Law & Society Review 44(3–4)

Presidential Address

A Personal Odyssey Toward a Theme: Race and Equality in the United States: 1948–2009
Richard Lempert

This 2009 Law & Society Association presidential address combines the personal and political to address issues relating to race relations in the United States. Combining narrative methods and quantitative data the article traces the roots of the author's commitment to racial equality and evaluates the degree to which over the past 60 years anti-black prejudice has diminished and black-white equality increased. The conclusion is that important progress toward black-white equality has occurred and prejudice is less of a barrier than it once was, but large gaps remain, and the progress achieved is fragile. Moreover, the greatest progress is in areas where the government has most strongly intervened, meaning that the racial jurisprudence of the current Supreme Court and conservative economic policies may present major impediments to further closing black-white gaps. Law and society scholars are urged to attend more to racial equality issues than they have in the past.

Commentators

Commentary on Professor Lempert's Presidential Address
Ralph Richard Banks

Racial Paradox in a Law and Society Odyssey
Mario L. Barnes

The Personal, the Political, and Race
Jeannine Bell

The Struggle for Racial Justice: The Personal, the Political, and … the Economic
Kitty Calavita

The Personal and the Professional: Assessing the Ambivalent Commitment to Racial Justice in the United States
Malcolm M. Feeley

Articles

What Counts As Knowledge? A Reflection on Race, Social Science, and the Law
Rachel F. Moran

In the years since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education (1954), most discussions of the case have focused on whether it was effective in promoting lasting equality of opportunity in the public schools. Although this profoundly important question dominates retrospectives on Brown, another unresolved controversy relates to whether the ruling has altered in any fundamental way the role of social science evidence in constitutional litigation. More than 50 years later, substantial disagreement persists about whether this kind of research has played or should play any important role in the jurisprudence of race. Today, social scientists face increasing doubts about their neutrality and objectivity, struggle to be heard in a marketplace of ideas increasingly flooded with information of questionable quality, and encounter growing resistance to the notion that expertise provides a proper foundation for legal decisionmaking. For those who still believe that social science has a role to play in advancing racial justice, the strategy used in Brown can no longer be taken for granted. The time is ripe to reassess what counts as knowledge so that social science is not increasingly marginalized in courts of law.

Experiencing Discrimination: Race and Retention in America's Largest Law Firms
Monique R. Payne-Pikus, John Hagan and Robert L. Nelson

Although the number of racial and ethnic minority lawyers in the legal profession has greatly increased, concern remains about their low percentage among partners in elite law firms. Using a nationally representative sample of young American lawyers, we compare a human capital–based theory, which emphasizes measures of merit, and an institutional discrimination–based theory, which focuses on differences in partner contact and mentoring. The results indicate that institutional discrimination theory is the better way of understanding racial and ethnic differences in lawyer retention. Future affirmative action programs need to focus not just on access but also the processes within large firms if minority presence is to be increased.

Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations
Osagie K. Obasogie

Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?

I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.

Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science
Catherine Lee and John D. Skrentny

Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration's guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.

Legal Mobilization in Schools: The Paradox of Rights and Race Among Youth
Calvin Morrill, Karolyn Tyson, Lauren B. Edelman and Richard Arum

In this article, we analyze ethnoracial patterns in youth perceptions and responses to rights violations and advance a new model of legal mobilization that includes formal, quasi-, and extralegal action. Slightly more than half of the 5,461 students in our sample reported past rights violations involving discrimination, harassment, freedom of expression/assembly, and due process violations in disciplinary procedures. Students, regardless of race, are more likely to take extralegal than formal legal actions in response to perceived rights violations. Self-identified African American and Latino/a students are significantly more likely than white and Asian American students to perceive rights violations and are more likely to claim they would take formal legal action in response to hypothetical rights violations. However, when they perceive rights violations, African American and Asian American students are no more likely than whites to take formal legal action and Latino/a students are less likely than whites to take formal legal action. We draw on in-depth interviews with youth and adults—which we interlace with our quantitative findings—to explore the interpretive dynamics underlying these survey findings, and we offer several theoretical and methodological implications of our work.

The Penology of Racial Innocence: The Erasure of Racism in the Study and Practice of Punishment
Naomi Murakawa and Katherine Beckett

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious.

Mass Incarceration and the Paradox of Prison Conditions Litigation
Heather Schoenfeld

In this article I examine how prison conditions litigation in the 1970s, as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, inadvertently contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. Using Florida as a case study, I detail how prison conditions litigation that aimed to reduce incarceration was translated in the political arena as a court order to build prisons. Drawing on insights from historical institutionalist scholarship, I argue that this paradox can be explained by considering the different historical and political contexts of the initial legal framing and the final compliance with the court order. In addition, I demonstrate how the choices made by policy makers around court compliance created policy feedback effects that further expanded the coercive capacity of the state and transformed political calculations around crime control. The findings suggest how “successful” court challenges for institutional change can have long-term outcomes that are contrary to social justice goals. The paradox of prison litigation is especially compelling because inmates' lawyers were specifically concerned about racial injustice, yet mass incarceration is arguably the greatest obstacle to racial equality in the twenty-first century.

Race, Urban Governance, and Crime Control: Creating Model Cities
Elizabeth Brown

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city of Seattle received federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “Model cities” funds to address issues of racial disenfranchisement in the city. Premised under the “Great Society” ethos, Model cities sought to remedy the strained relationship between local governments and disenfranchised urban communities. Though police-community relations were not initially slated as an area of concern in the city's grant application, residents of the designated “model neighborhood” pressed for the formation of a law and justice task force to address the issue. This article examines the process and outcome of the two law-and-justice projects proposed by residents of the designated “model neighborhood”: the Consumer Protection program and the Community Service Officer project. Drawing on the work of legal geographies scholars, I argue that the failure of each of these efforts to achieve residents' intentions stems from the geographical imagination of urban problems. Like law-and-order projects today, the geographical imagination of the model neighborhood produced a discourse of exceptionality that subjected residents to extraordinary state interventions. The Model cities project thus provides an example of a “history of the present” of mass incarceration in which the geographical imagination of crime helps facilitate the re-creation of a racialized power structure.

The Invisible Black Victim: How American Federalism Perpetuates Racial Inequality in Criminal Justice
Lisa L. Miller

The promise of civil rights is the promise of inclusion; yet the vast disparity in incarceration rates between blacks, Latinos, and whites stands as an ugly reminder of the nation's long history of race-based exclusionary practices. In this article, I argue that an important aspect of understanding race and the law in the twenty-first century is an appreciation of the American federal system that structures legal authority, political mobilization, and policy solutions and serves as an important and overlooked obstacle to more complete and sustained racial equality in crime and punishment in the United States. In contrast to the conventional wisdom about the role of the national government in protecting the rights of minorities and other disadvantaged groups, I suggest that crime and justice are arenas where the nationalization of issues has left the most important constituents behind. In fact, local crime politics provides a space where there is regular and ongoing articulation of the inclusionary goals of the civil rights agenda and sustained efforts to move forward in realizing that agenda through meaningful community involvement in promoting public safety, economic development, and social justice. This article explores these themes and offers a discussion of the linkages between federalism, racial inequality and crime, victimization and punishment.

From the Myth of Formal Equality to the Politics of Social Justice: Race and the Legal Attack on Native Entitlements
Courtenay W. Daum and Eric Ishiwata

This article examines how the conservative legal movement's successful countermobilization of the politics of rights enables U.S. Supreme Court outcomes that exacerbate racial and ethnic inequities while solidifying the privileged position of others in the name of equality. A comparison of two pivotal Supreme Court cases involving native entitlements—Morton v. Mancari (1974) and Rice v. Cayetano (2000)—illustrates how appeals to formal, as opposed to substantive, equality work in effect to support existing hierarchies. At the same time, the conservative legal movement's success provides progressive social actors with opportunities to reframe the discourse. We suggest that a critical questioning of strategies predicated on appeals for equal rights may be necessary to advance the interests of native populations in the current environment, and we identify an alternative way of working for native interests, one that escapes the constraints of equality doctrine by appealing to broader claims of social justice.

Law & Society Review, September/December 2010: Volume 44, Issues 3–4

Social Problems 57(4)

Reporting Conventions: Journalists, Activists, and the Thorny Struggle for Political Visibility
Sarah Sobieraj

This article draws upon 134 in-depth interviews with activists and journalists in an effort to reconcile the extensive activism taking place in the shadows of presidential campaigns with its near invisibility in the news. In his classic work, Todd Gitlin (1980) demonstrated that activists become newsworthy only by submitting to the "implicit rules of news making" (p. 3). This research supports his finding, but demonstrates that unbeknownst to activists, coverage of political outsiders is governed by a set of rules quite different from (and often diametrically opposed to) those employed in routine news-gathering. Taking cues from news creation practices that go on daily between journalists, parajournalists, and subjects, activist groups work assiduously to prepare members to fit the needs of political reporters. They bend over backwards to be media-friendly, which they perceive as professional, quotable, and credible, but ironically these studied attempts to conform to the norms of routine political reporting make them less appealing to journalists. While journalists may attend eagerly to elected officials' press conferences and official statements, they demand authenticity, particularly in the form of emotion and spontaneity, from outsiders—the very attributes activists work to erase in their media trainings. In the end, the activist groups fail to obtain coverage, not because they can't conform to the rules of news making, but because they are following the wrong rules. This article maps the contradictory sets of norms at play in the negotiation over news, and shows how they work together to create nearly insurmountable cultural boundaries for political outsiders.

Beyond the Ballot: Immigrant Collective Action in Gateways and New Destinations in the United States
Dina Okamoto and Kim Ebert

Most studies that attempt to understand immigrant political incorporation focus on patterns of electoral participation and citizenship acquisition. Given that nearly 60 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States is comprised of noncitizens, we argue that past studies miss an important dimension of the immigrant political incorporation process. In this article, we move beyond the ballot by documenting patterns of immigrant protest and conducting an analysis of the conditions under which immigrant organizing occurs in traditional gateways and new destinations. In addition to political opportunities and resources, we argue that conditions heightening group boundaries between immigrants and natives—what we call boundary markers—should play an important role in encouraging immigrants to develop a shared minority status and make collective claims on behalf of the larger group. Using hurdle models, we test our theoretical ideas with a new data set comprised of over 200 immigrant protest events in 52 metropolitan areas across the United States. Our results challenge past studies of immigrant mobilization because we find that inclusionary contexts characterized by greater access to formal political and economic incorporation both hinder and facilitate immigrant organizing, while boundary markers—measured here as threats and segregation—tend to encourage immigrant protest.

More Than Just Nickels and Dimes: A Cross-National Analysis of Working Poverty in Affluent Democracies
David Brady, Andrew S. Fullerton, and Jennifer Moren Cross

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (2009), we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty does not simply mirror overall poverty and that there is greater cross-national variation in working than overall poverty. We then examine four explanations for working poverty: demographic characteristics, economic performance, unified theory, and welfare generosity. We utilize Heckman probit models to jointly model the likelihood of employment and poverty among the employed. Our analyses provide the least support for the economic performance explanation. There is modest support for unified theory as unionization reduces working poverty in some models. However, most of these effects appear to be mediated by welfare generosity. More substantial evidence exists for the demographic characteristics and welfare generosity explanations. An individual's likelihood of being working poor can be explained by (a) a lack of multiple earners or other adults in one's household, low education, single motherhood, having children and youth; and (b) the generosity of the welfare state in which he or she resides. Also, welfare generosity does not undermine employment and reduces working poverty even among demographically vulnerable groups. Ultimately, we encourage a greater role for the welfare state in debates about working poverty.

Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on "Overweight" and "Obesity" in the United States and France
Abigail C. Saguy, Kjerstin Gruys, and Shanna Gong

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems.

The state of the Economy and the Relationship Between prisoner Reentry and Crime
Lance Hannon and Robert DeFina

Previous research has identified a positive relationship between prisoner reentry and crime rates. The relationship potentially reflects both the recidivism of reentering offenders and the broader impact of the releases on the social organization of the areas to which they return. This article explores how economic conditions moderate the association between the size of the reentering population and crime rates. Using a state-level panel spanning the years 1978 through 2003, and two alternative measures of economic strength, the results demonstrate that the amount of increase in property and violent crime associated with prisoner societal reentry is substantially lessened by strong economic conditions. The findings suggest that economic conditions and criminal justice policies should not be pitted against each other as simply competing explanations for variation in crime rates. Instead, they should be recognized as irreducibly interdependent.

Who Lives and Dies on Death Row? Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Sentence Outcomes in Texas
Michelle A. Petrie and James E. Coverdill

A substantial body of research has explored the extent to which the race of offenders and victims influences who receives a death sentence for capital crimes. Little is known about how race and ethnicity might pattern death-row outcomes. Drawing upon evidence from male offenders sentenced to death in Texas during the years 1974 through 2009, we extend recent research by examining whether the race and ethnicity of offenders and victims and a number of offender, victim, and crime attributes influence the likelihood of executions and sentence relief (whereby prisoners leave death row). Cox regression analyses are used in conjunction with a multiple-imputation method for handling a modest amount of missing data. The results show that cases involving minorities—with black or Latino offenders or victims—have lower hazards of execution than cases in which both offenders and victims are white. Victim and offender race and ethnicity have little to no independent effect upon the hazard of sentence relief.

A Paradox of Participation: Nonwhites in White Sororities and Fraternities
Matthew W. Hughey

Although law prohibits race-based exclusion in college sororities and fraternities in the United States, racial segregation prevails. As a result, nonwhite membership in white Greek-letter organizations (WGLOs) is often hailed as a transformative step toward equality and unity. The bulk of work on such cross-racial membership centers on comparative-historical and survey data and treats integrated membership as the successful end, rather than a problematic beginning, of analysis. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in three university campuses on the East Coast, I shift the focus from resource factors that either prevent or enable membership to the strategies of action that nonwhite members employ in their everyday lives in order to be perceived as full, belonging members. By drawing upon the insights of the sociology of culture, I argue that robust racialized schemas simultaneously enable and constrain inclusion. Rather than hide explicit racial-ethnic difference or accede to traditional expectations of Anglo conformity, I find that nonwhite members are enmeshed in a paradox of participation: their ability to frame themselves as equal and belonging Greek "brothers and sisters" remains tied to a patterned reproduction of their racial and ethnic identities as essentially different and inferior. Such a paradox emerges as an important theoretical and pragmatic dilemma with implications for an array of institutional contexts.

Social Problems, November 2010: Volume 57, Issue 4

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 47(4)

Betwixt and Between: The Role of Psychosocial Factors in the Early Stages of Desistance
Deirdre Healy

This article presents the results of an investigation into the psychosocial changes involved in the early stages of desistance, which to date have attracted little empirical or theoretical attention. The study used a mixed-methods design to produce a nuanced account of the shifts that occur in cognitions and social circumstances as offenders make the transition to desistance. Three psychometric instruments were completed by 73 adult males aged 18 to 35 who had acquired at least two previous convictions and were living in Dublin, Ireland. Participants who reported no offending in the past month were defined as ‘‘primary desisters.’’ In a regression analysis, age, age at onset of offending, and criminal thinking styles emerged as important predictors of primary desistance, whereas social circumstances and pro-criminal attitudes did not. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Are Teen Delinquency Abstainers Social Introverts?: A Test of Moffitt’s Theory
Xiaojin Chen and Michele Adams

Prior research has identified a small group of adolescents who completely refrain from delinquent behavior. Researchers have hypothesized that these adolescents may be excluded from normative peer activities and are thus insulated from delinquent peer role models. A central argument in Moffitt’s account of delinquency abstention, for example, is that delinquency abstainers are socially isolated due to certain unappealing physical/personality characteristics. Using the detailed friendship network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), the authors attempt to test Moffitt’s account of delinquency abstention, particularly the association between social exclusion and delinquency. Their results do not suggest strong empirical support for the hypothesis that delinquency abstention is ‘‘correlated with unpopularity and social isolation.’’ The complex associations between adolescent friendship network characteristics and delinquency abstention highlight the necessity for future research on peer contexts in which adolescents are embedded. The authors’ findings appear to challenge Moffitt’s theory, suggesting the need for certain modifications.

Effects of Hurricane Katrina and Other Adverse Life Events on Adolescent Female Offenders: A Test of General Strain Theory
Angela R. Robertson, Judith A. Stein, and Lacey Schaefer-Rohleder

This study tested Agnew’s General Strain Theory (GST) by examining the roles of anger, anxiety, and maladaptive coping in mediating the relationship between strain and three outcomes (serious delinquency, minor delinquency, and continued involvement in the juvenile justice system) among adolescent female offenders (N = 261). Strains consisted of adverse life events and exposure to Hurricane Katrina. Greater exposure to Hurricane Katrina was directly related to serious delinquency and maladaptive coping. Hurricane Katrina also had an indirect effect on minor delinquency and Post— Katrina juvenile justice involvement mediated through maladaptive coping. Adverse life events were associated with increased anger, anxiety, and maladaptive coping. Anger mediated the relationship between adverse life events and serious delinquency. Anxiety mediated the relationship between adverse life events and minor delinquency. Maladaptive coping strategies were associated with minor delinquency and juvenile justice involvement. Findings lend support to GST.

Contemporary Disorganization Research: An Assessment and Further Test of the Systemic Model of Neighborhood Crime
Paul E. Bellair and Christopher R. Browning

The systemic model posits that informal control reduces crime and that social networks reduce crime indirectly by stimulating informal control. The systemic literature consistently supports the informal control-crime relationship but reveals wider variation in the measurement and effects of network dimensions. Recognizing this pattern, some scholars advocate an explicit distinction between networks and informal control. We formally address that issue with analysis of the measurement structure of multiple network and informal control indicators using data collected in 300 Seattle neighborhoods. Results reveal several distinct network dimensions that are themselves distinct from informal control. Regression analysis supports the systemic model: informal control reduces crime victimization, and networks exhibit an indirect, negative effect through informal control. Consistent with prior research, some network measures have a positive, direct effect on crime. We conclude that a distinction between networks and informal control is essential when testing and evaluating the systemic model.

Examining the Direct and Interactive Effects of Changes in Racial and Ethnic Threat on Sentencing Decisions
Xia Wang and Daniel P. Mears

Minority threat theory has been used to explain sentencing decisions, but rarely has the theory’s logic been assessed by examining changes in threat. Building on prior theoretical and empirical research, we develop hypotheses about the direct and interactive effects of changes in racial and ethnic threat on sentencing. We test the hypotheses using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ State Court Processing Statistics program and other sources. The results indicate that increased racial threat contributes to a greater probability of receiving a prison sentence when baseline levels of threat are high. Less support is found for an effect of changes in ethnic threat. We find no support for arguments that minority threat effects are greater among minority defendants, but we do find support for the argument that threat effects are greater among violent and drug offenders. We discuss the implications of the findings for theory, research, and policy.

Are Sex Offenders Moving into Social Disorganization? Analyzing the Residential Mobility of California Parolees
John R. Hipp, Susan Turner, and Jesse Jannetta

This study focuses on the relationship between returning offender residential mobility and neighborhood structural factors characteristic of socially disorganized neighborhoods. It uses a unique data set that combines information on parolees released in the state of California during the 2005-2006 time period with their geocoded addresses to view the types of neighborhoods they are moving to. The authors find that sex offenders are entering neighborhoods with more concentrated disadvantage and residential instability upon reentry from prison and upon subsequent moves. This effect for sex offender status is particularly strong for whites and Latinos, leading them into more socially disorganized neighborhoods. The authors also find that sex offenders are more likely to enter neighborhoods with more minorities as measured by Latinos and African Americans and less likely to enter neighborhoods with more whites.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2010: Volume 47, Issue 4

American Sociological Review 75(5)

Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis
Jacob S. Rugh and Douglas S. Massey

The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending. We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble.

Stratification by Skin Color in Contemporary Mexico
Andrés Villarreal

Latin America is often used as a backdrop against which U.S. race relations are compared. Yet research on race in Latin America focuses almost exclusively on countries in the region with a large recognized presence of individuals of African descent such as Brazil. Racial categories in these countries are based on skin color distinctions along a black-white continuum. By contrast, the main socially recognized ethnic distinction in Indo-Latin American countries such as Mexico, between indigenous and non-indigenous residents, is not based primarily on phenotypical differences, but rather on cultural practices and language use. Many Mexicans today nevertheless express a preference for whiter skin and European features, even though no clear system of skin color categorization appears to exist. In this study, I use data from a nationally-representative panel survey of Mexican adults to examine the extent of skin-color-based social stratification in contemporary Mexico. Despite extreme ambiguity in skin color classification, I find considerable agreement among survey interviewers about who belongs to three skin color categories. The results also provide evidence of profound social stratification by skin color. Individuals with darker skin tone have significantly lower levels of educational attainment and occupational status, and they are more likely to live in poverty and less likely to be affluent, even after controlling for other individual characteristics.

Personal Characteristics, Sexual Behaviors, and Male Sex Work: A Quantitative Approach
Trevon D. Logan

Male sex workers serve multiple groups (i.e., gay-identified men, heterosexually-identified men, and their own sexual partners), making them a unique source to test theories of gender, masculinity, and sexuality. To date, most scholarship on this topic has been qualitative. I assembled a dataset from the largest online male sex worker website to conduct the first quantitative analysis of male escorts in the United States. I find the geographic distribution of male sex workers is more strongly correlated with the general population than with the gay male population. In addition, I estimate the value of sexual behaviors and personal characteristics in this market to test sociological theories of gender and masculinity. Consistent with hegemonic masculinity, I find that male escorts who advertise masculine behavior charge higher prices for their services, whereas escorts who advertise less masculine behavior charge significantly less, a differential on the order of 17 percent. Results show that race and sexual behavior interactions exert a strong influence on prices charged by male sex workers, confirming aspects of intersectionality theory.

Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s Earnings Distribution
Michelle J. Budig and Melissa J. Hodges

Earnings inequality has grown in recent decades in the United States, yet research investigating the motherhood wage penalty has not fully considered how the penalty itself, and the mechanisms producing it, may vary among low-wage, middle-wage, and high-wage workers. Pooling data from the 1979 to 2004 waves of the NLSY and using simultaneous quantile regression methods with fixed effects, we test whether the size of the motherhood penalty differs across the distribution of white women’s earnings, and whether the mechanisms explaining this penalty vary by earnings level. Results show that having children inflicts the largest penalty on low-wage women, proportionately, although a significant motherhood penalty persists at all earnings levels. We also find that the mechanisms creating the motherhood penalty vary by earnings level. Family resources, work effort, and compensating differentials account for a greater portion of the penalty among low earners. Among highly paid women, by contrast, the motherhood penalty is significantly smaller and largely explained by lost human capital due to childbearing. Our findings show that estimates of average motherhood penalties obscure the compounded disadvantage mothers face at the bottom of the earnings distribution, as well as differences in the type and strength of mechanisms that produce the penalty.

Good Times, Bad Times: Postwar Labor’s Share of National Income in Capitalist Democracies
Tali Kristal

This article returns to a classic question of political economy: the zero-sum conflict between capital and labor over the division of the national income pie. A detailed description of labor’s share of national income in 16 industrialized democracies from 1960 to 2005 uncovers two long-term trends: an increase in labor’s share in the aftermath of World War II, followed by a decrease since the early 1980s. I argue that the working class’s relative bargaining power explains the dynamics of labor’s share, and I model inter- and intra-class bargaining power in the economic, political, and global spheres. Time-series cross-section equations predicting the short- and long-term determinants of labor’s share support most of my theoretical arguments and the main findings are robust to alternative specifications. Results suggest that the common trend in the dynamics of labor’s share of national income is largely explained by indicators for working-class organizational power in the economic (i.e., unionization and strike activity) and political (i.e., government civilian spending) spheres, working-class structural power in the global sphere (i.e., southern imports and foreign direct investments), and indirectly by an indicator for working-class integration in the intra-class sphere (i.e., bargaining centralization).

The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816 to 2001
Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein

Why did the nation-state proliferate across the world over the past 200 years, replacing empires, kingdoms, city-states, and the like? Using a new dataset with information on 145 of today’s states from 1816 to the year they achieved nation-statehood, we test key aspects of modernization, world polity, and historical institutionalist theories. Event history analysis shows that a nation-state is more likely to emerge when a power shift allows nationalists to overthrow or absorb the established regime. Diffusion of the nation-state within an empire or among neighbors also tilts the balance of power in favor of nationalists. We find no evidence for the effects of industrialization, the advent of mass literacy, or increasingly direct rule, which are associated with the modernization theories of Gellner, Anderson, Tilly, and Hechter. Nor is the growing global hegemony of the nation-state model a good predictor of individual instances of nation-state formation, as Meyer’s world polity theory would suggest. We conclude that the global rise of the nation-state is driven by proximate and contextual political factors situated at the local and regional levels, in line with historical institutionalist arguments, rather than by domestic or global structural forces that operate over the long durée.

Calling for Participation: Requests, Blocking Moves, and Rational (Inter)action in Survey Introductions
Douglas W. Maynard, Jeremy Freese, and Nora Cate Schaeffer

We draw on conversation analytic methods and research to explicate the interactional phenomenon of requesting in general and the specific case of requesting participation in survey interviews. Recent work on survey participation gives much attention to leverage-saliency theory but does not explore how the key concepts of this theory are exhibited in the actual unfolding interaction of interviewers and potential respondents. We examine interaction using digitally recorded and transcribed calls to recruit participation in the 2004 Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. We describe how potential respondents present interactional environments that are relatively discouraging or encouraging, and how, in response, interviewers may be relatively cautious or presumptive in their requesting actions. We consider how interviewers’ ability to tailor their behavior to their interactional environments can affect whether an introduction reaches the point at which a request to participate is made, the form that this request takes, and the sample person’s response. This article contributes to understanding the social action of requesting and specifically how we might use insights from analyses of interaction to increase cooperation with requests to participate in surveys.

American Sociological Review, October 2010: Volume 75, Issue 5

Social Psychology Quarterly 73(3)

Openings

Urban Desolation and Symbolic Denigration in the Hyperghetto
Loïc Wacquant

Identity through a Glass Darkly: Review Essay of Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, Identity Theory
Mabel Berezin


Two on Age

Emigration, Generation, and Collective Memories: The Presence of the Past for Emigrants from the Former Soviet Union
Amy D. Corning

Age Identity in Context: Stress and the Subjective Side of Aging
Markus H. Schafer and Tetyana Pylypiv Shippee
  
Articles

Advice-implicative Interrogatives: Building “Client-centered” Support in a Children’s Helpline
Carly W. Butler, Jonathan Potter, Susan Danby, Michael Emmison, and Alexa Hepburn

Gender and Entrepreneurship as a Career Choice: Do Self-assessments of Ability Matter?
Sarah Thébaud

Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2010: Volume 73, Issue 3

The Annals of the AAPSS 631

The Federal Statistical System: Its Vulnerability Matters More Than You Think

Science Starts Not after Measurement, but with Measurement
Kenneth Prewitt

Social Science Data and the Shaping of National Policy
John P. Holdren

Federal Statistics: Understanding a Crucial Resource
Katherine K. Wallman

The Importance of Federal Statistics for Advancing Science and Identifying Policy Options
Ralph Cicerone

The Need to Get the Right Health Statistics and to Get the Health Statistics Right
Harvey Fineberg

In Engineering: Why It Is Critical to Have Quality Statistics and Scientifically Sound Statistical Analysis
Charles Vest

Federal Statistics in the Policy making Process
Peter R. Orszag

The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Uses of Federal Statistics
Nancy Kingsbury

Designing a New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts
Dale W. Jorgenson

The Federal Statistical System: The Local Government Perspective
Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

Indicators and the Federal Statistical System: An Essential but Fraught Partnership
Norman M. Bradburn and Carolyn J.E. Fuqua

The Media as Consumers of Statistics
Paul Overberg

Immigration Statistics for the Twenty-First Century
Douglas S. Massey

Why American Families Need the Census
Stephanie Coontz

The Census and the Federal Statistical System: Historical Perspectives
Margo Anderson

The Structure and Activities of the U.S. Federal Statistical System: History and Recurrent Challenges
Robert M. Groves

The Role of the Federal Statistical System in Evidence-based Policymaking, or How to Make the Statistical System Essential
Michael J. O'Grady

The Federal Statistical System and the Four “I”s
Stephen E. Fienberg

Future of Innovation in the Federal Statistical System
Hermann Habermann

Why We Need One Statistical Agency
Janet L. Norwood

Principles and Practices for the Federal Statistical System: The View from the Committee on National Statistics
William F. Eddy, Constance F. Citro, and Daniel L. Cork

What Is Political Interference in Federal Statistics?
Kenneth Prewitt

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2010: Volume 631

Journal of Quantitative Criminology Forthcoming

Titles of forthcoming articles currently available in Journal of Quantitative Criminology's "Online First" section:

A New Twist on an Old Approach: A Random-Interaction Approach for Estimating Rates of Inter-Group Interaction
John R. Hipp, George E. Tita and Lyndsay N. Boggess

Thoughtfully Reflective Decision Making and the Accumulation of Capital: Bringing Choice Back In
Ray Paternoster, Greg Pogarsky and Gregory Zimmerman

Asymmetric Loss Functions for Forecasting in Criminal Justice Settings
Richard Berk

Something Old, Something New: Revisiting Competing Hypotheses of the Victimization-Offending Relationship Among Adolescents
Graham C. Ousey, Pamela Wilcox and Bonnie S. Fisher

The Effects of Genetics, the Environment, and Low Self-Control on Perceived Maternal and Paternal Socialization: Results from a Longitudinal Sample of Twins
Kevin M. Beaver

Reliability and Validity of Prisoner Self-Reports Gathered Using the Life Event Calendar Method
James E. Sutton, Paul E. Bellair, Brian R. Kowalski, Ryan Light and Donald T. Hutcherson

A Longitudinal Study of Escalation in Crime Seriousness
Jiayi Liu, Brian Francis and Keith Soothill

One Bad Apple May Not Spoil the Whole Bunch: Best Friends and Adolescent Delinquency
Carter Rees and Greg Pogarsky

How Do They ‘End Up Together’? A Social Network Analysis of Self-Control, Homophily, and Adolescent Relationships
Jacob T. N. Young

Reciprocal Effects of Victimization and Routine Activities
Margit Averdijk

Advances and Challenges in Empirical Studies of Victimization
Janet L. Lauritsen

Gold Standard Myths: Observations on the Experimental Turn in Quantitative Criminology
Robert J. Sampson

The Development and Impact of Self-Report Measures of Crime and Delinquency
Marvin D. Krohn, Terence P. Thornberry, Chris L. Gibson and Julie M. Baldwin

The Present and Possible Future of Quantitative Criminology
David McDowall

Editorial Introduction
Alex R. Piquero and James P. Lynch

Picturing JQC’s Future
Michael D. Maltz

Criminal Contemplation, National Context, and Deterrence
Charles R. Tittle, Ekaterina V. Botchkovar and Olena Antonaccio

Nurturing the Journal of Quantitative Criminology Through Late Childhood: Retrospective Memories (Distorted?) from a Former Editor
John H. Laub

Longitudinal Criminology
David F. Greenberg

Communities, Crime, and Reactions to Crime Multilevel Models: Accomplishments and Meta-Challenges
Ralph B. Taylor

Making Space for Theory: The Challenges of Theorizing Space and Place for Spatial Analysis in Criminology
George E. Tita and Steven M. Radil

The Use of Official Records to Measure Crime and Delinquency
Colin Loftin and David McDowall

What You Can and Can’t Properly Do with Regression
Richard Berk

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, October 2010: Forthcoming

Critical Criminology Forthcoming

Titles of forthcoming articles currently available in Critical Criminology's "Online First" section:


Green Criminology and Dirty Collar Crime
Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nigel South

Criminalizing Ecological Harm: Crimes Against Carrying Capacity and the Criminalization of Eco-Sinners
Dennis Mares

OxyContin and a Regulation Deficiency of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Rethinking State-Corporate Crime
O. Hayden Griffin and Bryan Lee Miller

Deforestation Crimes and Conflicts in the Amazon
Tim Boekhout van Solinge

Toxic Atmospheres Air Pollution, Trade and the Politics of Regulation
Reece Walters

The Death Penalty: An Unusual Punishment America is Inflicting Upon Itself
Stephanie Boys

How an Elite-Engineered Moral Panic Led to the U.S. War on Iraq
Scott A. Bonn

Family Leave and Law Enforcement: A Survey of Parents in U.S. Police Departments
Corina Schulze

Cultural Criminology: An Invitation… to What?
Dale Spencer

Embracing Emotionality: Clothing My “Naked Truths”
Felice Yuen

Critical Criminology and Crimes Against the Environment
Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nigel South

The Corporate Crimes of Dow Chemical and the Failure to Regulate Environmental Pollution
Rebecca S. Katz

High Policing Theory and the Question of ‘What is to be Done?’
Warwick Tie

Restorative Justice and “Empowerment”: Producing and Governing Active Subjects through “Empowering” Practices
Kelly Richards

Structuration Theory and Wrongful Imprisonment: From ‘Victimhood’ to ‘Survivorship’?
Gabe Tan

Vandalizing Meaning, Stealing Memory: Artistic, Cultural, and Theoretical Implications of Crime in Galleries and Museums
Avi Brisman

Above the Law? A Comparative Study of National Prosecutions of Heads of State
Napoleon C. Reyes and Jurg Gerber

Deciphering the Ambiguous Menace of Sexuality for the Innocence of Childhood
J. C. W. Gooren

Qualitative Research and Intersectionality
Adam Trahan


Critical Criminology, October 2010: Forthcoming

Criminology & Public Policy 9(4)

VIOLENT VICTIMIZATION AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

Economic Conditions and Minority Violence : An introduction
Alfred Blumstein

Violent victimization among males and economic conditions : The vulnerability of race and ethnic minorities
Janet L. Lauritsen and Karen Heimer

In this article, we use data from the 1973 to 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to estimate previously unknown trends in serious nonfatal violent victimization for Latino, non-Latino Black, and non-Latino White males in the United States. Past research has shown that Blacks and Latinos have been more susceptible than Whites to financial hardship during economic downturns and that economic disadvantage is an important correlate of violence in cross-sectional analyses. If significant declines in the national economy contribute to increases in violence, then crime trends disaggregated by race and ethnicity should show greater changes among minorities during periods of economic downturn. Although rates of violence have declined for all groups, we find that trends for Latino and Black males are similar and closely follow changes in consumer sentiment. In contrast, trends for White males display fewer fluctuations coinciding with changes in economic conditions. Continued disaggregation shows that these patterns appear primarily in stranger violence and not in violence by known offenders. The patterns also suggest that the association between changing economic conditions and male victimization trends might have weakened in recent years.

The findings raise concerns about the potential impact of recent economic changes on the risk for serious victimization, particularly among Blacks and Latinos. In light of the possible recent weakening of the relationship between economic changes and crime, future research should assess whether criminal justice policies and other factors moderate the relationship between economic conditions and victimization and use group-specific measures of violence so that important variability across race and ethnicity is not masked. These analyses also should be expanded to consider the potential effects on violence of government policies designed to alleviate poverty and unemployment.

Property crime—yes; violence—no : Comment on Lauritsen and Heimer
Philip J. Cook

Questions about the relationship of economic conditions to violent victimization
Kenneth C. Land and Hui Zheng

Economic conditions and racial/ethnic variations in violence : Immigration, the Latino paradox, and future research
Ramiro Martinez Jr.

Inequality by design : The connection between race, crime, victimization, and social policy
Patricia Y. Warren

PUBLIC CRIMINOLOGIES

Editorial Introduction to “Public Criminologies”
Todd R. Clear

Public criminologies
Christopher Uggen and Michelle Inderbitzin

Public scholarship aspires to bring social science home to the individuals, communities, and institutions that are its focus of study. In particular, it seeks to narrow the yawning gap between public perceptions and the best available scientific evidence on issues of public concern. Yet nowhere is the gap between perceptions and evidence greater than in the study of crime. Here, we outline the prospects for a public criminology, conducting and disseminating research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities. We present historical data on the media discussion of criminology and sociology, and we outline the distinctive features of criminology—interdisciplinary, a subject matter that incites moral panics, and a practitioner base actively engaged in knowledge production—that push the boundaries of public scholarship.

Discussions of public sociology have drawn a bright line separating policy work from professional, critical, and public scholarship. As the research and policy essays published in Criminology & Public Policy make clear, however, the best criminology often is conducted at the intersection of these domains. A vibrant public criminology will help to bring new voices to policy discussions while addressing common myths and misconceptions about crime.

Comment on “Public Criminologies”
Paul Rock

Who will be the public criminologists? How will they be supported?
Kenneth C. Land

What is to be done with public criminology?
Ian Loader and Richard Sparks

“Public criminology” and evidence-based policy
Michael Tonry

The role of research and researchers in crime and justice policy
Daniel P. Mears

REDUCING HOMELESS – RELATED CRIME

The Police, Disorder, and the Homeless
Anthony A. Braga

Policing the homeless : An evaluation of efforts to reduce homeless-related crime
Richard Berk and John MacDonald

Police officials across the United States are increasingly relying on place-based approaches for crime prevention. In this article, we examine the Safer Cities Initiative, a widely publicized place-based policing intervention implemented in Los Angeles's “Skid Row” that focused on crime and disorder associated with homeless encampments. Crime reduction was the goal. The police division in which the program was undertaken provides 8 years of time-series data serving as the observations for the treatment condition. Four adjacent police divisions in which the program was not undertaken provide 8 years of time-series data serving as the observations for the comparison condition. The data are analyzed using a generalized additive model. On balance, we find that this place-based intervention is associated with meaningful reductions in violent, property, and nuisance street crimes. There is no evidence of crime displacement.

This study provides further evidence that geographically targeted police interventions can lead to significant crime prevention benefits, with no evidence that crime is simply displaced to other areas. Criminologists and the media have given the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) little credit for major reductions in crime that have occurred during the past 5 years following a number of major policy reforms. We suggest that researchers should look more closely at the targeted interventions the LAPD has undertaken for evidence-based examples of effective policing. Importantly, this work suggests that crime associated with homeless encampments can be meaningfully reduced with targeted police actions. However, law enforcement actions do not address the roots of homelessness nor most of its consequences. Getting tough on the homeless should not be confused with policies or programs that respond fundamentally to the social and personal problems that homelessness presents.

Policy essay on “Policing the homeless...”
Alex R. Piquero

Tackling homelessness in Los Angeles' Skid Row : The role of policing strategies and the spatial deconcentration of homelessness
Dennis P. Culhane

Policy is in the details: Using external validity to help policy makers
John E. Eck

The Safer Cities Initiative and the removal of the homeless : Reducing crime or promoting gentrification on Los Angeles' Skid Row?
Alex S. Vitale

Policy essay on “Policing the Homeless : An Evaluation of Efforts to Reduce Homeless-Related Crime”
Michael Rowe and Maria O'Connell

Jim Longstreet, Mike Marshall, and the lost art of policing skid row
Michael D. White


Criminology & Public Policy, November 2010: Volume 9, Issue 4

Journal of Marriage and Family 72(5)

Research Reviews

Aging and Family Life: A Decade Review
Merril Silverstein and Roseann Giarrusso

Marriage and Child Well-Being: Research and Policy Perspectives
Susan L. Brown

Children's Living Arrangements

Children With Nonresident Parents: Living Arrangements, Visitation, and Child Support
Susan D. Stewart

Sex Differences in Parenting Behaviors in Single-Mother and Single-Father Households
Mikaela J. Dufur, Nyssa C. Howell, Douglas B. Downey, James W. Ainsworth and Alice J. Lapray

Single Custodial Fathers' Involvement and Parenting: Implications for Outcomes in Emerging Adulthood
Jacinta Bronte-Tinkew, Mindy E. Scott and Emily Lilja

Changes in Externalizing and Internalizing Problems of Adolescents in Foster Care
Lenore M. McWey, Ming Cui and Andrea L. Pazdera

Marriage and Intimate Unions

Economic Factors and Relationship Quality Among Young Couples: Comparing Cohabitation and Marriage
Jessica Halliday Hardie and Amy Lucas

The Reproductive Context of Cohabitation in the United States: Recent Change and Variation in Contraceptive Use
Megan M. Sweeney

Patterns of Change in Marital Satisfaction Over the Newlywed Years
Justin A. Lavner and Thomas N. Bradbury

Marital Conflict Behaviors and Implications for Divorce Over 16 Years
Kira S. Birditt, Edna Brown, Terri L. Orbuch and Jessica M. McIlvane

Just the Two of Us? How Parents Influence Adult Children's Marital Quality
Corinne Reczek, Hui Liu and Debra Umberson

Intergenerational Relationships and Union Stability in Fragile Families
Robin S. Högns and Marcia J. Carlson

Selection, Alignment, and Their Interplay: Origins of Lifestyle Homogamy in Couple Relationships
Oliver Arránz Becker and Daniel Lois

Homogamy and Intermarriage of Japanese and Japanese Americans With Whites Surrounding World War II
Hiromi Ono and Justin Berg

Union Dissolution and Mobility: Who Moves From the Family Home After Separation?
Clara H. Mulder and Michael Wagner

Work and Family

The Within-Job Motherhood Wage Penalty in Norway, 1979–1996
Trond Petersen, Andrew M. Penner and Geir Høgsnes

Nonstandard Work and Marital Instability: Evidence From the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
Ariel Kalil, Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest and Jodie Levin Epstein

Duration of Leave and Resident Fathers' Involvement in Infant Care in Australia
Amanda Hosking, Gillian Whitehouse and Janeen Baxter

Work Characteristics and Parent-Child Relationship Quality: The Mediating Role of Temporal Involvement
Anne Roeters, Tanja Van Der Lippe and Esther S. Kluwer

Time With Children, Children's Well-Being, and Work-Family Balance Among Employed Parents
Melissa A. Milkie, Sarah M. Kendig, Kei M. Nomaguchi and Kathleen E. Denny

Parenthood, Gender and Work-Family Time in the United States, Australia, Italy, France, and Denmark
Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan

Of General Interest

It Takes a Village (Perhaps a Nation): Families, States, and Educational Achievement
Patrick Heuveline, Hongxing Yang and Jeffrey M. Timberlake

Unanticipated Educational Consequences of a Positive Parent-Child Relationship
Ruth N. López Turley, Matthew Desmond and Sarah K. Bruch

Micro- and Macrolevel Determinants of Women's Employment in Six Arab Countries
Niels Spierings, Jeroen Smits and Mieke Verloo

Kin and Youths in the Social Networks of Youth-Headed Households in Namibia
Mónica Ruiz-Casares

Buffering Effects of a Family-Based Intervention for African American Emerging Adults
Gene H. Brody, Yi-fu Chen, Steven M. Kogan, Karen Smith and Anita C. Brown

Men's and Women's Pathways to Adulthood and Their Adolescent Precursors
Sabrina Oesterle, J. David Hawkins, Karl G. Hill and Jennifer A. Bailey

Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2010: Volume 72, Issue 5

Journal of Criminal Justice 38(5)

The total effects of boot camps that house juveniles: A systematic review of the evidence
Benjamin Meade, Benjamin Steiner

School disorder, victimization, and general v. place-specific student avoidance
Ryan Randa, Pamela Wilcox

Death penalty views in China, Japan and the U.S.: An empirical comparison
Shanhe Jiang, Eric G. Lambert, Jin Wang, Toyoji Saito, Rebecca Pilot

Exploring the utility of entitlement in understanding sexual aggression
Leana Allen Bouffard

Sense-making and secondary victimization among unsolved homicide co-victims
Paul B. Stretesky, Tara O'Connor Shelley, Michael J. Hogan, N. Prabha Unnithan

Suicide by Cop: Police shooting as a method of self-harming
Vivian B. Lord, Michael W. Sloop

“Shaping history” or “Riding the wave”?: President Bush's influence on the public opinion of terrorism, homeland security, & crime  
Joshua Hill, Willard M. Oliver, Nancy E. Marion

Street youths’ control imbalance and soft and hard drug use
Stephen W. Baron

Routine activities as determinants of gender differences in delinquency
Katherine B. Novak, Lizabeth A. Crawford

Groups, gangs, and delinquency: Does organization matter?
Martin Bouchard, Andrea Spindler

The impact of political entity on confidence in legal authorities: A comparison between China and Taiwan
Yung-Lien Lai, Liqun Cao, Jihong Solomon Zhao

Social disorganization, marriage, and reported crime: A spatial econometrics examination of family formation and criminal offending
Jeremy R. Porter, Christopher W. Purser

Understanding gender-specific intimate partner homicide: A theoretical and domestic service-oriented approach
Amy Reckdenwald, Karen F. Parker

To execute or not to execute? Examining public support for capital punishment of sex offenders
Christina Mancini, Daniel P. Mears

The co-implementation of Compstat and community policing
James J. Willis, Stephen D. Mastrofski, Tammy Rinehart Kochel

Assessing the perceived benefits—criminal offending relationship
Thomas Baker, Alex R. Piquero

Anticipated shaming and criminal offending
Cesar J. Rebellon, Nicole Leeper Piquero, Alex R. Piquero, Stephen G. Tibbetts

The stalking victim's decision to contact the police: A test of Gottfredson and Gottfredson's theory of criminal justice decision making
Bradford W. Reyns, Christine M. Englebrecht

It's not the time they spend, it's what they do: The interaction between delinquent friends and unstructured routine activity on delinquency: Findings from two countries
Robert Svensson, Dietrich Oberwittler

Exploring the link between self-control and partner violence: Bad parenting or general criminals
Brian K. Payne, George E. Higgins, Brenda Blackwell

Sex offender residence restriction laws: Parental perceptions and public policy
Christina Mancini, Ryan T. Shields, Daniel P. Mears, Kevin M. Beaver

The validity of criminal justice contacts reported by inmates: A comparison of self-reported data with official prison records
Jennifer Roberts, William Wells

A review of the life-events calendar method for criminological research
James E. Sutton

Differentiating identity theft: An exploratory study of victims using a national victimization survey
Heith Copes, Kent R. Kerley, Rodney Huff, John Kane

An empirical examination of AMBER Alert ‘successes’
Timothy Griffin

Do you get what you pay for? Type of counsel and its effect on criminal court outcomes
Richard D. Hartley, Holly Ventura Miller, Cassia Spohn

Adolescent school-based sexual victimization: Exploring the role of opportunity in a gender-specific multilevel analysis
Marie Skubak Tillyer, Pamela Wilcox, Brooke Miller Gialopsos

Reexamining the effect of christian denominational affiliation on death penalty support
Kevin H. Wozniak, Andrew R. Lewis

Cost-benefit analysis of reducing crime through electronic monitoring of parolees and probationers
Stuart S. Yeh


Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2010: Volume 38, Issue 5

Critical Criminology 18(3)

Toward an Interpretive Criminal Justice
John P. Crank and Blythe Bowman Proulx

This paper presents the academic field of criminal justice as an interpretive social science. The opening section discusses academic criminal justice from scientific and interpretive perspectives, arguing that the terminology of “justice” is essentially contested. The second section presents the key implication of a contested core terminology: that an interpretive approach is the best way to develop the academic field of criminal justice. Section three reviews central elements of the Gadamerian tradition, with an eye towards its application to the field of criminal justice. The fourth section considers two issues pertinent to an interpretive criminal justice—the problem of interpretation in a field where professional practice is destructive to other normative systems, and the contribution of an interpretive criminal justice to public policy.

Overlooked and Overshadowed: The Case of Burundi
Kara Hoofnagle and Dawn L. Rothe

In east-central Africa, nestled between Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda is Burundi. From the onset of independence in 1961, Burundi has had a history of internal armed conflicts, ethnic tensions and civil unrest in the form of crimes against humanity, massive and systematic rape, and other gross human rights violations that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid to these types of crimes by criminologists. Political discourse and subsequent media reports suggest that the cause of the violence in Burundi is rooted in reappearing ethnic tensions between two ethnic groups. Yet, the origins and continued enactment of the conflict is far more complex. In this paper, the authors draw upon the extant state crime literature to both conceptually frame, and theoretically illuminate, the crimes against humanity and other gross human rights violations that have occurred.

Presidential Candidates and State Crime: Views of Some U.S. College Students
Josh Klein and Cathryn Lavery

This is a preliminary investigation of hawkish public opinion, understood as criminogenic in that it provides political support for state crimes of aggressive militarism. Our critical criminology approach treats public support for, or acceptance of, state aggression as part of criminogenic political culture. Despite growing interest among critical criminologists in broader perspectives on state crime and the politics of culture, there has been no work on this topic. Our survey of 53 criminal justice students at a liberal arts college finds both hawkish (militarist) and dovish (peaceful) beliefs and preferences regarding U.S. policy and the two major 2008 presidential candidates, Obama and McCain. We investigate whether authoritarianism helps explain hawkish opinions, but find little evidence for that expectation. We find evidence of respondent underestimation of the hawkishness of U.S. politics. We also find extensive evidence of dovish policy preferences, such as approval of diplomacy, a major attraction to Obama.

Scientific Method and the Crimes of the Powerful
Kristian Lasslett

Over the past six decades researchers interested in the crimes of the powerful have developed a respectable body of literature. Owing to the empirical and theoretical richness of these contributions, the crimes of the powerful sub-field is ready for critical interventions to be made on the plane of scientific method. Moreover, such interventions have become increasingly necessary owing to the disciplinary hegemony of an orthodox empiricist approach which erects a problematic boundary between empirical representations of the crimes of the powerful and theoretical explanation. To aid a critique of this approach, this paper will employ the scientific framework of classical Marxism to decipher the peculiar problems which flow out of the orthodoxy’s method. It will be concluded that while classical Marxism offers a more rigorous framework for penetrating analyses of the crimes of the powerful, orthodox scholars have nevertheless made significant contributions which should also be utilised in future research.

Engendering Imprisonment: The State and Incarcerated Female Subjects in Taiwan
Hua-Fu Hsu

In International feminist perspectives in criminology, Rafter and Heidensohn in International feminist perspectives in criminology: Engendering a discipline. Open University Press, Buckingham, (1995: 4) contended that current mainstream criminology was the most masculine of all social sciences. A look at arguments about penal development confronts us with the fact that most historical studies are not gender-specific. Whether female offenders were victimized or acted as their own agents in the penal institutions can be determined with reference to two considerations: first, women prisoners have persistently been treated differently from their male contemporaries; second, female offenders have typically been burdened with formal penalties and informal gender disciplines as punishments for their wrongdoings. The relationship between women and the state provides some clues regarding how penal institutions, which are authorized to act for the state in imposing penalties, treat female offenders and why women’s imprisonment has taken the forms that are evident historically. This study traces the unique political and social conditions of Taiwan’s history to determine what reformations penal institutions have sought to enforce upon female prisoners and which body-types of female inmates have been ‘docile’, ‘obedient’, and ‘useful’ to the state. From the establishment of women’s care homes and the practice of separating the genders in penal institutions, to the implementation of independent women’s prisons, the state in Taiwan has played a dominant role in penal reforms in various historical contexts. This investigation aims to provide a critical and unique perspective of the penalization of women.

Critical Criminology, September 2010: Volume 18, Issue 3

Sociological Theory 28(3)

More than a Game: Sociological Theory from the Theories of Games
Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom and David R. Gibson

Sociologists are fond of game metaphors. However, such metaphors rarely go beyond casual references to generic games. Yet games are little social systems, and each game offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between rules and constraints, on the one side, and emergent order, on the other. In this article, we examine three games—chess, go, and (Texas hold ‘em) poker—for sociological insights into contested social arenas such as markets, warfare, politics, and the professions. We describe each game's rules and emergent properties, and then offer a brief theorization of the social world through the “lens” of that game. Then we show how a study of the three games advances the sociology of strategy by enriching ideas about skill, position, and strategic dilemma.

Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism
Margaret S. Archer

Many scholars continue to accord routine action a central role in social theory and defend the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's habitus. Simultaneously, most recognize the importance of reflexivity. In this article, I consider three versions of the effort to render these concepts compatible, which I term “empirical combination,”“hybridization,” and “ontological and theoretical reconciliation.” None of the efforts is ultimately successful in analytical terms. Moreover, I argue on empirical grounds that the relevance of habitus began to decrease toward the end of the 20th century, given major changes in the structures of the advanced capitalist democracies. In these circumstances, habitual forms prove incapable of providing guidelines for people's lives and, thus, make reflexivity imperative. I conclude by arguing that even the reproduction of natal background is a reflexive activity today and that the mode most favorable to producing it—what I call “communicative reflexivity”—is becoming harder to sustain.

Explaining Religious Market Failure: A Gendered Critique of the Religious Economies Model
Evelyn Bush

According to the religious economies model, religious supply in open religious economies should adapt to the demands of diverse market niches. This proposition is inconsistent with the finding that, although women constitute the majority of religious consumers, the majority of the religions produced in the American religious marketplace favor men's interests relative to women's. Three modifications to the religious economies model are suggested to account for this contradiction. The first modification is a respecification of “religious capital” that takes into account unequal distributions of power among producers of religious value and their differential effects on the beneficiaries and targets of religious norms. The second modification theorizes religion's linkages to other social institutions as sources of cost and benefit that are taken into account by religious entrepreneurs. The third modification accounts for status-based discrimination and unequal distributions of capital as sources of constraint that influence the production of religious supply. Several directions for future research are proposed.

The Missing Key: Institutions, Networks, and the Project of Neoclassical Sociology
Marc Garcelon

The diversity of contemporary “capitalisms” underscores the need to supplant the amorphous concept of structure with more precise concepts, particularly institutions and networks. All institutions entail both embodied and relational aspects. Institutions are relational insofar as they map obligatory patterns of “getting by and getting along”—institutional orders—that steer stable social fields over time. Institutions are simultaneously embodied as institutional paradigms, part of a larger bodily agency Pierre Bourdieu called habitus. Institutions are in turn tightly coupled to networks between various people based on, but not reducible to, strategic interests. Yet social interaction sometimes exceeds institutional boundaries, giving rise to disjunctive fields and underscoring the prominence of institutional failures in the unfolding of antagonistic relations such as warfare. Such disjunctive fields can be tracked in relation to some transnational networks at the global level without assuming developmental convergence. This last point underscores the meaning of neoclassical sociology, which eschews assumptions of developmental convergence at the global level.

Sociological Theory, September 2010: Volume 28, Issue 3