Social Forces 93(1)

Social Forces, September 2014: Volume 93, Number 1

Gender and Occupations

The Scarring Effect of “Women’s Work”: The Determinants of Women’s Attrition from Male-Dominated Occupations
Margarita Torre

Nurse or Mechanic?: The Role of Parental Socialization and Children’s Personality in the Formation of Sex-Typed Occupational Aspirations
Javier G. Polavieja, Lucinda Platt

Family

Gender and the Division of Labor in Older Couples: How European Grandparents Share Market Work and Childcare
Thomas Leopold, Jan Skopek

Earnings Equality and Relationship Stability for Same-Sex and Heterosexual Couples
Katherine Weisshaar

Religion

The Growth of Protestantism in Brazil and Its Impact on Male Earnings, 1970–2000
Joseph E. Potter, Ernesto F. L. Amaral, Robert D. Woodberry

What Makes Muslims Feel French?
Rahsaan Maxwell, Erik Bleich

Religiousness, Social Networks, Moral Schemas, and Marijuana Use: A Dynamic Dual-Process Model of Culture and Behavior
John P. Hoffmann

Social Psychology

Personality and the Reproduction of Social Class
Michael J. Shanahan, Shawn Bauldry, Brent W. Roberts, Ross Macmillan, Rosemary Russo

Norms as Group-Level Constructs: Investigating School-Level Teen Pregnancy Norms and Behaviors
Stefanie Mollborn, Benjamin W. Domingue, Jason D. Boardman

Criminology

The Effect of Paternal Incarceration on Children’s Risk of Foster Care Placement
Signe Hald Andersen, Christopher Wildeman

The Intergenerational Consequences of Mass Incarceration: Implications for Children’s Co-Residence and Contact with Grandparents
Kristin Turney

Gendered Rioting: A General Strain Theoretical Approach
Wayne A. Santoro, Lisa Broidy

Sociology of Science

Diffusing through Disciplines: Insiders, Outsiders, and Socially Influenced Citation Behavior
Freda B. Lynn

Culture

The Toxicity of Torture: The Cultural Structure of US Political Discourse of Waterboarding
Jared Del Rosso

Environment

The Economic Gains and Environmental Losses of US Consumption: A World-Systems and Input-Output Approach
Christina Prell, Kuishuang Feng, Laixiang Sun, Martha Geores, Klaus Hubacek

Criminology & Public Policy 13(2)

Criminology & Public Policy, May 2014: Volume 13, Issue 2

COMMUNITY INVESTMENT AND THE CONTROL OF STREET CRIME

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Reducing Crime Through Community Investment
Lauren J. Krivo

RESEARCH ARTICLE
New Parochialism, Sources of Community Investment, and the Control of Street Crime
David M. Ramey and Emily A. Shrider

Research Summary: We examined Seattle, Washington's Neighborhood Matching Fund (NMF), a unique neighborhood improvement program that provides city funding for projects organized within neighborhoods. We found an inverse relationship between NMF funding and violent crime rates, a relationship that is stronger in poorer neighborhoods. The relationship also is stronger as funds accumulate within the neighborhoods over time. These findings suggest that investment and neighborhood participation can have both short-term and long-term crime reduction effects.

Policy Implications: The Neighborhood Matching Fund program is associated with significant reductions in crime, even though the program and its projects are not aimed specifically at crime reduction. This observation suggests that policies that encourage neighbors to interact with each other and that facilitate interactions and physical improvements can help reduce crime by improving neighborhood conditions and social relationships. Investments in neighborhoods by the city also can help counteract the negative effects of private disinvestment.

POLICY ESSAYS

New Parochialism and Community Dynamics
Andrea Leverentz

Making or Breaking Neighborhoods
María B. Vélez and Christopher J. Lyons

DOWNWARD DEPARTURES IN CHILD PORNOGRAPHY SENTENCING

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Sentencing Policy Disputes
Melissa Hamilton

RESEARCH ARTICLE
“Fundamentally Flawed?”
Kimberly A. Kaiser and Cassia Spohn

Research Summary: Using U.S. Sentencing Commission data, this study assesses whether judicial downward departures are more prevalent among child pornography offenders compared with a matched sample of defendants convicted of other offenses. Additionally, we examine reasons given by judges when departing from the guidelines for these offenders. We found that child pornography defendants received significant reductions in sentences by way of judicial downward departures.

Policy Implications: In 2007, the Supreme Court considerably altered the federal sentencing process. In Kimbrough v. United States (2007), the Court held that judicial departures were permissible on grounds of a policy disagreement. Many circuit courts have authorized sentencing judges to depart from the guidelines in child pornography cases based on such a policy disagreement. The findings of this study suggest that judicial downward departures for these offenders cannot be explained by individual characteristics, such as race, gender, or age, and may be indicative of a specific disagreement with this particular sentencing policy. An examination of the reasons provided by judges supports the hypothesis that judges may be attempting to remedy what they perceive as unjustly harsh sentencing guidelines.

POLICY ESSAY
Mismatch of Guidelines and Offender Danger and Blameworthiness Departures as Policy Signals from the Courts
Jeffery T. Ulmer
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12083/abstract?campaign=woletoc

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT, POLICING, AND CRIME

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
The Strange Career of Immigration in American Criminological Research
Richard Rosenfeld

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime
Elina Treyger, Aaron Chalfin and Charles Loeffler

Research Summary: In 2008, the federal government introduced “Secure Communities,” a program that requires local law enforcement agencies to share arrestee information with federal immigration officials. We employed the staggered activation of Secure Communities to examine whether this program has an effect on crime or the behavior of local police. Supporters of the program argue that it enhances public safety by facilitating the removal of criminal aliens. Critics worry that it will encourage discriminatory policing. We found little evidence for the most ambitious promises of the program or for its critics’ greatest fears.

Policy Implications: Although a large body of evidence reports that municipal police can have an appreciable effect on crime, involving local police in federal immigration enforcement does not seem to offer measurable public safety benefits. Noncitizens removed through Secure Communities either would have been incapacitated even in the absence of the program or do not pose an identifiable risk to community safety.

POLICY ESSAYS

Secure or Insecure Communities?
Charis E. Kubrin

The Reality of the Secure Communities Program
Ramiro Martinez Jr. and Janice Iwama

Crime & Delinquency 60(7)

Crime & Delinquency, October 2014: Volume 60, Issue 7

Magnetic Facilities: Identifying the Convergence Settings of Juvenile Delinquents
Gisela Bichler, Aili Malm, and Janet Enriquez

Facilities that draw youth from different communities are prone to become offender convergence settings and intercity crime generators. Applying network analysis to self-nominated hangouts of 5,082 delinquent youth residing in Southern California revealed specific facilities acting as regional convergence settings. A small number of magnetic locations (measured by popularity and breadth of appeal) enable the congregation and interaction of youth that would otherwise not be exposed to each other. As predicted, the sociocirculatory structure of place networks remains relatively constant over time. In-degree and betweenness centrality statistics offer a viable analytic strategy to identify facilities operating as stable regional convergence locations. Crime prevention programs invoking effective place management through ordinances may offer a way to publicly govern these private facilities.

Policing Domestic Violence in the Post-SARP Era: The Impact of a Domestic Violence Police Unit
M. Lyn Exum, Jennifer L. Hartman, Paul C. Friday, and Vivian B. Lord

During the Spousal Assault Replication Program, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, was identified as a site where arrest did not deter misdemeanor domestic violence. Shortly after these findings were published, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department developed a Domestic Violence (DV) unit to combat the problem of intimate partner violence. The mission of the Charlotte DV unit is to reduce future offending through intensive investigation and victim assistance. The current study evaluates the impact of the Charlotte DV unit versus standard patrol on official accounts of offender recidivism in a random sample of 891 domestic violence cases. Controlling for offender demographics, prior criminal history, case severity, and additional criminal justice responses, suspects processed through the DV unit had significantly lower rates of re-offending across an 18- to 30-month follow-up period. Theoretical explanations for the DV unit effect are proposed.

Risk Assessment of Girls: Are There Any Sex Differences in Risk Factors for Re-offending and in Risk Profiles?
Claudia E. van der Put, Maja Deković, Machteld Hoeve, Geert Jan J. M. Stams, Peter H. van der Laan, and Femke E. M. Langewouters

The aims of this study were (a) to investigate sex differences in risk factors for re-offending and (b) to provide a risk assessment model for girls. The data of 1,396 adolescents who committed a criminal offense were examined. Both generic and sex-specific risk factors for re-offending were found. The girl-specific risk factors are located mainly in the family domain. These girl-specific risk factors turn out to be by far the most important predictors for re-offending for girls. The risk assessment model divides girls into four different risk groups: a low risk group (containing 65% of the girls) and three high risk groups (girls with delinquent parents, victims of abuse, and repeat offenders), each showing a specific set of risk factors, which suggests the need for specific interventions.

A Sociological Theory of Drug Sales, Gifts, and Frauds
Scott Jacques and Richard Wright

The transfer of drugs from one person to another does not always involve a fair sale. Gifts and frauds are also common. Although the rationality perspective has dominated and made important contributions to the study of drug transfer, this article proposes a new theory of drug sales, gifts, and frauds. The theoretical lens of pure sociology is used to find social structural patterns in qualitative data obtained from a study of middle- and lower class drug dealers. Based on that data, the authors suggest that the social status of drug procurers and their social distance from drug dealers affect (a) whether the transfer is a gift, sale, or fraud and (b) the size of the gift, the price of the sale, and the seriousness of the fraud. Implications for future research are discussed.

Prison Architecture and Inmate Misconduct: A Multilevel Assessment
Robert G. Morris and John L. Worrall

Researchers have not yet devoted sufficient attention to the effect of prison architecture on inmate misconduct. Using data from the population of male prisoners in Texas, the authors explored the association between two prison architectural design types (as determined by satellite imagery) and inmate misconduct. The results from multilevel statistical analyses suggest that architectural design is associated with nonviolent misconduct but not violent misconduct. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Rape and Gender Conflict in a Patriarchal State
Richard R. Johnson

The handling of rape by the criminal justice system may be intimately intertwined with the gender inequality found in patriarchal communities. The present study examined the empirical relationship between female sociopolitical power and the rape rates and rape case clearance rates of 105 counties in an agrarian state with a reputation for patriarchal culture. The results suggested that, after controlling for contextual variables, counties with higher levels of female sociopolitical power also experienced higher rates of rape, and lower proportions of rape cases cleared by an arrest. The findings suggested that women in patriarchal communities experience a backlash effect as they achieve progress toward gender equality.

Journal of Marriage and Family 76(5)

Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2014: Volume 76, Issue 5

Brief Report

Work Hours, Schedules, and Insufficient Sleep Among Mothers and Their Young Children
Ariel Kalil, Rachel Dunifon, Danielle Crosby and Jessica Houston Su

Couple Relationships

Couple Longevity in the Era of Same-Sex Marriage in the United States
Michael J. Rosenfeld

Divorce in Norwegian Same-Sex Marriages and Registered Partnerships: The Role of Children
Kenneth Aarskaug Wiik, Ane Seierstad and Turid Noack

Happy Marriage, Happy Life? Marital Quality and Subjective Well-being in Later Life
Deborah Carr, Vicki A. Freedman, Jennifer C. Cornman and Norbert Schwarz

Living Apart Together and Money: New Partnerships, Traditional Gender Roles
Vicky Lyssens-Danneboom and Dimitri Mortelmans

A Social Network Comparison of Low-Income Black and White Newlywed Couples
Grace L. Jackson, David Kennedy, Thomas N. Bradbury and Benjamin R. Karney

Is the Cohabitation–Marriage Gap in Money Pooling Universal?
Dana Hamplová, Céline Le Bourdais and Évelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk

Family in the Great Recession

Economic Strain and Children's Behavior in the Aftermath of the Great Recession
Lindsey Jeanne Leininger and Ariel Kalil

Private Financial Transfers, Family Income, and the Great Recession
Aaron Gottlieb, Natasha Pilkauskas and Irwin Garfinkel

Of General Interest

Maternal Employment and Parenting Through Middle Childhood: Contextualizing Factors
Cheryl Buehler, Marion O'Brien, Kevin M. Swartout and Nan Zhou

Diet and Exercise in Parenthood: A Social Control Perspective
Corinne Reczek, Mieke Beth Thomeer, Amy C. Lodge, Debra Umberson and Megan Underhill

Reinstitutionalizing Families: Life Course Policy and Marriage in the Military
Jennifer Lundquist and Zhun Xu

Parental Migration and Education of Left-Behind Children: A Comparison of Two Settings
Yao Lu

Theory and Society, 43(5)

Theory and Society, September 2014: Volume 43, Issue 5

The politics of cross-border engagement: Mexican emigrants and the Mexican state
Roger Waldinger

Reacting to migrants’ many, ongoing involvements with their home communities, sending states have increasingly adopted policies designed to resolve the problems of citizens living abroad and to respond to expatriates’ search for engagement, doing so in ways that best meet home state leaders’ goals. This article seeks to understand the factors shaping this interaction between sending states and emigrants abroad by studying two contrasting aspects of the Mexican experience—expatriate voting, a relatively new development, and provision of the matrícula consular, a long-standing component of traditional consular services, though one that has recently been transformed. Focusing on the complex set of interactions linking migrants, sending states, and receiving states, the article identifies the key differences and similarities between these two policies. Both policies suffered from a capacity deficit inherent in sending state efforts to connect with nationals living in a territory that the home country cannot control; both also generated conflict over membership and rights. Nonetheless, Mexico’s efforts to resolve the immigrants’ identification problems in the receiving society proved useful to millions; by contrast, a tiny proportion of emigrants took advantage of the first opportunity to vote from abroad. These diverging experiences demonstrate that sending states can exercise influence when intervening on the receiving society side, where the embeddedness of the immigrant population provides a source of leverage. By contrast, the search to re-engage the emigrants back home encounters greater difficulties and yields poorer results, as the emigrants’ extra-territorial status impedes the effort to sustain the connection to the people and places left behind. In the end, the article shows that extension to the territory of another state yields far more constraints than those found on home soil as well as unpredictable reactions from receiving states and their peoples, not to speak of nationals who no longer perceive the migrants as full members of the society they left.

Grievances do matter in mobilization
Erica Simmons

This article proposes that by studying grievances as not only materially but also ideationally constituted claims, scholars can gain analytical leverage on puzzles of social movement emergence and development. This meaning-laden approach to grievances recognizes that the ideas with which some claims are imbued might be more conducive to motivating political resistance than others. The approach is inherently grounded in context—scholars begin by understanding the meanings that grievances take on in particular times and places. But it is also potentially generalizable; as scholars uncover the ways in which apparently different grievances may index similar ideas across time and place, those grievances can be categorized similarly and their potential relationship to social mobilization explored. Drawing on evidence from the 2000 Bolivian water wars, the article proposes that market driven threats to subsistence resources offer one such potential categorization.

Relational ethnography
Matthew Desmond

All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis—and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available to them. This article presents the alternative of relational ethnography. Relational ethnography involves studying fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. While this approach comes with its own set of challenges, it offers an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality.

Interpretations and critiques of modernity
Atle Møen

Peter Wagner has been one of the foremost theoretical sociologist for more than two decades. In particular, he has outlined an innovative way of linking social philosophy, political philosophy, and normative concerns to comparative- historical sociology. His overall goal is to describe modernity as different interpretations of modernity as an alternative to an institutional analysis of modernity. Wagner also draws heavily upon Boltanski's and Thevenot's sociology of critical capacities, in which members of society create institutions through disputes, evaluations, and everyday critiques of problematic experiences; therefore social critique is immanent in all modern institutions.

Law & Society Review 48(3)

Law & Society Review, September 2014: Volume 48, Issue 3

Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight
Kathryne M. Young

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a “second-order” layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second-order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second-order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs—for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.

Restorative Justice, Policing and Insurgency: Learning from Pakistan
John Braithwaite and Ali Gohar

Pakistan state law and Taliban rule of Sharia law are at different ends of a politico-legal spectrum. They share advocacy of one system of law and attraction to eradication of alternatives. Muslahathi Committees in Pakistan are used to explore legal pluralism, hybrid institutions that allow deliberative democracy to seek workable responses to injustice. Formal and traditional systems can show mutual respect and check each other. On the basis of purely qualitative evidence, it is argued that Muslahathi Committees are restorative justice programs that sustainably reduce revenge violence, make a contribution to preventing Pakistan from spiraling into civil war, and assist a police force with low legitimacy to become somewhat more accountable to local civil society. These contributions are limited, but could be more significant with modest investment in human rights and gender awareness training to control abuses and increase accountability. The ruthless, murderous, divisive politics of policing and restorative justice in Pakistan seems a least likely case for deliberative democracy to work. In limited ways it does.

Leprosy, Legal Mobilization, and the Public Sphere in Japan and South Korea
Celeste L. Arrington

This article addresses the question of what gets transmitted in cross-national diffusion and why. It does so by analyzing the spread of rights-based activism from Japanese to South Korean leprosy (Hansen's disease) survivors in the 2000s. Previous scholarship would predict extensive diffusion of mobilizing frames and tactics, especially since Korean lawyers learned an effective legal mobilization template while working with Japanese lawyers to win compensation for Korean leprosy survivors mistreated by Japanese colonial authorities before 1945. Yet the form of subsequent activism by Korean leprosy survivors for redress from the Korean government differed from the original Japanese model. This case suggests the need for scope conditions on theories about isomorphism and the agency of brokers. In particular, it draws attention to how the structure of a country's public sphere—and especially its legal profession, news media, and activist sector—affects the feasibility of imported innovations related to activism and legal mobilization.

How Do Cause Lawyers Decide When and Where to Litigate on behalf of Their Cause?
Scott Barclay and Daniel Chomsky

In this article, we begin to respond to the deceptively simple question: How do cause lawyers decide when and where to litigate on behalf of their cause? We consider the choice of location and timing faced by cause lawyers when more than one jurisdiction evinces a suitable legal environment for pursuing litigation on their cause. To consider this choice, we use evidence from the timing and actions of cause lawyers in the marriage equality cases in the United States from January 1990 through December 2004. And, we show the value in utilizing methods that are relatively novel in cause lawyering research—statistical models—to consider the apparent commonalities, beyond a suitable legal environment, across locations and time periods that might prompt cause lawyers into action.

Deciding Not to Decide: The Politics of Recusals on the U.S. Supreme Court
Robert J. Hume

When are U.S. Supreme Court justices more likely to recuse themselves from cases? This article proposes a strategic model of recusal behavior, hypothesizing that the justices balance statutory guidelines concerning recusals against other policy and institutional goals. Using data from the Supreme Court Database, I find evidence that recusal behavior is influenced by a combination of statutory, policy, and institutional considerations. Consistent with statutory explanations, which emphasize the elimination of bias or its appearance, justices are more likely to recuse themselves from cases when business interests are before the Court, when they have served for shorter terms, and when they have previously acted as Solicitor General. However, I also find that the justices are less likely to recuse themselves when cases are likely to be close or when the justices' policy goals are likely to be advanced by participating. These findings suggest that while the justices do follow statutory recusal guidelines, they also have other institutional and policy incentives that lead them to participate in cases despite their conflicts of interest.

State Solicitors General, Appellate Expertise, and State Success Before the U.S. Supreme Court
Ryan J. Owens and Patrick C. Wohlfarth

This article examines how institutional design leads state governments to win their cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze whether states are more likely to prevail on the merits when they create a formal solicitor general office and have an attorney from that office argue their cases before the Court. We employ an analytical matching approach and find that attorneys from state solicitor general offices are significantly more likely to win their cases compared to other kinds of state attorneys. Accordingly, if states prioritize victory before the Court, they should consider creating state solicitor general offices and granting those solicitors general the authority to control their appellate litigation.

Social Psychology Quarterly 77(3)

Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2014: Volume 77, Issue 3

The Causal Ordering of Prominence and Salience in Identity Theory: An Empirical Examination
Philip S. Brenner, Richard T. Serpe, and Sheldon Stryker

The Detrimental Effects of Sanctions on Intragroup Trust: Comparing Punishments and Rewards
Kyle Irwin, Laetitia Mulder, and Brent Simpson

Does Social Support Buffer the Stress of Discrimination and Reduce Psychological Distress Among Asian Americans?
Krysia N. Mossakowski and Wei Zhang

Direct-to-Consumer Racial Admixture Tests and Beliefs About Essential Racial Differences
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Sarah Zelner, and Lawrence H. Yang

Criminology 52(3)

Criminology, August 2014: Volume 52, Issue 3

The 2013 Sutherland Address: Varieties Of Violent Behavior
Cathy Spatz Widom

There is an implicit assumption of homogeneity across violent behaviors and offenders in the criminology literature. Arguing against this assumption, I draw on three distinct literatures [child abuse and neglect (CAN) and violence, violence and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and CAN and PTSD] to provide a rationale for an examination of varieties of violent behaviors. I use data from my prospective cohort design study of the long-term consequences of CAN to define three varieties of violent offenders using age of documented cases of CAN, onset of PTSD, and first violent arrest in a temporally correct manner [CAN → to violence, CAN → PTSD → violence (PTSD first), and CAN → violence → PTSD (violence first)], and a fourth variety, violence only. The results illustrate meaningful heterogeneity in violent behavior and different developmental patterns and characteristics. There are three major implications: First, programs and policies that target violence need to recognize the heterogeneity and move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Second, violence prevention policies and programs that target abused and neglected children are warranted, given the prominent role of CAN in the backgrounds of these violent offenders. Third, criminologists and others interested in violence need to attend to the role of PTSD, which is present in about one fifth (21 percent) of these violent offenders, and not relegate the study of these offenders to the psychiatric and psychological literatures.

Labeling Effects Of First Juvenile Arrests: Secondary Deviance And Secondary Sanctioning
Akiva M. Liberman, David S. Kirk And Kideuk Kim

A growing literature suggests that juvenile arrests perpetuate offending and increase the likelihood of future arrests. The effect on subsequent arrests is generally regarded as a product of the perpetuation of criminal offending. However, increased rearrest also may reflect differential law enforcement behavior. Using longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) together with official arrest records, the current study estimates the effects of first arrests on both reoffending and rearrest. Propensity score methods were used to control differences between arrestees and nonarrestees and to minimize selection bias. Among 1,249 PHDCN youths, 58 individuals were first arrested during the study period; 43 of these arrestees were successfully matched to 126 control cases that were equivalent on a broad set of individual, family, peer, and neighborhood factors. We find that first arrests increased the likelihood of both subsequent offending and subsequent arrest, through separate processes. The effects on rearrest are substantially greater and are largely independent of the effects on reoffending, which suggests that labels trigger “secondary sanctioning” processes distinct from secondary deviance processes. Attempts to ameliorate deleterious labeling effects should include efforts to dampen their escalating punitive effects on societal responses.

Explaining The Association Between Incarceration And Divorce
Sonja E. Siennick, Eric A. Stewart And Jeremy Staff

Recent studies have suggested that incarceration dramatically increases the odds of divorce, but we know little about the mechanisms that explain the association. This study uses prospective longitudinal data from a subset of married young adults in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 1,919) to examine whether incarceration is associated with divorce indirectly via low marital love, economic strain, relationship violence, and extramarital sex. The findings confirmed that incarcerations occurring during, but not before, a marriage were associated with an increased hazard of divorce. Incarcerations occurring during marriage also were associated with less marital love, more relationship violence, more economic strain, and greater odds of extramarital sex. Above-average levels of economic strain were visible among respondents observed preincarceration, but only respondents observed postincarceration showed less marital love, more relationship violence, and higher odds of extramarital sex than did respondents who were not incarcerated during marriage. These relationship problems explained approximately 40 percent of the association between incarceration and marital dissolution. These findings are consistent with theoretical predictions that a spouse's incarceration alters the rewards and costs of the marriage and the relative attractiveness of alternative partners.

Imprisonment Length And Post-Prison Employment Prospects
Anke Ramakers, Robert Apel, Paul Nieuwbeerta, Anja Dirkzwager And Johan Van Wilsem

This study considers the relationship between imprisonment length and employment outcomes. The data are a unique prospective, longitudinal study of Dutch pretrial detainees (N = 702). All subjects thus experience prison confinement of varying lengths, although the durations are relatively short (mean = 3.8 months; median = 3.1 months). This contrasts with prior research that was limited to the study of American prison sentences spanning an average of 2 years. These data thus fill a gap in the empirical base concerning short-term confinement, which is the norm in the United States (e.g., jail incarceration) and other Western countries. Using a comprehensive array of pre-prison covariates, a propensity score methodology is used to examine the dose–response relationship between imprisonment length and a variety of employment outcomes. The results indicate that, among prison lengths less than 6 months in duration, longer confinement is largely uncorrelated with employment. In contrast, among spells in excess of 6 months, longer imprisonment length seems to worsen employment prospects.

The Effects Of Directed Patrol And Self-Initiated Enforcement On Firearm Violence: A Randomized Controlled Study Of Hot Spot Policing
Richard Rosenfeld, Michael J. Deckard And Emily Blackburn

Targeted policing has proven effective in reducing serious crime in areas where it is highly concentrated, but the enforcement mechanisms responsible for the success of so-called hot spots strategies remain poorly understood. This study evaluates the effects of a 9-month randomized controlled hot spots field experiment on firearm assaults and robberies in St. Louis, Missouri. Thirty-two firearm violence hot spots were randomly allocated to two treatment conditions and a control condition. Directed patrols were increased in both treatment conditions, whereas the experimental protocol limited other enforcement activity in one of the treatment conditions and increased it in the other. The results from difference-in-difference regression analyses indicate that the intervention substantially reduced the incidence of nondomestic firearm assaults, with no evident crime displacement to surrounding areas, to times when the intervention was not active, or to nonfirearm assaults. By contrast, we find no effects of the intervention on firearm robberies. Less definitive results suggest that the certainty of arrests and occupied vehicle checks account for the treatment effects on nondomestic firearm assaults.

Self-Control Through Emerging Adulthood: Instability, Multidimensionality, And Criminological Significance
Callie H. Burt, Gary Sweeten And Ronald L. Simons

This study assesses self-control theory's stability postulate. We advance research on self-control stability in three ways. First, we extend the study of stability beyond high school, estimating GBTMs of self-control from ages 10 to 25. Second, drawing on advances in developmental psychology and social neuroscience, especially the dual systems model of risk taking, we investigate whether two distinct personality traits—impulsivity and sensation seeking—often conflated in measures of self-control, exhibit divergent developmental patterns. Finding that they do, we estimate multitrajectory models to identify latent classes of co-occurring developmental patterns. We supplement GBTM stability analyses with hierarchical linear models and reliable variance estimates. Lastly, using fixed effects models, we explore whether the observed within-individual changes are associated with changes in crime net of overall age trends. These ideas are tested using five waves of data from the Family and Community Health Study. Results suggest that self-control is unstable, that distinct patterns of development exist for impulsivity and sensation seeking, and that these changes are uniquely consequential for crime. We conclude by comparing our findings with extant research and discussing the implications for self-control theory.

Revisiting "What They Think": Adolescent Drinking And The Importance Of Peer Beliefs
Daniel T. Ragan

The association between delinquent peers and delinquent behavior is among the most consistent findings in the criminological literature, and several recent studies have raised the standards for determining the nature and extent of peer influence. Despite these advances, however, key questions about how deviant behavior is socially transmitted remain unresolved. In particular, much of the research examining peer influence has been limited to peer behavior, despite a rich literature supporting the salience of beliefs, such as expectations and moral approval, in shaping behaviors. In the current study, I model the peer influence and selection processes with longitudinal social network analysis to reexamine the contributions of peer beliefs and behaviors to adolescent drinking. I find evidence that beliefs related to peer drinking have both a direct and an indirect impact on behavior and play an important role in the friendship selection process. These results highlight the importance of understanding how peers influence deviant behavior and suggest that peer beliefs are an important part of this relationship.

Cumulative Disadvantage: Examining Racial And Ethnic Disparity In Prosecution And Sentencing
Besiki L. Kutateladze, Nancy R. Andiloro, Brian D. Johnson And Cassia C. Spohn

Current research on criminal case processing typically examines a single decision-making point, so drawing reliable conclusions about the impact that factors such as defendants’ race or ethnicity exert across successive stages of the justice system is difficult. Using data from the New York County District Attorney's Office that tracks 185,275 diverse criminal cases, this study assesses racial and ethnic disparity for multiple discretionary points of prosecution and sentencing. Findings from multivariate logistic regression analyses demonstrate that the effects of race and ethnicity vary by discretionary point and offense category. Black and Latino defendants were more likely than White defendants to be detained, to receive a custodial plea offer, and to be incarcerated—and they received especially punitive outcomes for person offenses—but were more likely to benefit from case dismissals. The findings for Asian defendants were less consistent but suggest they were the least likely to be detained, to receive custodial offers, and to be incarcerated. These findings are discussed in the context of contemporary theoretical perspectives on racial bias and cumulative disadvantage in the justice system.