Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 52(3)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, May 2015: Volume 52, Issue 3

The Mediating Role of Heart Rate on the Social Adversity-Antisocial Behavior Relationship: A Social Neurocriminology Perspective
Olivia Choy, Adrian Raine, Jill Portnoy, Anna Rudo-Hutt, Yu Gao, and Liana Soyfer

Objectives: Tests the hypothesis that the social adversity-antisocial behavior relationship is partly mediated by a biological mechanism, low heart rate. Method: 18 indicators of social adversity and heart rate measured at rest and in anticipation of a speech stressor were assessed alongside nine measures of antisocial behavior including delinquency (Youth Self-Report [YSR] and Child Behavior Checklist [CBCL]), conduct disorder (Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder Questionnaire), and child psychopathy (Antisocial Process Screening Device [APSD]) in a community sample of 388 children aged 11 to 12 years. PROCESS was used to test mediation models. Results: Low heart rate was a partial mediator of the adversity-antisocial behavior relationship, explaining 20.35 percent and 15.40 percent of the effect of social adversity on delinquency and overall antisocial behavior, respectively. Conclusions: Findings are, to the authors’ knowledge, one of the first to establish any biological risk factor as a mediator of the social adversity-antisocial behavior relationship and suggest that social processes alter autonomic functioning in a way to predispose to antisocial behavior. While not definitive, results give rise to a social neurocriminology theory that argues that the social environment influences biological risk factors in a way to predispose to antisocial and criminal behavior.

Developmental Trajectories of Individuals’ Code of the Street Beliefs through Emerging Adulthood
Richard K. Moule, Jr, Callie H. Burt, Eric A. Stewart, and Ronald L. Simons

Objectives: This study seeks to contribute to research on the patterning and stability of code of the street beliefs. We describe trajectories of street code beliefs from late childhood to emerging adulthood and investigate social factors that influence membership in and distinguish between trajectories. Methods: Using six waves of panel data from the Family and Community Health Study, group-based trajectory models were estimated to describe developmental patterns of street code beliefs from age 10 to 26. Correlates of street code beliefs, including racial discrimination, parenting practices, and neighborhood crime, were used to predict trajectory membership. Results: Analyses identified five distinct trajectories of street code beliefs. Four trajectories were largely stable across the study period; however, one group, comprised of 12 percent of the sample, dramatically declined in beliefs. Being male and experiencing racial discrimination significantly distinguish between all of the trajectories. Parental monitoring and perceptions of neighborhood crime differentiate between the declining trajectory and the stable trajectories. Conclusions: Findings provide insights into the developmental patterns and correlates, of street code beliefs. Results suggest beliefs are malleable but remain largely stable and underscore the need for more nuanced, longitudinal approaches to the code of the street.

Configural Behavior Settings of Crime Event Locations: Toward an Alternative Conceptualization of Criminogenic Microenvironments
Timothy C. Hart and Terance D. Miethe

Objectives: The utility of configural behavior settings is explored as an alternative unit of analysis for place-based criminological research. Four research questions are addressed: (1) How do robberies cluster within certain behavior settings? (2) How are conclusions about robbery’s behavior settings influenced by the distance interval used to measure the proximate environment? (3) Are dominant behavior settings homogeneous across patrol districts? and (4) Is there temporal variability among dominant behavior settings? Method: Conjunctive analysis of case configurations is used to construct configural behavior settings around 453 robbery locations in Henderson, Nevada, between 2007 and 2009. Results: The major findings of this study are that (1) the majority of personal robberies occur within a small number of dominant configural behavior settings and (2) the composition of behavior settings and the proportion of incidents for which they account varies by the distance interval used to measure the proximate environment, patrol district, and time of day. Conclusions: Configural behavior settings provide an alternative unit of analysis that can be used in future place-based research to improve our understanding of criminogenic microenvironments. Replication of this study in other cities that vary in urban design would further demonstrate the merits of this approach.

Kids, Groups, and Crime: In Defense of Conventional Wisdom
Franklin E. Zimring and Hannah Laqueur

Objectives: The objective of this analysis is to address the data and conclusions of Lisa Stolzenberg and Stewart D’Alessio in their article “Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve,” published in The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency in 2008. The authors analyze National Incident–based Reporting System (NIBRS) 2002 arrests from seven states and conclude that most arrests at all ages involve only one offender, and therefore group offending is of little etiological significance. Methods: To test their claims, we conduct offense-specific analyses of single and multiple arrests using the full 2002 NIBRS arrest data set. Results: After disaggregating the data by type of offense, we find group involvement among young offenders dominates the arrest statistics for all serious crimes other than rape and aggravated assault. Conclusions: Contrary to the conclusions of Stolzenberg and D’Alessio, co-offending does appear to have a substantial impact on young offenders. The extent of adolescent crime as group behavior may be a cliché in criminological circles, but this is because the empirical evidence for it is substantial.

Absent Fathers or Absent Variables? A New Look at Paternal Incarceration and Delinquency
Lauren C. Porter and Ryan D. King

Objectives: This research examines the association between paternal incarceration and children’s delinquency. Prior research suggests an association, although omitted variable bias is an enduring issue. Methods: To help address issues related to unobserved heterogeneity, we employ a method uncommonly used in criminological research. Rather than comparing the children of incarcerated fathers to respondents who have never had a father incarcerated, we exploit the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to generate a strategic comparison group: respondents who will have a father incarcerated in the future. We also examine two types of delinquency, expressive and instrumental, to infer plausible mechanisms linking paternal incarceration and delinquency. Results: When using “futures” as comparison cases, results differ from much prior work and suggest a spurious association between paternal incarceration and instrumental delinquency (e.g., theft). Paternal incarceration retains a significant effect on expressive delinquency, which is partly mediated by reduced attachment to fathers. Conclusions: The association between paternal incarceration and expressive (but not instrumental) crime supports Agnew’s strain theory and elements of control theory. Our comparison group also offers important advantages in terms of addressing unobserved heterogeneity, and we think this approach would prove useful for other topics in criminology.

Theory and Society 44(2)

Theory and Society, March 2015: Volume 44, Issue 2

Protecting citizens in hard times: citizenship and repatriation pressures in the United States and France during the 1930s
Matthew J. Baltz

Economic crises have historically left immigrants vulnerable due to their insecure positions in the labor market and tenuous social and political ties to host country populations. During the Great Depression, citizenship status also emerged as a key factor determining the rights and protections offered to foreign-born populations in the two main receiving states of the interwar period: the United States and France. This article investigates the ways in which citizenship began to intrude into areas of social and political life where it previously held little relevance. To explain this phenomenon, it draws upon and supplements theories on the relationship between the formation of states and the making of modern national communities, focusing on the expanding powers of nation states within and across international borders after World War I. In both France and the United States, there were notable expansions in their power to control migration and fund social assistance programs. Similarly, sending states were also expanding their power to provide “remote protections” for their citizens abroad through bilateral labor treaties or expanded consular support. As states began to do more things with greater capacity, new and firmer boundaries were forged between citizens and noncitizens as well as between sending and receiving states. A key consequence of this was unprecedented pressure to repatriate. Contrary to much of the previous scholarship on this subject, this article stresses the evolving powers of both sending and receiving states and the corresponding elevation of citizenship status as key enablers of repatriation.

Conceptualizing “unrecognized cultural currency”: Bourdieu and everyday resistance among the dominated
Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is important for understanding the cultural processes of domination but less helpful in understanding the agency and creativity of the dominated. This article develops the concept of “unrecognized cultural currency” (UCC) to theorize how certain cultural competencies specific to the dominated can facilitate in their everyday resistance. I theorize UCC as cultural resources that have little symbolic value but that nonetheless may be used by the dominated to acquire other valuable resources and push back, to some extent, forces of domination. A case study of low-income LEP (limited English proficiency) immigrant patients concretizes this theoretical argument, highlighting the contrast between practices of “covert maneuvering,” which are enabled by UCC, and practices of “passivity or withdrawal,” which characterize most patient behaviors in situations where UCC is unavailable. The concept of UCC supplements Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital with further explanations for intra-class stratification among dominated groups. Meanwhile, this article also helps advance recent discussions about everyday resistance.

Choosing health: embodied neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the “do-diet”
Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated how women are constrained through dieting discourse. Today’s scholars wrestle with similar themes, but confront a thornier question: how do we make sense of a food discourse that frames food choices through a lens of empowerment and health, rather than vanity and restriction? This article addresses this question, drawing from interviews and focus groups with women (N = 100), as well as health-focused food writing. These data allow us to document a postfeminist food discourse that we term the do-diet. The do-diet reframes dietary restrictions as positive choices, while maintaining an emphasis on body discipline, expert knowledge, and self-control. Our analysis demonstrates how the do-diet remediates a tension at the heart of neoliberal consumer culture: namely, the tension between embodying discipline through dietary control and expressing freedom through consumer choice. With respect to theory, our analysis demonstrates how the embodied dimensions of neoliberalism find gendered expression through postfeminism. We conclude that the do-diet heightens the challenge of developing feminist critiques of gendered body ideals and corporeal surveillance, as it promises a way of eating that is both morally responsible and personally empowering.

Gifts, donations, and loose coupling: responses to changes in academic entrepreneurship among bioscientists in Japan
Nahoko Kameo

This article delineates how local actors accomplish the adaptation of a global structure and how the social relations in which actors are embedded affect their negotiation of new practices. Specifically, the article draws on interviews and archival research to examine legal and institutional change regarding academic entrepreneurship in Japanese bioscience. In the late 1990s, Japan began to imitate the United States’ method of promoting academic entrepreneurship. New legislation regulating university-industry ties constrained and even prohibited university scientists’ previous practices of informal collaboration with firms. This article shows how Japanese scientists reappropriated the new rules to continue working with firms in ways that would keep established relationships and work arrangements intact. Previously, Japanese scientists maintained informal, trust-based relationships with firms: scientists received “donations” from firms and, in return, provided the “favor” of intellectual property rights. After the introduction of formal rules, scientists tried to avoid breaching their gift-exchange-like relationships with collaborating firms by neglecting, partially following, or working around the new rules to keep giving favors to firms. By tracing the ways Japanese bio-scientists worked around the new system, I thus show how the social ties and practices that local actors are embedded in affect how they think about their work and their relationships: how previous practices and relationships “pull” loosely-coupled practices.

Critical Criminology 23(2)

Critical Criminology, May 2015, Volume 23, Issue 2

Remembering Jock Young: Some Sociological and Personal Reflections
Walter S. DeKeseredy

Jock Young intellectually, politically, and personally touched the lives of many people. Thus, it is not surprising that his departure from this world on November 16, 2013 generated much shock, disbelief, and sadness. This article offers some personal and sociological reflections on Jock’s many contributions to critical criminology.

Jock Young and the Development of Left Realist Criminology
John Lea

This article traces Jock Young’s contribution to the development of Left Realist criminology beginning with the political interventions of the mid 1980s progressing through the development of the ‘square of crime’ as the conceptual framework for a Left Realist research programme to some of the final formulations in his later works. The emphasis of the article is less on critical receptions of Left Realism by the wider criminological community than on demonstrating the consistency of Jock’s commitment to following through the implications of the Left Realist paradigm.

Jock Young, Left Realism and Critical Victimology
Sandra Walklate

In this paper I reflect upon the legacy of the work of Jock Young for the development of a critical criminology. In doing this I also endeavour to offer a contribution to an internal history of both criminology and victimology but from a very particular, and personal, position. The paper falls into four parts. In the first I consider the time period from 1980–1997 and academic, political and policy debates therein. I have called this a time of ‘emergent optimism’. The second part considers the years from 1997–2007 in which this optimism was subjected to challenge. The third part considers 2007 to date and the challenges that remain for both criminology and victimology in the absence of the voice of Jock Young.

Opening Up the Imagination: On Being Mentored by Jock Young
Albert de la Tierra

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 659

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2015: Volume 659

Perspectives on Computational Social Science

From Big Data to Knowledge in the Social Sciences
Bradford W. Hesse, Richard P. Moser, and William T. Riley

On Building Better Mousetraps and Understanding the Human Condition: Reflections on Big Data in the Social Sciences
Jimmy Lin

Building Better Models: Prediction, Replication, and Machine Learning in the Social Sciences
Matthew Hindman

Is Bigger Always Better? Potential Biases of Big Data Derived from Social Network Sites
Eszter Hargittai

Computer Coding of Content and Sentiment

Data-Driven Content Analysis of Social Media: A Systematic Overview of Automated Methods
H. Andrew Schwartz and Lyle H. Ungar

Signals of Public Opinion in Online Communication: A Comparison of Methods and Data Sources
Sandra González-Bailón and Georgios Paltoglou

Bad News or Mad News? Sentiment Scoring of Negativity, Fear, and Anger in News Content
Stuart Soroka, Lori Young, and Meital Balmas

Using Supervised Machine Learning to Code Policy Issues: Can Classifiers Generalize across Contexts?
Bjorn Burscher, Rens Vliegenthart, and Claes H. De Vreese

Mapping Online Clusters and Networks

Searching and Clustering Methodologies: Connecting Political Communication Content across Platforms
Kevin Driscoll and Kjerstin Thorson

Candidate Networks, Citizen Clusters, and Political Expression: Strategic Hashtag Use in the 2010 Midterms
Leticia Bode, Alexander Hanna, Junghwan Yang, and Dhavan V. Shah

Online Fragmentation in Wartime: A Longitudinal Analysis of Tweets about Syria, 2011–2013
Deen Freelon, Marc Lynch, and Sean Aday

Individual Motivations and Network Effects: A Multilevel Analysis of the Structure of Online Social Relationships
Brooke Foucault Welles and Noshir Contractor

Examining Social Media Influence

What Social Media Data We Are Missing and How to Get It
Paul Resnick, Eytan Adar, and Cliff Lampe

The Dynamics of Issue Frame Competition in Traditional and Social Media
Lauren Guggenheim, S. Mo Jang, Soo Young Bae, and W. Russell Neuman

The Power of Television Images in a Social Media Age: Linking Biobehavioral and Computational Approaches via the Second Screen
Dhavan V. Shah, Alex Hanna, Erik P. Bucy, Chris Wells, and Vidal Quevedo

The Network of Celebrity Politics: Political Implications of Celebrity Following on Twitter
Sungjin Park, Jihye Lee, Seungjin Ryu, and Kyu S. Hahn

Innovations in Computational Social Science

Automating Open Science for Big Data
Mercè Crosas, Gary King, James Honaker, and Latanya Sweeney

Big Data under the Microscope and Brains in Social Context: Integrating Methods from Computational Social Science and Neuroscience
Matthew Brook O’Donnell and Emily B. Falk

Constructing Recommendation Systems for Effective Health Messages Using Content, Collaborative, and Hybrid Algorithms
Joseph N. Cappella, Sijia Yang, and Sungkyoung Lee

Content Analysis and the Algorithmic Coder: What Computational Social Science Means for Traditional Modes of Media Analysis
Rodrigo Zamith and Seth C. Lewis

Crime & Delinquency 61(4)

Crime & Delinquency, May 2015: Volume 61, Issue 4

Arab Americans’ Confidence in Police
Ivan Y. Sun and Yuning Wu

Although the September 11 attacks have drawn much law enforcement attention to Arab Americans, research on Arab Americans’ perceptions of police is almost nonexistent. Using survey data collected from 850 Arab Americans who resided in the Detroit metropolitan area, this study empirically examined the effects of demographic characteristics, personal experience, social attitudes and values, and social trust, of confidence in local police. The results indicated that the majority of Arab Americans had a great deal or a lot of confidence in police. Arab Americans’ confidence in police was significantly related to their social attitudes and trust, such as conservative outlook, confidence in the legal system, respect for authority, and trust in neighbors. Arab Americans’ background characteristics and experience had a weak effect on their confidence in police. More empirical research is warranted to assess Arab Americans’ evaluations of local police along more indicators of police performance.

Explaining Leniency: Organizational Predictors of the Differential Treatment of Men and Women in Traffic Stops
Amy Farrell

Scholars have devoted significant attention to measuring the degree to which a driver’s personal characteristics affect police decisions to stop and sanction motorists. Following the pattern of research on gender and enforcement practices more broadly, traffic stop studies show that female drivers are less likely to receive formal sanctions such as a citation following routine traffic stops. Despite the consistency of these findings across places and times, we know little about the conditions under which female traffic violators are granted leniency. This article extends research on the effect of driver and stop characteristics on gender disparities in traffic enforcement decisions by examining 149,888 stops from across 37 communities in Rhode Island with different local needs and variation in police organizational culture and structure. The findings confirm that although women are less likely to be cited than men, community-level variation in police agency culture and structure, particularly the proportion of female officers in an agency, moderates the effect of driver sex on stop outcomes.

Substance Use, Personality, and Inhibitors: Testing Hirschi’s Predictions About the Reconceptualization of Self-Control
Shayne Jones, Donald R. Lynam, and Alex R. Piquero

Hirschi argues that self-control has not been properly measured or conceptualized in previous research. He insists that personality-based notions of self-control should be replaced with inhibitors/social bonds as the key construct, which in turn influence whether an individual considers the full range of costs associated with an antisocial behavior. This analysis supplements a small literature exploring this new conceptualization of self-control, specifically by examining substance use. The findings indicate that inhibitors/bonds do exert an effect on substance use but are not mediated by perceived costs. Furthermore, different variants of impulsivity continue to exert independent influences, with some mediated by perceived costs. Finally, perceived rewards not only influenced substance use directly but were also the most consistent mediator of inhibitors/bonds and impulsivity.

The Benefits of Keeping Idle Hands Busy: An Outcome Evaluation of a Prisoner Reentry Employment Program
Grant Duwe

This study evaluated the effectiveness of EMPLOY, a prisoner reentry employment program, by examining recidivism and postrelease employment outcomes among 464 offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2006 and 2008. As outcome data were collected on the 464 offenders through the end of June 2010, the average follow-up period was 28 months. Observable selection bias was minimized by using propensity score matching to create a comparison group of 232 nonparticipants who were not significantly different from the 232 EMPLOY offenders. Results from the Cox regression analyses revealed that participating in EMPLOY reduced the hazard ratio for recidivism by 32% to 63%. The findings further showed that EMPLOY increased the odds of gaining postrelease employment by 72%. Although EMPLOY did not have a significant impact on hourly wage, the overall postrelease wages for program participants were significantly higher because they worked a greater number of hours. The study concludes by discussing the implications of these findings.

A Test of the Routine Activities and Neighborhood Attachment Explanations for Bias in Disorder Perceptions
Danielle Wallace

“Neighborhood disorder” refers to how people perceive neighborhoods as unsafe and disorganized. However, certain disorder cues may indicate disorder to some residents but not to others. There are many explanations for disorder perception bias, though few have been tested. This article uses data on 4,721 residents in 100 neighborhoods in Seattle to assess two explanations for biases: neighborhood attachment and routine activities. Using fixed-effect models, this article shows that neighborhood attachment and routine activities provide additional insight into disorder perceptions. Hanging out with teens and engaging in protective neighborhood activities, like watching neighbors’ property, have a strong positive influence on disorder perceptions. This study concludes by discussing alternative explanations for disorder perception bias and their impact on disorder theory as a whole.

Trust in the Police: The Influence of Procedural Justice and Perceived Collective Efficacy
Justin Nix, Scott E. Wolfe, Jeff Rojek, and Robert J. Kaminski

Tyler’s process-based model of policing suggests that the police can enhance their perceived legitimacy and trustworthiness in the eyes of the public when they exercise their authority in a procedurally fair manner. To date, most process-based research has focused on the sources of legitimacy while largely overlooking trust in the police. The present study extends this line of literature by examining the sources of trust in the police. In particular, emerging research has revealed that neighborhood context influences attitudes toward the police but much less attention has been given to exploring the role individuals’ perceptions of their neighborhood play in shaping such evaluations. Therefore, the present study considers whether individuals’ perceptions of collective efficacy serve as a social-psychological cognitive orientation that influences levels of trust in the police. Using data from a recently conducted mail survey of a random sample of 1,681 residents from a metropolitan city, we find that procedural justice evaluations are a primary source of trust in the police. At the same time, however, level of perceived collective efficacy is positively associated with trust even after accounting for procedural justice. The findings suggest that police procedural fairness is vitally important to establishing trust from the public but peoples’ cognitive orientation toward their neighborhood context partially shapes the level of trustworthiness they afford to the police.

Sociological Theory 33(1)

Sociological Theory, March 2015: Volume 33, Issue 1

Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence
Rogers Brubaker

This paper seeks to develop a nuanced and qualified account of the distinctive ways in which religion can inform political conflict and violence. It seeks to transcend the opposition between particularizing stances, which see religiously informed political conflicts as sui generis and uniquely intractable, and generalizing stances, which assimilate religiously informed political conflicts to other forms of political conflict. The paper specifies the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order, as well as the distinctiveness of religion as a rich matrix of interlocking modalities and mechanisms that—in certain contexts—can contribute to political conflict and violence even when the stakes are not distinctively religious. At the same time, the paper shows that many putatively religious conflicts are fundamentally similar to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic recognition, or cultural reproduction.

Repulsed by the “Other”: Integrating Theory with Method in the Study of Intergroup Association
Zbigniew Karpiński and John Skvoretz

We offer an integration of theory and method in the study of intergroup social associations. Specifically, we show that models for intergroup association tables developed using generic log-linear methods for categorical data analysis embody a general theoretical point of view on the driving force behind intergroup association, namely, as the outcome of a probabilistic process of repulsion from dissimilar others. We develop this argument and illustrate it with intermarriage data. We conclude by identifying the advantages that accrue to both theory and method when the theoretical assumptions underlying the application of a generic statistical methodology are clearly understood.

Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World
Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo

In this article, we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in three ways: first, by linking it with recent research on the cognitive and motor development of infants; second, by drawing out a typology of belief states that accounts for a range of different experiential traits; and third, by applying the new model to reinterpret two belief-based phenomena of broad sociological interest: “irrational” decision making and religious conversion.

Revising as Reframing: Original Submissions versus Published Papers in Administrative Science Quarterly, 2005 to 2009
David Strang and Kyle Siler

Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields.

British Journal of Criminology 55(3)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2015: Volume 55, Issue 3

Understanding Complainant Credibility in Rape Appeals: A Case Study of High Court Judgments and Judges’ Perspectives in India
Ravinder Barn and Ved Kumari

Despite the growing number of reported cases of rape and sexual assault against women in India, there is an insufficient understanding of the perspectives and responses of the Indian Criminal Justice System in general and the judiciary in particular. By employing a framework of ‘complainant credibility’, this paper examines High Court judgments and judges’ perspectives in rape appeals. In placing a robust and systematic focus on one aspect of the Indian jurisdiction, this paper sheds light on how competing realities are understood by the judiciary to inform decision making about complainant credibility and suspect’s guilt in affirming or overturning trial court decisions.

Gender, Pressure, Coercion and Pleasure: Untangling Motivations for Sexting Between Young People
Murray Lee and Thomas Crofts

What has been problematically termed ‘sexting’ has attracted considerable legal, political, public, media and academic attention. Concern has focused on sexting between young people who may experience emotional and reputational damage and are at risk of being charged with child abuse or pornography offences in many jurisdictions. Recent research has rightly highlighted sexting’s gendered dynamics. Accordingly, a discourse has developed that imagines the common sexting scenario involves girls feeling pressured into sending boys sexual images. This article develops an analytic framework of pressure and critically reviews research into sexting. It suggests that while such scenarios occur, they do not reflect the experiences expressed by the majority of girls who actually engage in sexting, who are more likely to express motivations associated with pleasure or desire.

State-directed Sterilizations in North Carolina: Victim-centredness and Reparations
Sarah Brightman, Emily Lenning, and Karen McElrath

Thirty-three states in the United States implemented eugenic sterilization laws during the 20th century, and an estimated 65,000 US residents underwent coerced sterilization via state policies. In North Carolina, 7,528 individuals were targeted for state-led sterilization between 1929 and 1974. The majority of these individuals were women, impoverished and officially classified as ‘feeble-minded’. We argue that the sterilizations constituted serious violations of human rights largely due to state exploitation of already marginalized people, lack of consent and limited due process that accompanied sterilization orders. In this article, we analyze textual data from state proceedings that focused on reparations, and find considerable power differentials that placed sterilization victims at the margins rather than at the centre of the reparation process.

Disjointed Service: An English Case Study of Multi-agency Provision in Tackling Child Trafficking
Jackie H. Harvey, Rob A. Hornsby, and Zeibeda Sattar

This article examines the issue of child trafficking in the United Kingdom and of multi-agency responses in tackling it. The United Kingdom, as a signatory to the recent trafficking protocols, is required to implement measures to identify and support potential victims of trafficking—via the National Referral Mechanism. Effective support for child victims is reliant on cooperation between agencies. Our regional case study contends that fragmented agency understandings of protocols and disjointed partnership approaches in service delivery means the trafficking of vulnerable children continues across the region. This article asserts that child trafficking in the United Kingdom, previously viewed as an isolated localized phenomenon, maybe far more widespread, revealing deficiencies in child protection services for vulnerable children.

Capote’s Ghosts: Violence, Media and the Spectre of Suspicion
Travis Linnemann

In 1959, on the Kansas high plains, two ex-convict drifters fell upon a defenseless farm family, slaying them ‘in cold blood’. As the subject of a book widely regarded as the first of the modern true crime genre—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood— the murdered and murderers live on in the spectral, haunting the minds of the public as the horrors of random crimes and senseless violence. Paying close attention to the cultural production of both the present and absent, this paper considers how violence haunts commonplace geographies and the imaginations of everyday actors, through the lens of banal crime reporting and celebrated true crime novels. Doing so, it offers unique context and insight into the production of suspect identities and the social insecurities that underpin everyday life.

Earning a Score: An Exploration of the Nature and Roles of Heroin and Crack Cocaine ‘User-dealers’
Leah Moyle and Ross Coomber

Research consistently shows a strong correlation between heroin/crack cocaine use, acquisitive crime and income generation, through activities such as sex work and theft. Less is known however about alternative choices of income generation such as small-scale drug supply. Drawing on data from interviews with 30 heroin and crack cocaine user-dealers in a city in South West England, this article explores the motivations, practices and roles undertaken by small-scale addicted suppliers who distribute drugs to other addicted users for the purpose of reproducing their own supply. Findings suggest that addicted user-dealers’ motivations are commonly different to those of commercially motivated suppliers, while their activities are perceived as a less harmful and a more convenient way of funding their drug dependency than other acquisitive crimes.

Social Structure and Bonhomie: Emotions in the Youth Street Gang
Kevin Moran

Scholars have overlooked the significance of emotion in motivating participation in deviant subcultures. Youth subcultures, particularly those of lower or working class provenance, emerge as an ongoing attempt to manage and mitigate structurally produced feelings of shame, by converting this sense of devaluation into pride. Using the youth street gang as a case study, this article gives greater precision to this emotional conversionary process, arguing that gangs transpose ambient parent culture of solidarity into subcultural emphasis on self and group affirming loyalty. Thus, espirit de corps, a central and vivifying value within youth street gangs, is magnified and maintained via group symbolic praxis and expressive violence. Moreover, youth street gang culture protects this emotional conversionary process from iatrogenic threats, i.e. injury, prison, the death of others, by subsuming potentially negative consequences within this subcultural system.

From Cybercrime to Cyborg Crime: Botnets as Hybrid Criminal Actor-Networks
Wytske van der Wagen and Wolter Pieters

Botnets, networks of infected computers controlled by a commander, increasingly play a role in a broad range of cybercrimes. Although often studied from technological perspectives, a criminological perspective could elucidate the organizational structure of botnets and how to counteract them. Botnets, however, pose new challenges for the rather anthropocentric theoretical repertoire of criminology, as they are neither fully human nor completely machine driven. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to provide a symmetrical perspective on human and non-human agency in hybrid cybercriminal networks and analyze a botnet case from this perspective. We conclude that an ANT lens is particularly suitable for shedding light on the hybrid and intertwined offending, victimization and defending processes, leading to the new concept of ‘cyborg crime’.

A Crime Script Analysis of the Online Stolen Data Market
Alice Hutchings and Thomas J. Holt

The purpose of this study is to better understand the online black market economy, specifically relating to stolen data, using crime script analysis. Content analysis of 13 English- and Russian-speaking stolen data forums found that the different products and services offered enabled the commodification of stolen data. The marketplace offers a range of complementary products, from the supply of hardware and software to steal data, the sale of the stolen data itself, to the provision of services to turn data into money, such as drops, cashiers and money laundering. The crime script analysis provides some insight into how the actors in these forums interact, and the actions they perform, from setting up software to finalizing transactions and exiting the marketplace.

On the Relevance of Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Assessing Computer Susceptibility to System Trespassing Incidents
David Maimon, Theodore Wilson, Wuling Ren, and Tamar Berenblum

We employ knowledge regarding the early phases of system trespassing events and develop a context-related, theoretically driven study that explores computer networks’ social vulnerabilities to remote system trespassing events. Drawing on the routine activities perspective, we raise hypotheses regarding the role of victim client computers in determining the geographical origins and temporal trends of (1) successful password cracking attempts and (2) system trespassing incidents. We test our hypotheses by analyzing data collected from large sets of target computers, built for the sole purpose of being attacked, that were deployed in two independent research sites (China and Israel). Our findings have significant implications for cyber-criminological theory and research.