rolling Back Prices and Raising Crime Rates? The Walmart Effect on Crime in the United States
Scott E. Wolfe and David C. Pyrooz

Wal-Mart is not an ordinary retail store—communities are impacted in significant ways by its entrance. Using various data sources and propensity-weighted multilevel modelling, this paper explores the ‘Wal-Mart effect’ on crime. Concentrating on the 1990s, results reveal that Wal-Mart is located in United States counties with higher crime rates, net of robust macro-level correlates of crime. Wal-Mart selected into counties primed for the 1990s crime decline, but, after accounting for endogeneity, growth of the company stunted crime declines when compared to matched counties. A Wal-Mart–crime relationship exists. If Wal-Mart did not build in a county, property crime rates fell by an additional 17 units per capita from the 1990s to the 2000s. A marginally statistically significant, yet stable, effect for violent crime was also observed, falling by two units per capita. These findings provide important theoretical implications regarding the influence of specific economic forces on aggregate crime trends and offer important implications for local governments faced with the prospect of Wal-Mart entering their communities.

Ripping up the Map: Criminology and Cartography Reconsidered
Theo Kindynis

Criminologists have long been interested in mapping crime, yet their use and understanding of maps remain superficial and uncritical. This article traces crime mapping’s historical development before considering the emergence of ‘critical cartography’ and exploring its implications for criminology. Criminologists are urged to interrogate conventional crime maps, and to investigate the criminological implications of emergent digital mapping technologies. Maps and map making afford a host of innovative methodologies that criminologists have yet to take advantage of, and some tentative suggestions are made as to how criminologists might utilize cartographic methods in order to generate unique empirical insights. Finally, the article considers how criminologists might harness maps’ communicative power to better engage with the public and to promote social justice.

The Labyrinth of Jewish Security Arrangements in Johannesburg: Thinking through a Paradox about Security
Jonny Steinberg and Monique Marks

After more than a century of providing other sorts of communal services, organized Jewry in Johannesburg, South Africa began to provide security in the uncertain period after the end of apartheid. In documenting the short but eventful history of these initiatives, we stumble upon a paradox. In the very process of taking charge of its own security, and thus raising a drawbridge between itself and the society around it, organized Jewry felt the tug of a broader South African citizenship. We argue that this paradox, expressed in the simultaneous desire to protect one’s own and to reach out to others, illuminates important aspects of security itself. Security, we argue, triggers feelings of extreme discomfort when it is traded for money or when it is hoarded by an exclusive group, and is thus, ironically, a resource in the construction of feelings of patriotism and national identity.

Marketization, Knowledge Work and Visibility in ‘Users Pay’ Policing in Canada
Randy K. Lippert and Kevin Walby

This article explores central themes in policing and security scholarship by examining a ‘users pay’ form of police moonlighting in Ontario called ‘pay duty’. Drawing on interviews with police personnel and service users, as well as analysis of ‘pay duty’ data and policies from four municipal police services, we raise questions about this form of policing in relation to police marketization, knowledge work and visibility. Our analysis of pay duty casts doubt on assumptions about the pervasiveness of police marketization and knowledge work. We also explore dimensions of police visibility overlooked in existing literature and make connections to issues of legitimacy. We demonstrate how police marketization, work type and visibility represent a key conceptual trifecta useful in examining this pervasive form of police moonlighting, and in policing and security studies more broadly.

Risk, Welfare and the Treatment of Adolescent Cannabis Users in England
Simon Flacks

Incorporating analysis of data collected from a small sample of interviews within drug-treatment settings, the aim of this article is to critically consider the purpose and scope of adolescent drug treatment with a particular focus on the drugs–crime nexus. A central question is whether treatment can be understood according to the ‘rise of risk’ in advanced liberal democracies, and whether this corresponds to the proposed rupture with ‘welfarist’ approaches to youth justice policy. The findings suggest, in line with other research, that any such rupture may have been overstated. They also suggest that some drug-treatment research has tended towards sweeping accounts of policy changes, when the specificities of age, drug type and history demand more nuanced explanation, as some authors have already argued. Finally, the analysis suggests there should be concern about the extent of ‘net-widening’ within the youth drug-treatment system.

Ordinary Business: Impacts on Commercial and Residential Burglary
Sung-suk Violet Yu and Michael G. Maxfield

Research on land use and burglary has focused on the presence of drinking places and other undesirable businesses. The current study examines how a variety of ordinary businesses are associated with commercial and residential burglary. We identify three characteristics of ordinary businesses: services locations (on-site or off-site), volume of transactions (higher to lower) and clientele (neighbourhood or beyond). Businesses providing services or products on-site, used frequently and serving neighbourhood residents displayed strong associations with increased risks of victimization. Findings demonstrate the importance of recognizing how ordinary businesses influence crime patterns.

Reconceptualizing Penality: Towards a Multidimensional Measure of Punitiveness
Claire Hamilton

Despite the proliferation of work on the ‘punitive turn’, issues concerning its definition and measurement remain largely under-examined in the mainstream literature. This article seeks to refocus attention on the best ways in which to measure punitiveness and to argue that a more accurate characterization of what we mean by the concept forms an important part of advancing our understanding in this area. To illustrate this point, punitiveness in three countries is measured according to a unidimensional measure, a broader test proposed by Tonry and a fully multidimensional test. It is contended that the very different results produced by these tests suggest the need for greater social-scientific attention to the measurement of the punitiveness concept itself.

Media use and the Process-Based Model for Police Cooperation: An Integrative Approach towards Explaining Adolescents’ Intentions to Cooperate with the Police
Astrid Dirikx and Jan Van den Bulck

Public cooperation with the police is essential for successful crime control. Police can particularly benefit strongly from adolescent cooperation, since young people have a disproportionally high chance of police contact. The current study examines how media use relates to adolescents’ willingness to assist police. Using survey data collected from a sample of 1,968 Flemish adolescents, we test an integrative model which combines Tyler’s process-based model of police cooperation with assumptions from media effects theories. We find that crime show exposure directly and indirectly predicts adolescents’ willingness to cooperate with police. Our findings highlight the importance of media use as an antecedent of police cooperation net of the influence of adolescents’ direct police contacts, age, gender, ethnicity or educational level.

Social Problems 61(1)

Social Problems, February 2014: Volume 61, Issue 1

“Robbing Peter to Pay Paul”: Economic and Cultural Explanations for How Lower-Income Families Manage Debt
Laura M. Tach and Sara Sternberg Greene

This article builds upon classic economic perspectives of financial behavior by applying the narrative identity perspective of cultural sociology to explain how lower-income families respond to indebtedness. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 194 lower-income household heads, we show that debt management strategies are influenced by a desire to promote a financially responsible, self-sufficient social identity. Families are reluctant to ask for assistance when faced with economic hardship because it undermines this identity. Because the need to pay on debts is less acute than the need to pay for regular monthly expenses like rent or groceries, debts receive a lower priority in the monthly budget and families typically juggle their debts in private rather than turning to social networks for assistance. In some cases, however, debts take on special meanings and are handled differently. Respondents prioritize debts when they perceive payment as affirming a self-sufficient or upwardly mobile identity, but they reject and ignore debts they view as unfair or unjust. Because the private coping strategies families employ trap them in costly cycles of indebtedness and hinder future mobility prospects, debt management strategies are consequential for long-term financial well-being.

Brothers and Others: Organizing Masculinity, Disorganizing Workers
Poulami Roychowdhury

Sociologists have long argued that hegemonic masculinity serves as an organizing tool, uniting men around a collective identity by excluding women and subordinate men. This article reformulates existing theories by analyzing organizing drives among an occupationally segregated, ethnically diverse group of men. Ten months of participant observation and 30 in-depth interviews with street vendors in New York City revealed how the exclusionary processes involved in constructing a collective gendered identity can disrupt solidarity and collective action. Organizers attempted to orient members around “brotherhood” in a context where disparate cultural histories and occupational networks shaped interpretive disagreements over masculinity. These interpretive disagreements eventually alienated members and undermined mobilization. Organizational failures such as these allude to the limits social movements face in manipulating gender for institutional purposes. These limits may be especially relevant for resource poor, voluntary organizations that preside over a heterogeneous base.

“It Just Happened”: Telescoping Anxiety, Defiance, and Emergent Collective Behavior in the Student Walkouts of 2006
Laura Barberena, Hortencia Jiménez and Michael P. Young

In one week in the spring of 2006 more than 100,000 students walked out of schools all across America to protest the threat of H.R. 4437 to immigrants. Drawing on 50 interviews with students, educators, and community activists involved in 11 walkouts across five Texas metropolitan areas, we reconstruct the lived experience of these spontaneous protests. We identify three tightly interrelated aspects of a social and psychological process shaping these protests: the relationship between political threat and telescoping anxiety; the role of defiance and its emotion-switching effect; and the emergent and situational nature of the walkouts. We argue that the collective psychological process of telescoping anxiety punctuated by the situational thrill of defiance is indispensable in explaining these massive, far-flung, and spontaneous protests.

“Caught Up”: How Urban Violence and Peer Ties Contribute to High School Noncompletion
Maria G. Rendón

While research shows growing up in urban neighborhoods increases the likelihood of not completing high school, it remains unclear what mechanism facilitates this process and why some youth are more vulnerable than others. This study addresses this gap by drawing on interviews with male, Latino high school graduates and noncompleters in Los Angeles. Interviews reveal urban violence is the most salient feature of urban neighborhoods and consequential for school completion. In an effort to avoid victimization male youth exposed to urban violence draw on male peer ties for protection. Inherent in these social ties, as in other forms of social capital, are expectations and obligations. I find that an orientation that privileges these expectations and obligations—and not specifically an anti-school orientation—gets male youth “caught up” in behavior counterproductive to school completion, like being truant with peers and getting expelled for “backing them” in a fight. I find not all urban youth adopt this orientation because youth are differentially exposed to the neighborhood. Family and school institutional factors limit some youth's time in the neighborhood, buffering them from urban violence. These youth then bypass the opportunity and need to draw on male peer ties for protection. Not having to employ these “strategies of action,” they avoid getting “caught up” and experience higher chances to graduate. This study argues that to understand the cultural orientation that guides behavior that contributes to school noncompletion requires accounting for how the threat of violence punctuates and organizes the daily lives of male urban youth.

Police Use of Excessive Force in Minority Communities: A Test of the Minority Threat, Place, and Community Accountability Hypotheses
Brad W. Smith and Malcolm D. Holmes

We extend existing research on police use of coercive mechanisms of social control against racial/ethnic minority populations by testing three structural hypotheses regarding excessive force. The minority threat hypothesis maintains that the greater the proportion of minority residents in a city, the greater the use of coercive crime control mechanisms. The place hypothesis argues that spatially segregated minority populations are the primary targets of coercive control. The community accountability hypothesis maintains that organizational characteristics of police departments promote the use of excessive force against minorities. Combining data from several sources for cities with populations of 100,000 or more, we include the key variables of these theoretical models in analyses of sustained excessive force complaints. Findings provide support for the minority threat hypothesis but indicate that place effects are contingent on the existence of a very high degree of racial/ethnic segregation. They offer little support for the community accountability hypothesis.

Productive Addicts and Harm Reduction: How Work Reduces Crime – But Not Drug Use
Christopher Uggen and Sarah K. S. Shannon

From the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal to the Job Corps of the Great Society era, employment programs have been advanced to fight poverty and social disorder. In today's context of stubborn unemployment and neoliberal policy change, supported work programs are once more on the policy agenda. This article asks whether work reduces crime and drug use among heavy substance users. And, if so, whether it is the income from the job that makes a difference, or something else. Using the nation's largest randomized job experiment, we first estimate the treatment effects of a basic work opportunity and then partition these effects into their economic and extra-economic components, using a logit decomposition technique generalized to event history analysis. We then interview young adults leaving drug treatment to learn whether and how they combine work with active substance use, elaborating the experiment's implications. Although supported employment fails to reduce cocaine or heroin use, we find clear experimental evidence that a basic work opportunity reduces predatory economic crime, consistent with classic criminological theory and contemporary models of harm reduction. The rate of robbery and burglary arrests fell by approximately 46 percent for the work treatment group relative to the control group, with income accounting for a significant share of the effect.

Coming Home: Attitudes toward U.S. Veterans Returning from Iraq
Alair MacLean and Meredith Kleykamp

In this article, we investigate public attitudes toward combat veterans returning from Iraq. Using data from a nationally representative survey that incorporates an experimental design, we assess the extent to which attitudes toward military veterans and private contractors differ, and whether public attitudes toward men vary based on combat and war zone experience. Drawing on social psychology and military sociology, we test hypotheses derived from a conceptual model of stigma and from research on the cultural injunction to “support the troops.” Consistent with the first portion of the stigma model, members of the public are not surprised to learn that men who went to a war zone behave according to stereotypes that imply that such men have problems with mental health, substance abuse, and violent behavior. Yet they do not discriminate against these men. Instead they favor men who went to Iraq compared to those who stayed in the United States. They also favor veterans compared to contractors. While combat veterans may be stereotyped, they are not stigmatized. They benefit from symbolic capital, which outweighs the effect of stereotypes on discrimination.

Theoretical Criminology 18(1)

Theoretical Criminology, February 2014: Volume 18, Issue 1

Outcasts, performers and true believers: Responsibilized subjects of criminal justice
Dawn Moore and Hideyuki Hirai

We draw on a field study of three drug treatment courts to show that responsibilization strategies create a paradox of bulimic exclusion and empowerment for individual subjects. By theorizing three different subjectivities emerging from our research sites (outcasts, performers and true believers), we show how subjects of intervention actively work to negotiate their own experiences of responsibilization.

Corporate fraud as misplaced confidence? Exploring ambiguity in the accuracy of accounts and the materiality of money
Fiona Haines

The corporate fraud narrative suggests that misleading and inaccurate accounts engender misplaced confidence that robs creditors and investors alike. Yet, this view underplays nested ambiguities in business accounts first in the (im)possibility of accuracy in a set of accounts and second in the constituent figures themselves as embodying uncertain monetary value. This article analyses these phenomena and argues that confidence, nurtured by governments through their regulatory practices, is essential to maintaining perceived integrity to both in spite of continuing ambiguity. This management of confidence is engendered through the interdependent yet contested relationships between government, business and professional elites. Corporate fraud is embedded within these relationships and hence difficult to dislodge without threatening the productiveness that business promises and government craves. Criminalization of corporate fraud deflects attention to one of these actors, the business and its directors, without clear recognition of the role played by government itself.

Weeding the garden: The Third Way, the Westminster tradition and Imprisonment for Public Protection
Harry Annison

This article engages with the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence of the UK Criminal Justice Act 2003, a prominent measure against ‘dangerous offenders’, in a ‘substantively political light’ (O’Malley, 1999). It provides an interpretation based on policymakers’ beliefs and traditions. I argue that the perceived need for the IPP sentence and its ultimate form was the result of New Labour ministers’ reliance on the Third Way political ideology and its implications for criminal justice policy. In addition, in terms of the policymaking process, I suggest that the ‘Westminster tradition’ conditioned policymakers’ actions in relation to the IPP sentence, in ways that were crucial to its outcome. The article concludes with an examination of the moral significance of these beliefs and traditions by reference to Bauman’s discussion of the dangers of a modern ‘garden culture’.

The emotional geography of prison life
Ben Crewe, Jason Warr, Peter Bennett, and Alan Smith

Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated.

The symbolic purpose of hate crime law: Ideal victims and emotion
Gail Mason

This article examines the symbolic function of hate crime law. By challenging the norms that sustain and promote prejudice, hate crime law seeks to contribute to claims for social justice on behalf of victim groups. This symbolic function cannot be achieved by legal rules alone. Drawing upon theories of emotional thinking, the article argues that the moral work of hate crime laws is dependent upon the capacity of victim groups to engender compassionate thinking that helps reconfigure perceptions of them as dangerous, illegitimate or inferior Others. This analysis seeks to contribute to our understanding of the processes through which some minority communities fall short of the image of ideal victims capable of contributing to the moral claim embedded in hate crime law.

Legitimacy and crime: Theorizing the role of the state in cross-national criminological theory
Amy Nivette

One of the primary components of state stability and order is that citizens consider those in power just and legitimate. Citizens who perceive the state as legitimate are likely to consider its institutions a valid source of morality and social control.  Theoretically, legitimacy should play an important role in criminal offending across countries. This link between state power and citizens—that is, legitimacy—has the potential to be an important social mechanism connecting state actions to individual criminal behaviours. With this in mind, this article explores how political legitimacy might affect levels of crime and violence across countries.  A lack of legitimacy may lead citizens to (1) reject the monopoly of physical force to employ self-help and/or (2) withdraw commitment from institutions, breaking down social control.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 51(2)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, March 2014: Volume 51, Issue 2

Are Arrested and Non-Arrested Serial Offenders Different? A Test of Spatial Offending Patterns Using DNA Found at Crime Scenes
Marre Lammers

Objectives: Compare the spatial offending patterns of arrested offenders to that of non-arrested offenders, in order to assess selection bias in arrest data. Method: Data used for this study are from the Dutch DNA database for criminal cases. DNA allows reliable linkage of serial crimes committed by the same offender, whether or not the offender has ever been arrested. Spatial offending patterns of arrested and non-arrested offenders are measured by calculating the mean intercrime distance (MICD) of the offense locations. Survival analysis is performed to study whether the MICD has an influence on the duration until arrest. Results: No large differences are found between the MICD of arrested offenders and the MICD of non-arrested offenders. The MICD does not affect the duration until arrest. Conclusions: Because no differences in the MICDs are found between the arrested and non-arrested offenders, arrest data are probably less selective than has been suspected in the past, and results based on these data are unlikely to be strongly biased.

Proximal Adolescent Outcomes of Gang Membership in England and Wales
Juan José Medina Ariza, Andreas Cebulla, Judith Aldridge, Jon Shute, and Andy Ross

Objectives: This article aims to apply a “turning points” framework for understanding the developmental impacts of gang membership in a British sample of young people. The study explores the proximal impact of gang membership on offending, victimization, and a number of attitudinal and experiential outcomes that have been theorized to mediate the relationship between gang membership and offending. Method: The authors used data from the Offending Crime and Justice Survey, a rotating panel representative of young people in England and Wales that measured gang membership using the Eurogang definition. The effects of gang membership onset were tested using a propensity score analysis approach. Results: As previously reported with American data, gang onset has an impact on offending, antisocial behavior, drug use, commitment to deviant peers, and neutralization techniques. In addition, gang membership increases the probability of unwanted police contact, even adjusting for offending through a “double robust” procedure. Conclusion: Despite differences in social context, history of gangs and level of violence, we encounter more similarities than differences regarding consequences of gang membership. The impact on unwanted police contact deserves further research and policy attention.

Breaches in the Wall: Imprisonment, Social Support, and Recidivism
Joshua C. Cochran

Objectives: Drawing on theories that emphasize the salience of social ties, this study examines the different kinds of experiences prisoners have with visitation and the implications of those experiences for behavior after release. Method: This study uses data from a release cohort of prisoners to (1) explore how visitation experiences unfold for different cohorts of individuals serving different amounts of time in prison and to (2) test the effects of longitudinal visitation patterns on recidivism. Results: Findings suggest that individuals who maintain connections with their social networks outside of prison have lower rates of reoffending and that the timing and consistency with which visitation occurs also affect criminal behavior. Specifically, prisoners who are visited early and who experience a sustained pattern of visitation are less likely to recidivate. Conclusion: These findings underscore the importance of social ties for understanding the prisoner experience and its implications for offending. More research is needed that seeks to explain the effects identified here and that explores, using nuanced approaches, other prison experiences, and the implications of those experiences.

Uncovering the Spatial Patterning of Crimes: A Criminal Movement Model (CriMM)
Andrew A. Reid, Richard Frank, Natalia Iwanski, Vahid Dabbaghian, and Patricia Brantingham

Objectives: The main objective of this study was to see if the characteristics of offenders’ crimes exhibit spatial patterning in crime neutral areas by examining the relationship between simulated travel routes of offenders along the physical road network and the actual locations of their crimes in the same geographic space. Method: This study introduced a Criminal Movement model (CriMM) that simulates travel patterns of known offenders. Using offenders’ home locations, locations of major attractors (e.g., shopping centers), and variations of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm we modeled the routes that offenders are likely to take when traveling from their home to an attractor. We then compare the locations of offenders’ crimes to these paths and analyze their proximity characteristics. This process was carried out using data on 7,807 property offenders from five municipalities in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) in British Columbia, Canada. Results: The results show that a great proportion of crimes tend to be located geographically proximal to the simulated travel paths with a distance decay pattern characterizing the distribution of distance measures. Conclusion: These results lend support to Crime Pattern Theory and the idea that there is an underlying pattern to crimes in crime neutral areas.

American Sociological Review 79(1)

American Sociological Review, February 2014: Volume 79, Issue 1

2013 Presidential Address: Why Status Matters for Inequality
Cecilia L. Ridgeway

To understand the mechanisms behind social inequality, this address argues that we need to more thoroughly incorporate the effects of status—inequality based on differences in esteem and respect—alongside those based on resources and power. As a micro motive for behavior, status is as significant as money and power. At a macro level, status stabilizes resource and power inequality by transforming it into cultural status beliefs about group differences regarding who is “better” (esteemed and competent). But cultural status beliefs about which groups are “better” constitute group differences as independent dimensions of inequality that generate material advantages due to group membership itself. Acting through micro-level social relations in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere, status beliefs bias evaluations of competence and suitability for authority, bias associational preferences, and evoke resistance to status challenges from low-status group members. These effects accumulate to direct members of higher status groups toward positions of resources and power while holding back lower status group members. Through these processes, status writes group differences such as gender, race, and class-based life style into organizational structures of resources and power, creating durable inequality. Status is thus a central mechanism behind durable patterns of inequality based on social differences.

Does Immigration Undermine Public Support for Social Policy?
David Brady and Ryan Finnigan

There has been great interest in the relationship between immigration and the welfare state in recent years, and particularly since Alesina and Glaeser’s (2004) influential work. Following literatures on solidarity and fractionalization, race in the U.S. welfare state, and anti-immigrant sentiments, many contend that immigration undermines public support for social policy. This study analyzes three measures of immigration and six welfare attitudes using 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for 17 affluent democracies. Based on multi-level and two-way fixed-effects models, our results mostly fail to support the generic hypothesis that immigration undermines public support for social policy. The percent foreign born, net migration, and the 10-year change in the percent foreign born all fail to have robust significant negative effects on welfare attitudes. There is evidence that the percent foreign born significantly undermines the welfare attitude that government “should provide a job for everyone who wants one.” However, there is more robust evidence that net migration and change in percent foreign born have positive effects on welfare attitudes. We conclude that the compensation and chauvinism hypotheses provide greater potential for future research, and we critically consider other ways immigration could undermine the welfare state. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that factors other than immigration are far more important for public support of social policy.

Local Ethnic Composition and Natives’ and Immigrants’ Geographic Mobility in France, 1982–1999
Roland Rathelot and Mirna Safi

This article provides empirical results on patterns of native and immigrant geographic mobility in France. Using longitudinal data, we measure mobility from one French municipality (commune) to another over time and estimate the effect of the initial municipality’s ethnic composition on the probability of moving out. These data allow us to use panel techniques to correct for biases related to selection based on geographic and individual unobservables. Our findings tend to discredit the hypothesis of a “white flight” pattern in residential mobility dynamics in France. Some evidence does show ethnic avoidance mechanisms in natives’ relocating. We also find a strong negative and highly robust effect of co-ethnics’ presence on immigrants’ geographic mobility.

Reputation Formation and the Evolution of Cooperation in Anonymous Online Markets
Andreas Diekmann, Ben Jann, Wojtek Przepiorka, and Stefan Wehrli

Theoretical propositions stressing the importance of trust, reciprocity, and reputation for cooperation in social exchange relations are deeply rooted in classical sociological thought. Today’s online markets provide a unique opportunity to test these theories using unobtrusive data. Our study investigates the mechanisms promoting cooperation in an online-auction market where most transactions can be conceived as one-time-only exchanges. We first give a systematic account of the theoretical arguments explaining the process of cooperative transactions. Then, using a large dataset comprising 14,627 mobile phone auctions and 339,517 DVD auctions, we test key hypotheses about the effects of traders’ reputations on auction outcomes and traders’ motives for leaving feedback. Our statistical analyses show that sellers with better reputations have higher sales and obtain higher prices. Furthermore, we observe a high rate of participation in the feedback system, which is largely consistent with strong reciprocity—a predisposition to unconditionally reward (or punish) one’s interaction partner’s cooperation (or defection)—and altruism—a predisposition to increase one’s own utility by elevating an interaction partner’s utility. Our study demonstrates how strong reciprocity and altruism can mitigate the free-rider problem in the feedback system to create reputational incentives for mutually beneficial online trade.

Close, But No Cigar: The Bimodal Rewards to Prize-Seeking
Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke

This article examines the economic effects of prizes with implications for the diversity of market positions, especially in cultural fields. Many prizes have three notable features that together yield an emergent reward structure: (1) consumers treat prizes as judgment devices when making purchase decisions, (2) prizes introduce sharp discontinuities between winners and also-rans, and (3) appealing to prize juries requires costly sacrifices of mass audience appeal. When all three conditions obtain, winning a prize is valuable, but seeking it is costly, so trying and failing yields the worst outcome—a logic we characterize as a Tullock lottery. We test the model with analyses of Oscar nominations and Hollywood films from 1985 through 2009. We create an innovative measure of prize-seeking, or “Oscar appeal,” on the basis of similarity to recent nominees in terms of such things as genre, plot keywords, and release date. We then show that Oscar appeal has no effect on profitability. However, this zero-order relationship conceals that returns to strong Oscar appeals are bimodal, with super-normal returns for nominees and large losses for snubs. We then argue that the effect of judgment devices on fields depends on how they structure and refract information.

How You Downsize Is Who You Downsize: Biased Formalization, Accountability, and Managerial Diversity
Alexandra Kalev

Scholars and pundits argue that women and minorities are more likely to lose their jobs in downsizing because of segregation or outright discrimination. In contrast, this article explores how the formalization and legalization of downsizing affect inequalities. According to bureaucracy theory and management practitioners, formalization constrains decision-makers’ bias, but neo-structural and feminist theories of inequality argue that formalization can itself be gendered and racially biased. Accountability theory advances this debate, pointing to organizational and institutional processes that motivate executives to minimize inequality. Building on these theories, and drawing on unique data from a national sample of 327 downsized establishments between 1971 and 2002, I analyze how layoff formalization and actors’ antidiscrimination accountability affect women’s and minorities’ representation in management after downsizing. Results demonstrate that, first, downsizing significantly reduces managerial diversity. Second, formalization exacerbates these negative effects when layoff rules rely on positions or tenure, but not when layoff rules require an individualized evaluation. Finally, antidiscrimination accountability generated by internal legal counsels or compliance awareness prods executives to override formal rules and reduce inequalities. I conclude that although downsizing has been increasingly managed by formal rules and monitored by legal experts, this has often meant the institutionalization of unequal, rather than equal, opportunity.

Dilettante or Renaissance Person? How the Order of Job Experiences Affects Hiring in an External Labor Market
Ming D. Leung

Social actors who move across categories are typically disadvantaged relative to their more focused peers. Yet candidates who compile experiences across disparate areas can either be appreciated as renaissance individuals or penalized as dilettantes. Extant literature has focused on the comparison between single versus multiple category members and on skill assessment, hindering its applicability. To discriminate between more versus less successful category spanners, I suggest that the order of accumulated experiences matters, because it serves as an indicator of commitment. I propose the concept of erraticism and predict that employers will prefer candidates who demonstrate some erraticism, by moving incrementally between similar jobs, over candidates who do not move and also over those with highly erratic job histories. Furthermore, I suggest this relationship holds for more complex jobs, less experienced freelancers, and is attenuated through working together. These issues are particularly salient given the rise of external labor markets where careers are increasingly marked by moves across traditional boundaries. I test and find support for these hypotheses with data from an online crowd-sourced labor market for freelancing services, Elance.com. I discuss how virtual mediated labor markets may alter hiring processes.

Unmasking the Conflicting Trends in Job Tenure by Gender in the United States, 1983–2008
Matissa N. Hollister and Kristin E. Smith

Americans are convinced that employment stability has declined in recent decades, but previous research on this question has led to mixed conclusions. A key challenge is that trends for men and women are in opposite directions and appear to cancel each other out. We clarify this situation by examining trends in employer tenure by sex, marital status, and parental status. We find that married mothers are behind the increase in women’s job tenure, but men and never-married women have seen declines in tenure. Furthermore, we show that the timing of tenure trends for women parallels periods of increased labor force attachment. Finally, we find that shifts in industry and occupation composition can account for the decline in tenure among men and never-married women before 1996 but not afterward. We situate these diverging trends in two broad shifts in expectations, norms, and behaviors in the labor market: the end-of-work discourse and the revolution in women’s identification with paid work. Our findings support the view that job tenure is declining for all groups, but women’s greater labor force attachment, especially their more continuous employment around childbirth, countered and masked this trend.

Law & Society Review 48(1)

Law & Society Review, March 2014: Volume 48, Issue 1

Karl Renner and (Intellectual) Property—How Cognitive Theory Can Enrich a Sociolegal Analysis of Contemporary Copyright
Stefan Larsson

This article deals with copyright regulation meeting the quite rapid societal changes associated with digitization, and it does so by reinterpreting Karl Renner's classical texts in the light of contemporary cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors and embodiment. From a cognitive theory perspective, I focus on the notion that the legal norms only appear to be unchanged—the Renner distinction between form and function. This includes social norms, technological development, and changes in social structures in general, which create a social and cognitive reinterpretation of law. This article, therefore, analyzes the contemporary push for copyright as property, which I relate to historical claims for copyright as property as well as de facto legal revisions in intellectual property faced with the challenges of digitization. Of particular relevance here is what Renner described in terms of property as an “institution of domination and control,” and thus the increased measures for control that are added to a digital context in the name of copyright.

The (Dis)Advantage of Certainty: The Importance of Certainty in Language
Pamela C. Corley and Justin Wedeking

How can legal decision makers increase the likelihood of a favorable response from other legal and social actors? To answer this, we propose a novel theory based on the certainty expressed in language that is applicable to many different legal contexts. The theory is grounded in psychology and legal advocacy and suggests that expressing certainty enhances the persuasiveness of a message. We apply this theory to the principal–agent framework to examine the treatment of Supreme Court precedent by the Federal Courts of Appeal. We find that as the level of certainty in the Supreme Court's opinion increases, the lower courts are more likely to positively treat the Court's decision. We then discuss the implications of our findings for using certainty in a broader context.

The Impact of Supreme Court Activity on the Judicial Agenda
Douglas Rice

When the Supreme Court takes action, it establishes national policy within an issue area. A traditional, legal view holds that the decisions of the Court settle questions of law and thereby close the door on future litigation, reducing the need for future attention to that issue. Alternatively, an emerging interest group perspective suggests the Court, in deciding cases, provides signals that encourage additional attention to particular issues. I examine these competing perspectives of what happens in the federal courts after Supreme Court decisions. My results indicate that while Supreme Court decisions generally settle areas of law in terms of overall litigation rates, they also introduce new information that leads to increases in the attention of judges and interest groups to those particular issues.

The Costs and Benefits of American Policy-Making Venues
Aaron J. Ley

Many law and policy scholars consider judges inimical to good public policymaking, and the criticisms they level on the judiciary implicitly reflect some of the concerns raised by Alexander Bickel and other critics. Despite the charge by critics that judges are institutionally ill equipped to participate in the policy-making process and that legal processes are costly, there are reasons to believe otherwise. This article uses field interviews and three case studies of an environmental dispute in the Pacific Northwest to show that the judiciary can be an institutional venue that enhances public input, can be more inclusive than other venues, and produces positive-sum outcomes when other venues cannot. The findings also suggest that legislative and agency policymaking are just as contentious and costly as judicial policy-making processes.

Jurisdiction, Crime, and Development: The Impact of Public Law 280 in Indian Country
Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl, Peter Grajzl and A. Joseph Guse

Public Law 280 transferred jurisdiction over criminal and civil matters from the federal to state governments and increased the extent of nontribal law enforcement in selected parts of Indian country. Where enacted, the law fundamentally altered the preexisting legal order. Public Law 280 thus provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of legal institutions and their change on socioeconomic outcomes. The law's controversial content has attracted interest from legal scholars. However, empirical studies of its impact are scarce and do not address the law's endogenous nature. We examine the law's impact on crime and on economic development in U.S. counties with significant American-Indian reservation population. To address the issue of selection of areas subject to Public Law 280, our empirical strategy draws on the law's politico-historical context. We find that the application of Public Law 280 increased crime and lowered incomes. The law's adverse impact is robust and noteworthy in magnitude.

Unfounding Sexual Assault: Examining the Decision to Unfound and Identifying False Reports
Cassia Spohn, Clair White and Katharine Tellis

One of the most controversial—and least understood—issues in the area of sexual violence is the prevalence of false reports of rape. Estimates of the rate of false reports vary widely, which reflects differences in way false reports are defined and in the methods that researchers use to identify them. We address this issue using a mixed methods approach that incorporates quantitative and qualitative data on sexual assault cases that were reported to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 2008 and qualitative data from interviews with LAPD detectives assigned to investigate reports of sexual assault. We found that the LAPD was clearing cases as unfounded appropriately most, but not all, of the time and we estimated that the rate of false reports among cases reported to the LAPD was 4.5 percent. We also found that although complainant recantation was the strongest predictor of the unfounding decision, other factors indicative of the seriousness of the incident and the credibility of the victim also played a role. We interpret these findings using an integrated theoretical perspective that incorporates both Black's sociological theory of law and Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer's focal concerns perspective.

Do Rich and Poor Behave Similarly in Seeking Legal Advice? Lessons from Taiwan in Comparative Perspective
Kuo-Chang Huang, Chang-Ching Lin and Kong-Pin Chen

A central concern of access-to-justice studies is whether the socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals can obtain effective assistance in dealing with their legal problems. Using the newly collected data from the 2011 Taiwan Survey, this article examines Taiwanese people's advice-seeking behavior in general and explores the effect of income in particular. This article finds that income had a significantly positive correlation with the likelihood of obtaining legal advice, but it has no impact on obtaining nonlegal advice. By contrast, education had little bearing on the decision to obtain legal advice, but it had a positive influence on seeking nonlegal advice. This article argues that although the gravity of problem was more influential than income on obtaining legal advice, the effect of income should not be easily dismissed. Moreover, the contrasting effect of education on obtaining nonlegal advice strongly suggests that its use was determined by people's knowledge of its existence and capability of accessing such service. To improve the disadvantaged's access to justice, care should be taken not only to increase publicly funded legal advice services but also to enhance the public's awareness of their availability.