Crime & Delinquency 61(2)

Crime & Delinquency, March 2015: Volume 61, Issue 2

How do Former Inmates Perform in the Community? A Survival Analysis of Rearrests, Reconvictions, and Technical Parole Violations
Michael Ostermann

This study provides insight into the postrelease performance of all former inmates with available data who were released from a prison in New Jersey in 2006 (N = 12,187). Three indicators of recidivism are considered: (a) an arrest for a new crime, (b) a conviction for a new crime, and (c) a technical parole violation. Individuals are categorized into groups according to the release mechanism that they experienced: discretionary parole, mandatory parole, or unconditional release. Multivariate analyses utilize Cox proportional hazards survival tests. Results indicate that after approximately 3 years of follow-up time, those released to supervision were generally less involved in new crimes when compared with those who were released unconditionally. However, a high proportion of those who were paroled recidivated shortly after release, and the predicted probability that a former inmate would recidivate did not substantially differ between release groups in the presence of statistical controls.

Participation in the Community Social Control, the Neighborhood Watch Groups: Individual- and Neighborhood-Related Factors
Ji Hyon Kang

Studies confirm differences between participants and nonparticipants in voluntary organizations in general as well as those for crime prevention. Participants are more stable, longer residents, and attached residents with better socioeconomic status. Yet, previous studies have not thoroughly considered neighborhood conditions. A few studies show the overall participation-rate differences across neighborhoods without considering whether individuals residing in neighborhoods with different conditions show dissimilar patterns of participation. In addition, studies rarely consider the crime-related problems of communities. This study examines the differences between participants and nonparticipants in neighborhood crime-prevention associations with particular attention paid to the neighborhood-related factors, including crime problems. In addition, whether individual-related characteristics show the same or similar impact on participation when the community social context is in consideration is another question to be answered. It is revealed that individual- and neighborhood-related factors differentiate the residents’ participation. In particular, crime problems of the neighborhood affect participation in crime-prevention associations.

Officer Race Versus Macro-Level Context: A Test of Competing Hypotheses About Black Citizens’ Experiences With and Perceptions of Black Police Officers
Rod K. Brunson and Jacinta M. Gau

It has been proposed that hiring more Black police officers is an effective way to alleviate long-standing tensions between police and African Americans because Black officers will connect with Black citizens and treat them well. This hypothesis, however, fails to account for the macro-level context of the troubled locations in which African Americans disproportionately reside and wherein police–minority citizen problems are deep seated. The present study examines two competing hypotheses concerning the influence ofofficer race relative to that of ecological context in shaping African Americans’ experiences with and perceptions of local police. These hypotheses are testedusing in-depth interview data with Black residents of a majority-Black, high-crime, economically troubled city. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

Inside the Black Box: Identifying the Variables That Mediate the Effects of an Experimental Intervention for Adolescents
Carter Hay, Xia Wang, Emily Ciaravolo, and Ryan C. Meldrum

In recent decades, researchers have identified many programs that successfully reduce juvenile delinquency. Evaluations of these programs generally do not, however, assess the mediating variables that intervene between program participation and reduced delinquency. Thus, although much insight has been gained on which programs are effective, the question of why they are effective is often neglected. This study addresses this issue by considering the risk factors that mediate the effects of a comprehensive intervention on juvenile offending. This was considered with data from the Children at Risk program, a 2-year multimodal intervention with random assignment that has been shown to reduce delinquency among high-risk early adolescents.

Reconceptualizing Victimization and Victimization Responses
Heather Zaykowski

Research consistently demonstrates that severity, often measured by victim injury, is the most influential factor to predict reporting crimes to the police. However, less is known with regard to how the victim’s perception of the incident or their involvement in offending behavior inhibits this decision. The current study examines how traditional indicators (i.e., victim, offender and incident characteristics), the victim’s offending behavior, and perceptual measures influence police awareness of criminal victimization. Results suggest that victim injury and offending status does not significantly predict police awareness when subjective measures are controlled. However, multiple offenders, community crime, and parental knowledge significantly increased the odds that the police were aware that the victimization occurred.

The Triangulation Effects of Family Structure and Attachment on Adolescent Substance Use
Tiffiney Barfield-Cottledge

Travis Hirshi’s control theory hypothesizes that weak attachment to social control mechanisms increase the likelihood of crime and delinquency commission. The current study examined the effect of family structure and attachment on adolescent substance use, specifically hard liquor and drug use. Youth respondents between the ages of 15 and 18 years from the National Survey of Youth were included in the analyses (N = 1,036). The sample on which analyses were conducted comprised female (n = 498) and male (n = 538) respondents. For both male and female respondents, findings revealed that the family attachment variable emerged as a more significant predictor of adolescent alcohol and marijuana use (p < .05) when compared with the family structure variable.

Critical Criminology 23(1)

Critical Criminology, March 2015: Volume 23 Number 1

Lost in Translation: Looking for Transgender Identity in Women’s Prisons and Locating Aggressors in Prisoner Culture
Jennifer Sumner and Lori Sexton

The incarceration of transgender prisoners in men’s prisons is a burgeoning topic of legal challenge, policy development, and social science inquiry. The conspicuous absence of comparable attention to women’s facilities may facilitate a tacit assumption that what is known about transgender prisoners in men’s prisons translates seamlessly to women’s facilities. This paper interrogates this assumption by examining current understandings of what it means to be transgender in a women’s prison. Findings from focus groups with prisoners and staff reveal that gender is understood as both reflected by and constituted through social interaction. Specifically, in attempting to explain the concept of “transgender” in women’s prisons, this work instead reveals a different prevailing concept in prisoner culture: “aggressor.” Unlike transgender, aggressor does not denote gender identity; rather, it implies presentation and performance as reflective of gendered ways of navigating relationships within the context of a sex-segregated setting. These findings simultaneously affirm the extant literature on gender and sexuality in women’s prisons and complicate the translation of the identity-based concept “transgender” from men’s prisons to a women’s prison.

Wrongfully Convicting the Innocent: A State Crime?
Greg Stratton

Although there is evidence of its occurrence in most criminal justice systems, wrongful conviction remains underdeveloped from a criminological perspective. The result of a confluence of factors and actors, wrongful conviction stands as evidence that criminal justice systems are not immune to error. Amongst the different circumstances in individual cases, the state (or those acting on its behalf) is one constant actor implicated in wrongful conviction of the innocent. Recognizing this consistency, wrongful conviction has the potential to be examined through existing understandings of state crime and enter more robust discussions within critical and orthodox criminology. By expanding upon existing arguments relevant to state crime, this article suggests a typology of wrongful conviction by placing it on a continuum of state crime from acts of omission to commission. In doing so, this article further develops a theoretical argument demonstrating the relevance of wrongful conviction within the state crime ‘spectrum’, adding to the understanding of the problem of wrongful conviction.

Critical Criminology in the Life and Work of Eugene Victor Debs
Kenneth D. Tunnell and Edward L. W. Green

The American socialist, Eugene Debs, made a profound impact on American politics during the first half of the twentieth century. Although socialism and the public’s knowledge of Debs have waned since then, we argue, in this paper, that Debs, his writings and his life’s work are relevant to criminology—particularly critical criminology—yet neglected during the formative development of critical criminology. In this paper, we describe Debs’ biography and politics. We document his first-hand experiences with the legal system (including incarceration), his consistent critiques of capitalism and his written and spoken texts that empirically link American-style capitalism and its captains to US politics. Last, we describe Debs’ only published book on prisons and prison life and its unfortunate omission from the criminological canon yet argue that Debs’ life and written and spoken word remain central to social justice.

De-Demonizing the ‘Monstrous’ Drug Addict: A Qualitative Look at Social Reintegration Through Rehabilitation and Employment
Brandon Lutman, Caitlin Lynch and Elizabeth Monk-Turner

Few studies explore how employers perceive the experience of hiring recovering substance abusers. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with employers who hire clients from a residential drug treatment facility for adult males in a capital city in the southeastern United States as well as several administrators that work at this facility. The emergent themes uncovered through these interviews shed light on the opinions of those who refuse to abandon a population of individuals who have been neglected by so many others. The research participant insights shed light on the fact that when overcoming drug addiction and abuse, getting sober is only half the battle. These individuals are then left to fight against the labels and stigmatization cast upon them by society. Information gleaned from these interviews may offer employers who may consider hiring ex-offenders, insights into potential benefits and problems they may encounter in working with this population. The findings of this study emphasize the damning effects of labeling on the social reintegration of those desperate for a second chance at being productive members of society.

Breaking Out of Prison and into Print? Rationales and Strategies to Assist Educated Convicts Conduct Scholarly Research and Writing Behind Bars
Jeffrey Ian Ross, Miguel Zaldivar and Richard Tewksbury

Some educated convicts want to conduct scholarly research and have the results of their work appear in academic publications. This provides numerous benefits and challenges to the researcher/writer and the academic world. This article outlines these issues in order to assist convicts, scholars, journal editors, and correctional service personnel understand the opportunities and limitations to scholarly research by convicts behind bars. The authors argue that the best strategy to use for inmates in this situation is a team research approach. The discussion provides definitions and examples of the challenges, opportunities, and means of overcoming these obstacles.

Seeing Like an Orientalist State: The Three Deaths of Neda Agha-Soltan
Justin Turner

On June 20, 2009 one image became a symbol of violence, as well as a rallying cry for a movement that contested the disputed election of hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The image captured the murder of a 26 year old protester named Neda Agha-Soltan, and showed a first-hand account, in bloody detail, of the savagery of state killing. With the help of social media, the video received mass attention from news organizations in the United States by June 22, 2009. Cursory analysis of the New York Times and The Washington Post, representation of Neda’s death, reveals an Iranian government that was unafraid to violently repress a democratic movement. It is my contention here that such a construction was framed by an Orientalist discourse which helped to fabricate three distinct deaths of this murdered protester. First the lasting images of death became a symbol of freedom; Neda’s second death showed a grievable life, one that provided an emotional space for a US audience; and finally her third death which became a means of defining and (re)stabilizing Orientalized perceptions of Iran as violent and barbaric. Ultimately, these three deaths became an instrument that would help justify the call for US intervention on behalf of Western morality and humanitarian aid.

Reverberate, Resonate, Reproduce: A Reconsideration of Ideological Influence in Crime News Production
Nick Chagnon

For decades, scholars have increasingly been concerned with media representations of crime. Content analyses have chronicled pervasive distortions in media representations of crime. Many have argued these issues are particularly troubling in the news, as it supposedly provides an invaluable democratic service, spurring many theories of crime news production. Classic works often conceptualized crime news as either a product of dominant ideologies and top–down power, or journalistic routines and values, coupled with reflexive agency by journalists. More recently scholars have argued for hybrid perspectives. However, such hybridized approaches often brusquely treat the role of ideology in crime news. This article rethinks the role of ideology in crime news production, particularly the ways in which various ideologies interact and mutually strengthen each other.

Ambivalent Sovereigns and Restorative Justice: Exploring Conditions of Possibility and Impossibility for Restorative Justice in a Post-communicative Age
Ronnie Lippens

This contribution hopes to be able to contribute to answering the question: whither restorative justice? The restorative justice (RJ) movement has arrived at an existential crossroads. In this contribution an attempt is made to analyse how some of the origins of the RJ movement could be located in the emergence and crystallization of a new form of life (“control society”) in the wake of the Second World War. At the heart of this form of life one might be able to discern, on the one hand, a desire for and will to radical sovereignty, and, on the other, a resulting awareness of ambivalence. Whilst these aspects of post-war life have formed the backdrop of developments in RJ, and have therefore formed part of its conditions of possibility, one might now wonder if, in a post-communicative age such as ours, those very aspects have now become part of its conditions of impossibility. The argument explored in this contribution however holds that elements in the aforementioned form of life also hold potential for the re-thinking of restorative justice theory and practice.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 658

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 2015: Volume 658

The Politics of Science: Political Values and the Production, Communication, and Reception of Scientific Knowledge

Section I: Political Values and Public Beliefs About Science

Does Partisanship Shape Attitudes toward Science and Public Policy? The Case for Ideology and Religion
Joshua M. Blank and Daron Shaw

The Partisan Brain: How Dissonant Science Messages Lead Conservatives and Liberals to (Dis)Trust Science
Erik C. Nisbet, Kathryn E. Cooper, and R. Kelly Garrett

Questionnaire Design Effects in Climate Change Surveys: Implications for the Partisan Divide
Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sungjong Roh, and Norbert Schwarz

Red States, Blue States, and Brain States: Issue Framing, Partisanship, and the Future of Neurolaw in the United States
Francis X. Shen and Dena M. Gromet

The Influence of Specific Risk Perceptions on Public Policy Support: An Examination of Energy Policy
James W. Stoutenborough, Arnold Vedlitz, and Xinsheng Liu

Commentary
Why People “Don’t Trust the Evidence”: Motivated Reasoning and Scientific Beliefs
Patrick W. Kraft, Milton Lodge, and Charles S. Taber

Section II: Politics and Science Communication

Expertise in an Age of Polarization: Evaluating Scientists’ Political Awareness and Communication Behaviors
Matthew C. Nisbet and Ezra M. Markowitz

The Content and Effect of Politicized Health Controversies
Erika Franklin Fowler and Sarah E. Gollust

Selecting Our Own Science: How Communication Contexts and Individual Traits Shape Information Seeking
Sara K. Yeo, Michael A. Xenos, Dominique Brossard, and Dietram A. Scheufele

Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-Channel Model of Science Communication
Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith, Tor Tarantola, Carol L. Silva, and Donald Braman

Commentary
The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism in Politicized Science Debates
Matthew C. Nisbet and Declan Fahy

Section III: Values, Knowledge Elites, and the Public

Technology Optimism or Pessimism about Genomic Science: Variation among Experts and Scholarly Disciplines
Jennifer Hochschild and Maya Sen

Enablers of Doubt: How Future Teachers Learn to Negotiate the Evolution Wars in Their Classrooms
Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer

Citizens’, Scientists’, and Policy Advisors’ Beliefs about Global Warming
Toby Bolsen, James N. Druckman, and Fay Lomax Cook

Commentary
Politics and Science: Untangling Values, Ideologies, and Reasons
Heather Douglas

Theoretical Criminology 19(1)

Theoretical Criminology, February 2015: Volume 19, Issue 1

Editorial
Mary Bosworth and Simon Cole

The Dark Ghetto revisited: Kenneth B Clark’s classic analysis as cutting edge criminology
Elliott Currie, Tim Goddard, and Randolph R Myers

In this article we revisit one of the classic works of the 1960s on crime and delinquency in poor communities: Kenneth B Clark’s Dark Ghetto. Our exploration reveals its insights to be extremely relevant today both in understanding the roots of the self-destructive violence that tears at those communities and in thinking about how to combat the structural conditions and individual mentalities that generate it. Beyond the specific theoretical and methodological lessons that can be gleaned from Dark Ghetto, Clark’s work serves as a much-needed illustration of how theoretical insights derived from intensive qualitative research that is attuned to political, historical, and economic realities—and their human consequences—can enhance criminological theory, and align with progressive movements for social change.

Resistance or friction: Understanding the significance of prisoners’ secondary adjustments
Ashley T Rubin

Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain prisoner behaviors, creating both analytical and normative consequences. Instead, I suggest the concept of “friction” more accurately describes the reactive behaviors that occur when people find themselves in highly controlled environments.

The police and punishment: Understanding the pains of policing
Diarmaid M Harkin

This article argues that police studies should draw on the sociology of punishment to better understand state pain-delivery. Whereas penal theorists commonly assess the pain and punishment of inmates in relation to wider social sentiments, police theory has yet to regard police violence and harm in the same fashion. As a result, police scholars often fail to address why the damage caused by public constabularies, even when widely publicized, is accommodated and accepted. Adapting the idea of ‘punitiveness’ from penal theory allows some explanation of how the public views injury and suffering caused by the police by illuminating the emotions and sentiments their actions generate.

Falling crime rates: What happened last time
Paul Knepper

Although the falling crime rates in the 1990s surprised criminologists, it was not the first time crime had declined. There was a ‘crime drop’ in England in the 1920s. When crime did not rise as expected following the Great War, the government closed half the prisons, and Edwin Sutherland came to investigate ‘England’s empty prisons’. To conduct his analysis, Sutherland relied on work by SK Ruck, and between them, they came up with most of the leading explanations now used by criminologists. They considered the police and prisons, the economy and household security. They also discussed the psychological conditions of low-crime societies, the ‘sense of security’. Drawing on their unpublished material from archives in New York and London, the discussion here examines what can be learned about contemporary analyses of the crime drop of the 1990s. Overall, this article argues for the importance of theory in analysing the statistics of falling crime and how historical studies of crime trends can be useful in developing this theory.

Resilience in UK counter-terrorism
Keiran Hardy

Resilience describes the capacity of an individual, community or ecosystem to mitigate the impact of a shock or disturbance and then to recover in its aftermath. In recent years, resilience has become the favoured solution for a range of contemporary policy problems including natural disasters, mental health issues and terrorism. However, the concept is understood far less in criminology and counter-terrorism than in other fields such as psychology and natural hazards studies. This article compares resilience-building measures in the Prepare and Prevent strands of CONTEST, the UK government’s national strategy for countering terrorism. Its aim is to explore the benefits and dangers of resilience according to how the concept is defined and applied across different contexts.

Securing the home: Gender, CCTV and the hybridized space of apartment buildings
Jordana Wright, Amanda Glasbeek, and Emily van der Meulen

This article explores gendered narratives of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in apartment buildings. Drawing on primary data from a study with a diversity of women in Toronto, Canada, the authors foreground women’s experiences with apartment living and situate it as a profoundly feminized domestic arrangement. Consideration of the workings of CCTV in apartment buildings troubles both security and surveillance studies, especially in the context of the dominant legal and ideological configuration of ‘the home’. The apartment is at once ‘the home’ and neighbourhood; it is simultaneously a private space that must be secured from external threats and a public space that inhabitants have little power to secure.

Digital drift and the criminal interaction order
Andrew Goldsmith and Russell Brewer

Despite growing interest in cybercrime, the Internet still poses significant challenges for criminological understanding. Its penetration of everyday life is relevant to many crime types, not just cybercrimes. This article examines the ways in which criminal commitments form using the Internet and related communication technologies that empower the individual relative to the group (gang, mafia, etc.). We argue this occurs in two ways. First, it allows individuals to limit involvement in particular associations or networks. The concept of digital drift is used to explore this element. Second, it allows them to commit crimes more autonomously through facilitating self-instruction. Drawing on Goffman, the importance of studying the encounter as the basic unit of a criminal interaction order is proposed.

The British Journal of Criminology 55(2)

The British Journal of Criminology, March 2015: Volume 55, Issue 2

Editor's choice: Enlisting the Public in the Policing of Immigration
Ana Aliverti

As border policing is no longer circumscribed to external borders and increasingly performed inland, in Britain migration work relies on the assistance of a range of unorthodox partners, including the public. The unearthing of the ‘community’ as a crucial partner to police a myriad of public safety issues, including migration, begs the question of what are the implications of mobilizing citizenship for law enforcement? This paper argues that enlisting the public in migration law enforcement yields important civic by-products: it ‘creates’ citizens and citizenship. It imparts civic training by instilling a sense of civic responsibility in law and order maintenance, and in doing so it intends to recreate social cohesion across a deeply fragmented society.

Foucault’s Punitive Society: Visual Tactics of Marking as a History of the Present
Phil Carney

Applying a form of genealogical method rooted in Nietzsche’s use of history, this article seeks an understanding of ‘marking’ punishments in our own mass-mediated culture. First, Foucault’s analysis of the punitive tactic of marking in his 1973 course, The Punitive Society, will be considered. Second, his concept of ‘virtual marking’ will be extended and applied to the case of the pitture infamanti in the early renaissance. Third, I will use these insights in a genealogical spirit in order to examine the rise of virtual marking in modernity. We will discover that Foucault was mistaken to tether marking punishments so closely to sovereign power. Instead, with certain antecedents in ancient Rome, virtual marking emerged in a largely ‘bourgeois’ society during the early renaissance and re-emerges in our own society of mass, photographic spectacle.

An Examination of the Local Life Circumstances of Female Offenders: Mothering, Illegal Earnings and Drug Use
Carolyn Yule, Paul-Philippe Paré, and Rosemary Gartner

Most women convicted of crime are mothers, yet we know little about whether the daily activity of mothering affects women’s criminal behaviour. If mothering reduces opportunities to engage in crime, strengthens informal controls and increases the costs of crime, it should discourage offending. On the other hand, if children create an imperative for resources that women cannot accommodate legally or exacerbate psychological and emotional strains, women may resort to criminal behaviour. Using data from interviews with 259 incarcerated women in Ontario, Canada, we estimate multi-level models focussing on month-to-month changes in women’s responsibilities for children and their offending. We find that mothering is an important ‘local life circumstance’ for reducing women’s involvement in criminal activities.

Gender, Aging and Drug Use: A Post-structural Approach to the Life Course
Ingrid Lander

This article focuses on the ageing process among drug-using women, proceeded on the basis of a critical post-structural approach to the life course (Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Halberstam 2005; Ahmed 2006; Mattsson 2014). The objective is to provide an alternative perspective on the life course to that which dominates current criminology. This perspective challenges prevailing norms and conceptions regarding the other, and in doing so focuses the analysis on the social mechanisms that lie behind social exclusion, crime and drug use. By means of the retrospective narratives of 4 women, who describe a rambling journey along crooked paths on the margins of the welfare state, the article reveals the nature of prevailing norms and conceptions regarding ageing, gender and drug use.

Neutralization Without Drift: Criminal Commitment Among Persistent Offenders
Bruce A. Jacobs and Heith Copes

Prior research suggests that serious predatory offenders are sufficiently committed to illicit conduct that they must neutralize good behaviour, rather than bad behaviour. Drawing from a sample of offenders who commit carjacking, we question that assumption. Specifically, our data reveal the manner in which such offenders neutralize bad conduct without meaningfully drifting. The notion of ‘neutralization without drift’ represents a theoretical refinement of neutralization theory and an extension of core conceptualization in the interpretation of criminal commitment. Through this concept, we attempt to make sense of how persistent predatory offenders who commit carjacking are able to embrace aggression, explain that it’s not ‘really them’, neutralize bad rather than good conduct, yet retain their status as committed criminals.

Officers and Drug Counsellors: New Occupational Identities in Nordic Prisons
Torsten Kolind, Vibeke A. Frank, Odd Lindberg, and Jouni Tourunen

Increasingly, prison drug treatment is introduced in European prisons. This increase may begin to change the prison as officers and drug counsellors are given new occupational responsibilities. Based on six month of observational studies and qualitative interviews with 104 prison employees in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway in 12 prisons, this article investigates the practices and values of drug counsellors and officers. This shows that increasingly, counsellors integrate the control and disciplinary sanctions of the prison environment into their treatment approach. Simultaneously, officers working in drug treatment wings highlight the importance of the treatment ethos in their control work, adjusting the social representations of their professional identities accordingly. We discuss whether the concepts of treatment and control should be rethought.

Expanding the Community: An Exploratory Analysis of an American Parole Office’s Location and Its Impact on Parolees
Rita Shah

Numerous scholars study the effect of former prisoners’ neighbourhood on reintegration; few discuss how the geographic aspects of a community can impact the relationships within that community. This lack of discussion is particularly interesting for understanding the American parole system, as there seems to be no discussion of how the neighbourhood context of a parole office’s location impacts the relationships within. In this article, I argue the look, feel and location of a parole office may affect the parolee/parole agent relationship, which may in turn affect parole’s role in the reintegration process, and that we need to continue expanding criminological understandings of community and geography beyond where one lives and of how geographic and relational communities are connected.

Transforming ‘Summary Justice’ Through Police-led Prosecution and ‘Virtual Courts’: Is ‘Procedural Due Process’ Being Undermined?
Jenni Ward

The administration of ‘summary’ justice in the lower criminal courts in England and Wales is undergoing significant transformation. Broadly, this sits within the desire to create a modernized and more streamlined system. But, criminal justice scholars state ‘swift justice’ is not necessarily fair justice, and ‘procedural due process’ might be challenged by objectives of economics and speed. This paper centres on two areas of change—the expanded role of the police in prosecutorial decision making and the introduction of ‘virtual courts’ where accused defendants appear via video link from police stations to the criminal courts. It is argued these two alterations call into question fundamental principles of procedural due process.

‘Such Misconducts Don’t Make a Good Ranger’: Examining Law Enforcement Ranger Wrongdoing in Uganda
William D. Moreto, Rod K. Brunson, and Anthony A. Braga

Wildlife crime has been recognized to be an important topic of study by criminologists in recent years. Prior research has highlighted the detrimental impact of corruption on conservation-related issues. Law enforcement rangers are often the primary protectors of protected areas and wildlife. Yet, like other law enforcement agents, they are not immune to misconduct and corruption. The present study offers an in-depth examination of rangers’ experiences with and perceptions of wrongdoing in a specific Ugandan protected area. Findings indicate that ranger wrongdoing is driven by a myriad of factors and manifests in various ways. These findings have implications for the understanding and prevention of ranger misconduct.

On the Correlates of Reporting Assault to the Police in Malawi
Aiden Sidebottom

It is well known that many victims of crime do not notify the police. Research suggests that factors related to the victim, crime event and wider community are all implicated in the decision to report victimization. Few studies have investigated the correlates of victim reporting in developing countries, mainly owing to a lack of relevant data. It is therefore unclear whether the determinants of victim reporting in Western industrialized countries are generalizable to low-income developing settings. This paper explores the factors associated with victims reporting assault to the police in the African context of Malawi, using data from a nationally representative household survey. Results of a multilevel logistic regression indicate some similarities with the Western criminological literature, such as age of the victim and crime seriousness positively correlating with crime reporting. Other results seem to reflect the distinctive characteristics of Malawi, with victims more likely to report being assaulted if they are male, have access to a working phone or live in urban areas. The results illustrate the importance of studying criminological phenomena across a diverse range of settings. Implications of the findings for future research and crime prevention are discussed.

What Makes Long Crime Trips Worth Undertaking? Balancing Costs and Benefits in Burglars’ Journey to Crime
Christophe Vandeviver, Stijn Van Daele, and Tom Vander Beken

This study taps into rational choice theory and scrutinizes the assumption that profit maximization and effort minimization govern decisions related to burglary behaviour and the journey to crime. It treats distance as one of the major costs in the burglary target selection process and uses community characteristics to gain insight into how the anticipation of particular benefits favours the incremental costs of long crime trips. Two thousand three hundred and eighty-seven burglary trips were extracted from police records and analyzed using negative binomial regression analysis. The journey-to-crime distance was found to increase when burglaries were committed in communities containing motorways, dense road networks, and being ethnically heterogeneous. The journey-to-crime distance was found to decrease when densely populated areas and communities with high clearance rates are targeted.

American Sociological Review 80(1)

American Sociological Review, February 2015: Volume 80, Issue 1

2014 Presidential Address: Cultural Knowledge and Social Inequality
Annette Lareau

Using both qualitative longitudinal data collected 20 years after the original Unequal Childhoods study and interview data from a study of upwardly mobile adults, this address demonstrates how cultural knowledge matters when white and African American young adults of differing class backgrounds navigate key institutions. I find that middle-class young adults had more knowledge than their working-class or poor counterparts of the “rules of the game” regarding how institutions worked. They also displayed more of a sense of entitlement to ask for help. When faced with a problem related to an institution, middle-class young adults frequently succeeded in getting their needs accommodated by the institution; working-class and poor young adults were less knowledgeable about and more frustrated by bureaucracies. This address also shows the crucial role of “cultural guides” who help upwardly mobile adults navigate institutions. While many studies of class reproduction have looked at key turning points, this address argues that “small moments” may be critical in setting the direction of life paths.

Category Taken-for-Grantedness as a Strategic Opportunity: The Case of Light Cigarettes, 1964 to 1993
Greta Hsu and Stine Grodal

Theories within organizational and economic sociology that center on market categories often equate taken-for-grantedness with increased constraint on category members’ features. In contrast, we develop a novel perspective that considers how market participants’ changing category-related attributions decrease the scrutiny of category offerings, opening up strategic opportunities for firms. We further argue that whether producers should be expected to take advantage of these opportunities depends on the extent to which they are incentivized to do so. We use the case of the light cigarette category to test this thesis. We argue and find evidence that increasing taken-for-grantedness of the light cigarette category created greater opportunity for tobacco firms to strategically manipulate category features.

Can Ratings Have Indirect Effects? Evidence from the Organizational Response to Peers’ Environmental Ratings
Amanda J. Sharkey and Patricia Bromley

Organizations are increasingly subject to rating and ranking by third-party evaluators. Research in this area tends to emphasize the direct effects of ratings systems that occur when ratings give key audiences, such as consumers or investors, more information about a rated firm. Yet, ratings systems may also indirectly influence organizations when the collective presence of more rated peers alters the broader institutional and competitive milieu. Rated firms may be more responsive to ratings systems when surrounded by more rated peers, and ratings may generate diffuse or spillover effects even among unrated firms. We test these arguments by analyzing how rated and unrated firms change their pollution behavior when more firms in their peer group are rated on environmental performance. Results indicate that the presence of more rated peers is often associated with emissions reductions. This relationship varies, however, by whether a firm was rated, whether the rating was positive or negative (if rated), and, often, features of the competitive and regulatory environment.

Traditional, Modern, and Post-Secular Perspectives on Science and Religion in the United States
Timothy L. O’Brien and Shiri Noy

Using General Social Survey data, we examine perspectives on science and religion in the United States. Latent class analysis reveals three groups based on knowledge and attitudes about science, religiosity, and preferences for certain religious interpretations of the world. The traditional perspective (43 percent) is marked by a preference for religion compared to science; the modern perspective (36 percent) holds the opposite view. A third perspective, which we call post-secular (21 percent), views both science and religion favorably. However, when faced with competing accounts of events such as creation and evolution, post-seculars root their views in religion rather than in mainstream science. Regression models indicate that perspectives on science and religion do not simply mirror other denominational or ideological differences. Furthermore, religio-scientific perspectives shape attitudes about political issues where scientific and some religious communities diverge, including on abortion rights and stem cell research. Overall, most individuals favor either scientific or religious ways of understanding, but many scientifically inclined individuals prefer certain religious accounts. This suggests that public divisions related to science and religion are cultural and epistemological. This article underscores the complexity of the boundary between reason and faith and highlights the roots of political conflict in perspectives on science and religion in the United States.

Can We Finish the Revolution? Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint
David S. Pedulla and Sarah Thébaud

Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit men’s and women’s ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men’s and women’s preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across education levels. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women’s relationship structure preferences are more responsive than men’s to the removal of institutional constraints through supportive work-family policy interventions. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces.

The Price of Protection: A Trajectory Analysis of Civil Remedies for Abuse and Women’s Earnings
Melanie M. Hughes and Lisa D. Brush

We know men’s violence against women is costly. Yet, we know little about the costs—or benefits—of women’s efforts to end it. This study investigates the temporal dynamics of women’s earnings and petitioning for a Protection from Abuse (PFA) civil restraining order. Women’s earnings might rise or fall at the time of petitioning but quickly return to pre-petitioning levels, a short-term boost or shock; or, petitioning might precipitate a longer-term stall or upward shift in women’s earnings. To test for these effects, we use latent growth curve analysis and evaluate women’s earnings trajectories over six years. We find overwhelming evidence that the period around petitioning is one of exceptional earnings instability for petitioners, many of whom experience both shocks and stalls. Virtually no one experiences a boost in the quarter of petitioning or an upward shift in earnings growth in the year after petitioning for a PFA. Welfare, however, buffers negative effects of petitioning on women’s earnings growth. We also calculate lost earnings as the difference between women’s counterfactual projected and estimated earnings. Our findings inform theoretical and policy debates about interventions intended to address poverty and violence against women.

Capturing Culture: A New Method to Estimate Exogenous Cultural Effects Using Migrant Populations
Javier G. Polavieja

We know that culture influences people’s behavior. Yet estimating the exact extent of this influence poses a formidable methodological challenge for the social sciences. This is because preferences and beliefs are endogenous, that is, they are shaped by individuals’ own experiences and affected by the same macro-structural conditions that constrain their actions. This study introduces a new method to overcome endogeneity problems in the estimation of cultural effects by using migrant populations. This innovative method uses imputed traits, generated from non-migrating equivalents observed at the country of origin, as instruments for immigrants’ own cultural traits measured at the country of destination. By construction, imputed traits are exogenous to immigrants’ host social environment. The predicted power of imputed traits over observed traits in instrumental-variable estimation captures the non-idiosyncratic component of preferences and beliefs that migrants and non-migrating equivalents share as members of the same national-origin group, that is, their culture. I use this innovative method to estimate the net exogenous impact of traditional values on female labor-force participation in Europe. I find that this impact is much larger than standard regression methods would suggest.

Pulling Closer and Moving Apart: Interaction, Identity, and Influence in the U.S. Senate, 1973 to 2009
Christopher C. Liu and Sameer B. Srivastava

This article reconciles two seemingly incompatible expectations about interpersonal interaction and social influence. One theoretical perspective predicts that an increase in interaction between two actors will promote subsequent convergence in their attitudes and behaviors, whereas another view anticipates divergence. We examine the role of political identity in moderating the effects of interaction on influence. Our investigation takes place in the U.S. Senate—a setting in which actors forge political identities for public consumption based on the external constraints, normative obligations, and reputational concerns they face. We argue that interaction between senators who share the same political identity will promote convergence in their voting behavior, whereas interaction between actors with opposing political identities will lead to divergence. Moreover, we theorize that the consequences of political identity for interpersonal influence depend on the local interaction context. Political identity’s effects on influence will be greater in more divided Senate committees than in less divided ones. We find support for these hypotheses in analyses of data, spanning over three decades, on voting behavior, interaction, and political identity in the Senate. These findings contribute to research on social influence; elite integration and political polarization; and identity theory.

Contact Theory in a Small-Town Settler-Colonial Context: The Reproduction of Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-White Canadian Relations
Jeffrey S. Denis

This article builds on group position theory and the subcategorization model of intergroup contact by illustrating how, in a small-town settler-colonial context, contact tends to reproduce, rather than challenge, the inequitable racial structure. In Northwestern Ontario, Indigenous-settler relations are characterized by widespread intergroup marriage and friendship as well as pervasive prejudice and discrimination. Using 18 months of fieldwork and 160 interviews and surveys with First Nations, Métis, and non-Indigenous residents, I show that although contact is associated with less “old-fashioned” prejudice (i.e., overt categorical hostility), it does not necessarily eliminate whites’ superior sense of group position. Even white individuals who have close Indigenous friends or spouses often express laissez-faire racism. Three mutually reinforcing social processes—subtyping, ideology-based homophily, and political avoidance norms—interact to sustain whites’ sense of group superiority and justifications for racial inequity. These processes are facilitated by historical and structural conditions, in this case colonization and small-town dynamics.

Theory and Society 44(1)

Theory and Society, January 2015: Volume 44, Issue 1

Subordination and dispositions: Palestinians’ differing sense of injustice, politics, and morality
Silvia Pasquetti

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and incorporating insights from feminist and critical race and legal scholarship on the creation of “subjugated knowledge,” this article investigates the dispositional production of perceptions of injustice, politics, and morality among differently situated members of a subordinated population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within and across the West Bank and the Israeli city of Lod, I track how the political rhetoric that Lod Palestinians use to describe key issues in their lives—for example, drug use and dealing, and poor formal education—differs from the moral judgments through which West Bank Palestinians, who have moved to the city and remain there precariously, interpret the same issues. This article traces this interpretive divergence to two dispositional formations: one that has emerged under protracted conditions of denigration, criminalization, and surveillance in Lod and the other that has been produced over time by military rule in the West Bank and imported to Lod by West Bank Palestinians who moved there. It concludes by calling attention to the role of dispositions in studies of identity-formation and boundary-work as well as issues of submission and resistance in contexts of subordination.

Maintaining ethnic boundaries in “non-ethnic” contexts: constructivist theory and the sexual reproduction of diversity
Z. Ozgen

How can ethnic boundaries survive in contexts of legal racial equality and institutionalized ethnic mixing? Constructivist theories of ethnicity have long emphasized the fluidity, rather than the durability, of ethnic boundaries. But the fact that ethnic boundaries often endure—and even thrive—in putatively non-ethnic political contexts suggests the need for sustained attention to the problem of boundary persistence. Based on an ethnographic study of ethnic boundaries in the Turkish case, this article argues that the regulation of the domain of sexuality and marriage can play a critical role in reproducing boundaries when political institutions neither acknowledge nor aid in the survival of ethnic diversity. Ultimately, the data provide substantial evidence that the transmission and internalization of informal rules of inter-ethnic sexual conduct are central to boundary maintenance.

Deep culture in action: resignification, synecdoche, and metanarrative in the moral panic of the Salem Witch Trials
Isaac Ariail Reed

Sociological research on moral panics, long understood as “struggles for cultural power,” has focused on the social groups and media conditions that enable moral panics to emerge, and on the consequences of moral panics for the social control systems of societies. In this article I turn instead to modeling the specific cultural process of how the conditions for a moral panic are turned into an actual moral panic, moving the understanding of moral panic away from its Durkheimian origins and towards a process-relational cultural sociology. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of myth and Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, the paper posits the cultural process of resignification via synecdoche and metanarrative as the driver of the disproportion, concern, hostility, consensus, and volatility of moral panics. This process can be carefully traced in the case of the Salem Witch Trials; a retrospective reading reveals the same process at work in the “Mods and Rockers” panic analyzed by Stanley Cohen. Beyond moral panics, theorizing resignification as a non-exclusive counterpoint to framing and ideational embeddedness enriches the theoretical repertoire of cultural sociology. “Deep culture” and mythological signification can, using the schema proposed here, be understood as practical accomplishments—rhetorical responses to particular situations that, when performed successfully, legitimate violence and other forms of domination.

Journal of Marriage and Family 77(1)

Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2015: Volume 77, Issue 1

Communicating Qualitative Research: Some Practical Guideposts for Scholars
Abbie E. Goldberg and Katherine R. Allen

Placing Families in Context: Challenges for Cross-National Family Research
Wei-hsin Yu

Minority Stress and Stress Proliferation Among Same-Sex and Other Marginalized Couples
Allen J. LeBlanc, David M. Frost and Richard G. Wight

The Relationship Between Maternal Education and Children's Academic Outcomes: A Theoretical Framework
Jessica F. Harding, Pamela A. Morris and Diane Hughes

Exploring Ambivalence in Family Ties: Progress and Prospects
Ingrid Arnet Connidis

Challenges and Opportunities for Research on Same-Sex Relationships
Debra Umberson, Mieke Beth Thomeer, Rhiannon A. Kroeger, Amy C. Lodge and Minle Xu

Marginal Structural Models: An Application to Incarceration and Marriage During Young Adulthood
Valerio Bacak and Edward H. Kennedy

Families Under the Microscope: Repeated Sampling of Perceptions, Experiences, Biology, and Behavior
Rena L. Repetti, Bridget M. Reynolds and Meredith S. Sears

Measuring Constructs in Family Science: How Can Item Response Theory Improve Precision and Validity?
Rachel A. Gordon

Family Structure and Child Well-being: Integrating Family Complexity
Susan L. Brown, Wendy D. Manning and J. Bart Stykes

Investigating Family Shared Realities With Factor Mixture Modeling
W. Justin Dyer and Randal D. Day

Social Relations Model Analyses of Perceived Self-Control and Trust in Families
Asuman Buyukcan-Tetik, Catrin Finkenauer, Merel Siersema, Karin Vander Heyden and Lydia Krabbendam

Parental Responsibilities: Dilemmas of Measurement and Gender Equality
Andrea Doucet

Sampling Richness and Qualitative Integrity: Challenges for Research With Families
Kevin Roy, Anisa Zvonkovic, Abbie Goldberg, Elizabeth Sharp and Ralph LaRossa

Do Positive Feelings Hurt? Disaggregating Positive and Negative Components of Intergenerational Ambivalence
Megan Gilligan, J. Jill Suitor, Scott Feld and Karl Pillemer

Handling Missing Values in Longitudinal Panel Data With Multiple Imputation
Rebekah Young and David R. Johnson

The Analysis of Duocentric Social Networks: A Primer
David P. Kennedy, Grace L. Jackson, Harold D. Green, Thomas N. Bradbury and Benjamin R. Karney

Estimates and Meanings of Marital Separation
Dmitry Tumin, Siqi Han and Zhenchao Qian

Social Science Research 50

Social Science Research, Volume 50: March 2015

Predicting performance expectations from affective impressions: Linking affect control theory and status characteristics theory

Joseph Dippong, Will Kalkhoff

Latent Class Models in action: Bridging social capital & Internet usage 

Barbara Barbosa Neves, Jaime R.S. Fonseca

Surgical sterilization, regret, and race: Contemporary patterns 

Karina M. Shreffler, Julia McQuillan, Arthur L. Greil, David R. Johnson

(Dis)placing trust: The long-term effects of job displacement on generalised trust over the adult lifecourse

James Laurence

Universalism under siege? Exploring the association between targeting, child benefits and child poverty across 26 countries
Wim Van Lancker, Natascha Van Mechelen

Career pathways for temporary workers: Exploring heterogeneous mobility dynamics with sequence analysis
Sylvia Fuller, Natasha Stecy-Hildebrandt

Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment of adolescents, buffered by personality and educational commitment
Jaap Nieuwenhuis, Pieter Hooimeijer, Wim Meeus

The increasing unemployment gap between the low and high educated in West Germany. Structural or cyclical crowding-out?
Markus Klein

State liberalism, female supervisors, and the gender wage gap
David J. Maume, Leah Ruppanner

Measuring the level of social support using latent class analysis
Letícia Marques Santos, Leila Denise A.F. Amorim, Darci Neves Santos, Maurício L. Barreto

The use of multilevel modeling and the level two residual file to explore the relationship between middle years programme student performance and diploma programme student performance
Melissa Gordon, Liz Bergeron

Liking and disliking minority-group classmates: Explaining the mixed findings for the influence of ethnic classroom composition on interethnic attitudes
Tobias H. Stark, Michael Mäs, Andreas Flache

Cultural capital in context: Heterogeneous returns to cultural capital across schooling environments
Ida Gran Andersen, Mads Meier Jæger

Material hardship and 529 college savings plan participation: The mitigating effects of Child Development Accounts
Nora Wikoff, Jin Huang, Youngmi Kim, Michael Sherraden

Occupational stratification, job-mismatches, and child poverty: Understanding the disadvantage of Black immigrants in the US
Kevin J.A. Thomas

Towards climate justice: How do the most vulnerable weigh environment–economy trade-offs?
Katrina Running

When everyone goes to college: The causal effect of college expansion on earnings
Seongsoo Choi

Status, emotional displays, and the relationally-based evaluation of criminals and their behavior
Lisa M. Dilks, Tucker S. McGrimmon, Shane R. Thye

Chips off the old blocks? The political participation patterns of parents and children in Italy
Giulia M. Dotti Sani, Mario Quaranta

The power of a paired t-test with a covariate
E.C. Hedberg, Stephanie Ayers

The impact of cumulative family risks on various levels of food insecurity
Daphne C. Hernandez

The often overlooked issue of statistical power: This and other issues regarding assessing importance weighting in quality of life measures
Chang-ming Hsieh

Work–family conflict in context: The impact of structural and perceived neighborhood disadvantage on work–family conflict
Marisa Young

Gender, trust and cooperation in environmental social dilemmas
Kyle Irwin, Kimberly Edwards, Jeffrey A. Tamburello

Growth curve analyses of the relationship between early maternal age and children’s mathematics and reading performance
D. Diego Torres

Extracurricular associations and college enrollment
Benjamin G. Gibbs, Lance D. Erickson, Mikaela J. Dufur, Aaron Miles

Instrumental variables estimates of peer effects in social networks
Weihua An

Crime & Delinquency 61(1)

Crime & Delinquency, February 2015: Volume 61, Issue 1

An Examination of the Interaction Between Morality and Deterrence in Offending: A Research Note
Robert Svensson

This study examines whether deterrence and morality interact in the explanation of adolescent offending. On the basis of the Situational Action Theory, the author hypothesizes that deterrence is more effective in preventing offending among individuals with low levels of morality than among individuals with high levels of morality. To test this hypothesis, self-report data are used from a sample of young adolescents in Halmstad, Sweden (N = 891). The findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that the effect of deterrence (measured as the perceived risk of getting caught, that is, “certainty”) on offending is dependent on the individual’s level of morality, indicating that deterrence has a significantly stronger effect on offending for individuals with low levels of morality than for individuals with higher levels of morality.

An Examination of the Micro-Level Crime–Fear of Crime Link
Jihong Solomon Zhao, Brian Lawton, and Dennis Longmire

Since the late 1960s, crime has been hypothesized to be associated with fear of crime. However, little research has been available to test this assumption at the individual level of analysis. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between crime and fear of crime using data collected from a random telephone survey of local residents in the city of Houston. The authors investigate if there is an impact of an individual’s spatial proximity to crime on fear of crime also measured at the individual level. To be more specific, the authors examine the crime–fear of crime link using three types of crime—violent crime, property crime, and disorder crime. Both the residence of respondents and crime events are spatially located, allowing the authors to construct a buffer surrounding the respondent’s residence to obtain the number of crime incidents that occur within a 528-foot (1/10th of a mile) radius of the residence. In addition, the authors explore the relationship between spatial distribution of actual crime events and individual fear of crime at 0.5-mile radius and 1.0-mile radius of each respondent who participated in the telephone interview. The findings suggest that a person’s proximity to crime incidents has a significant impact on fear of crime among respondents interviewed. Furthermore, the magnitudes of coefficients show that different types of crime (violent crime, property crime, and disorder crime) have similar impacts on fear of crime.

Neighborhood Conditions and Fear of Crime: A Reconsideration of Sex Differences
Karen A. Snedker

Research indicates that men and women commonly express different amounts of fear about crime. This article explores the sex difference in fear of crime levels by assessing differences in fear of crime in relation to urban environments. Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety, the present analysis employs multinomial logistic regressions to examine gradations in two measures of fear of crime. Some aspects of the neighborhood environment do differentially influence men and women’s fear of crime levels, including serious crime in the neighborhood, physical and social disorder. Findings highlight that women’s greater fear of crime is partially due to higher perceived risks through signals of neighborhood conditions.

Problem-Oriented Policing in Colorado Springs: A Content Analysis of 753 Cases
Edward R. Maguire, Craig D. Uchida, and Kimberly D. Hassell

Problem-oriented policing (POP) has generated substantial attention from practitioners, scholars, and policy makers. A growing body of research is beginning to cast doubt on the extent to which this reform has been implemented in police agencies as prescribed by reformers. This study presents findings from an analysis of POP in the Colorado Springs Police Department, one of the national leaders of POP in the United States. The principal form of evidence is a systematic content analysis of case summaries and reports completed by police officers in 753 POP cases in Colorado Springs. The results point to a set of common roadblocks in the implementation of POP, as well as more general patterns that seem to influence the implementation of police reform.

Sentencing Asian Offenders in State Courts: The Influence of a Prevalent Stereotype
Travis W. Franklin and Noelle E. Fearn

A significant body of literature has developed to explain the controversial issue of sentencing disparity among various racial/ethnic groups. According to the focal concerns perspective, judges may rely on race-based stereotypes, among other factors, in reaching sentencing outcomes. This contention has received support by the empirical literature when examining sentencing differences that emerge between similarly situated White, Black, and Hispanic offenders. Unfortunately, very little research has addressed the relative treatment of Asian offenders to determine whether stereotypes that commonly target these individuals—particularly the “model minority” stereotype—emerge as a potential extralegal factor in judicial sentencing decisions. To address this shortcoming, the current study employs a large sample of offenders processed by state courts to examine the sentencing of Asians relative to White, Black, and Hispanic offenders. Findings are consistent with a focal concerns/model minority perspective and indicate that Asians are, in fact, treated more leniently than other racial/ethnic groups at the incarceration decision. This extralegal disparity, however, does not emerge during the sentence length decision. Implications for theory, policy, and future research are discussed.

The Relationship Between Citizen Perceptions of Collective Efficacy and Neighborhood Violent Crime
Todd A. Armstrong, Charles M. Katz, and Stephen M. Schnebly

The current work assesses the relationship between respondent perceptions of collective efficacy and neighborhood violence. Data used in the analysis combined a community survey from Mesa, Arizona, with census data. Factor analysis provided mixed evidence regarding the factor structure of collective efficacy; therefore, separate regression models were used to test the influence of collective efficacy, social cohesion, and willingness to intervene on levels of neighborhood violence. Analyses found that community structural characteristics including concentrated disadvantage and residential instability significantly predicted perceptions of collective efficacy, social cohesion, and willingness to intervene. In turn each of these variables was related to violent crime after controlling for levels of concentrated disadvantage, residential instability, and individual demographic characteristics. When social cohesion and willingness to intervene were included in a single regression model, only social cohesion was predictive of neighborhood violence. Social cohesion and violent crime had reciprocal effects that were both negative and statistically significant.

Adjusting for Unit Non-Response in Surveys Through Weighting

Danielle Marie Carkin and Paul E. Tracy

Unit non-response is a serious problem in survey research. This article validates the necessity of adjusting for unit non-response in disproportionate stratified sampling designs through the use of sample weights. Using data from the 1958 Birth Cohort study, we demonstrate that sample data which are affected by unit non-response can be a poor representation of population parameters. These non-response effects can be addressed through the application of sample weights.

Sociological Theory 32(4)

Sociological Theory, December 2014: Volume 32, Issue 4

Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology
Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed

Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists’ formation stories have been mischaracterized as noncausal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional “forcing-cause” accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality—variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms—all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing-causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing-cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing-cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis.

Enduring Illusions: The Social Organization of Secrecy and Deception
David R. Gibson

Sociologists theorize that people comply with the dictates of states and other organizations out of self-interest or because of the perceived legitimacy of those in authority. Some organizations, however, are based on lies, or secrets, and it would seem that these should be very short-lived, given how easy it is for the truth to escape. This article lays the foundations of a sociology of deception, focusing on lies and secrets successfully maintained for years or even decades. The ideas of Goffman and Simmel provide a theoretical starting point. Then Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is considered as a case study. Drawing on that and other examples, the article culminates in a theory that distinguishes between barriers to knowing, barriers to asking, barriers to telling, barriers to perceiving, barriers to believing, and barriers to acting. Together, these may counter the natural entropic tendency for information to leak and diffuse, in part because the effectiveness of one sort of barrier may offset imperfections in others.

The High of Cultural Experience: Toward a Microsociology of Cultural Consumption
Claudio Benzecry and Randall Collins

Does the experience of cultural consumption have its own sui generis attraction and value in itself, or is it an index of external social ranking? Four criteria are proposed that are observable in microsociological detail: (1) bodily self-absorption in the cultural experience, creating an intense internal interaction ritual; (2) collective effervescence among the audience; (3) Goffmanian front-stage self-presentation in settings of cultural consumption; and (4) verbal discourse during and around the cultural experience. Data from highly committed opera fanatics in Buenos Aires are used to document the extreme pole of cultural consumption that rejects external social hierarchies in favor of pure musical experience. This individualized and internal style of music consumption resembles religious mysticism, and what Weber in his typology of orientations to religious experience called virtuoso religiosity, as distinct from typical social class orientations to religion and to music.

The Socioemotional Foundations of Suicide: A Microsociological View of Durkheim’s Suicide
Seth Abrutyn and Anna S. Mueller

Durkheim’s theory of suicide remains one of the quintessential “classic” theories in sociology. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, it has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. Rather than defend Durkheim’s theory on its own terms, this paper elaborates his typology of suicide by sketching suicide’s socioemotional structure. We integrate social psychological, psychological, and psychiatric advances in emotion research and argue that (1) egoistic, or attachment-based suicides, are driven primarily by sadness/hopelessness; (2) anomic/fatalistic, or regulative suicides, are driven by shame; and (3) mixed-types exist and are useful for developing a more robust and complex multilevel model.

The Birth of the Gods: Robertson Smith and Durkheim’s Turn to Religion as the Basis of Social Integration
Alexandra Maryanski

Emile Durkheim’s ideas on religion have long served as foundational blocks for sociological theories. Yet, a mystery remains over where Durkheim’s insights into religion came from and especially the event that opened his eyes to religion’s importance in social life. Durkheim never supplied details on this conversion, but he did credit Robertson Smith for his new understanding. Did Smith really play the key role in Durkheim’s turn to religion? This essay examines Durkheim’s revelation in 1895 by starting from a novel angle—the first edition of The Division of Labor and his original stage model with the “cult of nature” as the starting point for religion. Tracing the implications of his initial choice of naturism as the elementary religion, a choice he would later soundly reject as “the product of [a] delirious interpretation,” offers new insights into why Durkheim found Smith’s ideas so inspirational. It also sheds light on why Durkheim overhauled his theory of solidarity, discarding his famous distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. In Robertson Smith’s work, Durkheim discovered a more inclusive and enduring basis of solidarity in the social universe.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 52(1)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, February 2015: Volume 52, Issue 1

Burglar Target Selection: A Cross-national Comparison
Michael Townsley, Daniel Birks, Wim Bernasco, Stijn Ruiter, Shane D. Johnson, Gentry White, and Scott Baum

Objectives: This study builds on research undertaken by Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta and explores the generalizability of a theoretically derived offender target selection model in three cross-national study regions. Methods: Taking a discrete spatial choice approach, we estimate the impact of both environment- and offender-level factors on residential burglary placement in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Combining cleared burglary data from all study regions in a single statistical model, we make statistical comparisons between environments. Results: In all three study regions, the likelihood an offender selects an area for burglary is positively influenced by proximity to their home, the proportion of easily accessible targets, and the total number of targets available. Furthermore, in two of the three study regions, juvenile offenders under the legal driving age are significantly more influenced by target proximity than adult offenders. Post hoc tests indicate the magnitudes of these impacts vary significantly between study regions. Conclusions: While burglary target selection strategies are consistent with opportunity-based explanations of offending, the impact of environmental context is significant. As such, the approach undertaken in combining observations from multiple study regions may aid criminology scholars in assessing the generalizability of observed findings across multiple environments.

Consequences of Expected and Observed Victim Resistance for Offender Violence during Robbery Events
Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard, Wim Bernasco, and Scott Jacques

Objectives: Drawing on the rational choice perspective, this study aims at explaining why some robberies take place with physical force while others occur only with threat. The focus is how expected and observed victim resistance impact physical force by robbers. Methods: We draw on quantitative and qualitative data obtained from 104 robbers who described 143 robbery events. Based on the coding of behavioral sequences between offenders and victims, we distinguish between the use of physical force at the onset from the use of physical force during the progression of the event. Results: At the onset of robberies, physical force of offenders is influenced by whether they judge the victim to be street credible. During the progression of robberies, offenders are more likely to use physical force against a resistant than against a compliant victim. Conclusions: At the onset of the robbery, offender violence is related to expected victim resistance; during the progression, it is related to observed victim resistance. Future research should focus on behavioral sequences within robbery events including the meaning of victim characteristics and victim behavior in different phases of the event.

Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Threat: Is There a New Criminal Threat on State Sentencing?
Ben Feldmeyer, Patricia Y. Warren, Sonja E. Siennick, and Malisa Neptune

Objectives: The racial threat perspective argues that racial minorities are subjected to greater punishment in places with large or growing minority populations. However, prior research has focused largely on Black populations while devoting limited attention to potential “Latino threat” or “immigrant threat” effects. To address these gaps, this study explores the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on sentence disposition (jail, prison, or community corrections) and sentence length. Methods: Using 2000 through 2006 data from the Florida Department of Corrections Guideline database, we use multilevel modeling techniques to explore the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on state criminal sentencing. Results: The results provide support for racial/ethnic threat theory among Black but not Latino defendants. Black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison and are given longer sentences in counties with growing Black populations. In contrast, Latino sentences are not significantly influenced by Latino population growth. Results provide no support for immigrant threat positions. Conclusions: Overall, our findings offer a complex picture for racial/ethnic and immigrant threat. However, one pattern remains clear. Within Florida courts, Black defendants continue to be the prime targets for effects of racial threat and resulting disadvantages in criminal sentencing.

What Works for Whom? The Effects of Gender Responsive Programming on Girls and Boys in Secure Detention
Jacob C. Day, Margaret A. Zahn, and Lisa P. Tichavsky

Objectives: This study investigates whether gender responsive programming is effective at reducing recidivism relative to traditional, reinforcement-based programming for both girls and boys in secure detention. Methods: Event-history analysis is used to examine recidivism outcomes for two propensity score matched samples of girls (n = 148) and boys (n = 140) released from gender responsive versus traditional detention facilities in Connecticut. The contingent effects of trauma, depression/anxiety, alcohol/drug abuse, anger/irritability, and somatic complaints are also examined. Results: Compared to traditional programming, gender responsive programming for youth in secure detention is associated with a lower risk of recidivism for girls with gender-sensitive risk factors but a higher risk of recidivism among girls who do not display these risk factors. Gender responsive programs are no more or less effective at reducing recidivism for boys, regardless of whether they display risk factors commonly associated with girls’ delinquency and confinement. Conclusions: The results suggest that girls in secure detention require different approaches depending on their histories of trauma and associated mental and physical health issues. While girls who follow gendered pathways into detention benefit from the relational approach employed in gender responsive programs, girls without such issues benefit more from traditional reinforcement programming.

Marriage and County-level Crime Rates: A Research Note
Michael Rocque, Chad Posick, Steven E. Barkan, and Ray Paternoster

Objectives: To determine whether the relationship between marriage and crime extends beyond the individual level of analysis by examining the relationship between marriage rates and crime rates at the county level. Methods: Linear regression analyses of marriage rates on various types of crime, including violent, property, drug, and juvenile crime arrest rates. Results: The analyses suggest that marriage rates are inversely related to rates of violent crime, property crime, drug use, and juvenile violence. Conclusions: This research note suggests that the relationship between marriage and crime is more far reaching than previous studies have indicated. Final remarks address the implications of the findings for theoretical work on crime causation and for public policy.

American Journal of Sociology 120(1)

American Journal of Sociology, July 2014: Volume 120, Issue 1

“I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman”: Queer Negotiations of Identity and Social Group Membership
Carla A. Pfeffer

For decades, sociological theory has documented how our lives are simultaneously produced through and against normative structures of sex, gender, and sexuality. These normative structures are often believed to operate along presumably “natural,” biological, and essentialized binaries of male/female, man/woman, and heterosexual/homosexual. However, as the lives and experiences of transgender people and their families become increasingly socially visible, these normative structuring binaries are called into stark question as they fail to adequately articulate and encompass these social actors’ identities and social group memberships. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 50 women from the United States, Canada, and Australia, who detail 61 unique relationships with transgender men, this study considers how the experiences of these queer social actors hold the potential to rattle the very foundations upon which normative binaries rest, highlighting the increasingly blurry intersections, tensions, and overlaps between sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 21st century. This work also considers the potential for these normative disruptions to engender opportunities for social collaboration, solidarity, and transformation.

Neither Ideologues nor Agnostics: Alternative Voters’ Belief System in an Age of Partisan Politics
Delia Baldassarri and Amir Goldberg

How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulations, each characterized by a distinctive way of organizing its political beliefs, are identified: ideologues, whose political attitudes strongly align with either liberal or conservative categories; alternatives, who are instead morally conservative but economically liberal, or vice versa; and agnostics, who exhibit weak associations between political beliefs. Individuals’ sociodemographic profiles, particularly their income, education, and religiosity, lie at the core of the different ways in which they understand politics. Results show that while ideologues have gone through a process of issue alignment, alternatives have grown increasingly apart from the political agendas of both parties. The conflictual presence of conservative and liberal preferences has often been resolved by alternative voters in favor of the Republican Party.

Governing Inside the Organization: Interpreting Regulation and Compliance
Garry C. Gray and Susan S. Silbey

Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations’ behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance.

Blocked Acculturation: Cultural Heterodoxy among Europe’s Immigrants
Andreas Wimmer and Thomas Soehl

Which immigrant groups differ most from the cultural values held by mainstream society and why? The authors explore this question using data from the European Social Survey on the values held by almost 100,000 individuals associated with 305 immigrant groups and the native majorities of 23 countries. They test whether distant linguistic or religious origins (including in Islam), value differences that immigrants “import” from their home countries, the maintenance of transnational ties and thus diasporic cultures, or legal and social disadvantage in the country of settlement shape acculturation processes. They find that only legally or socially disadvantaged groups differ from mainstream values in significant ways. For first generation immigrants, this is because the values of their countries of origin diverge more from those of natives. Among children of disadvantaged immigrants, however, value heterodoxy emerges because acculturation processes are blocked and the values of the parent generation partially maintained. From the second generation onward, therefore, cultural values are endogenous to the formation and dissolution of social boundaries, rather than shaping these as an exogenous force.

Issue Bricolage: Explaining the Configuration of the Social Movement Sector, 1960–1995
Wooseok Jung, Brayden G. King, and Sarah A. Soule

Social movements occupy a shared ideational and resource space, which is often referred to as the social movement sector. This article contributes to the understanding of the relational dynamics of the social movement sector by demonstrating how ideational linkages are formed through protest events. Using a data set of protest events occurring in the United States from 1960 to 1995, the authors model the mechanisms shaping why certain movement issues (e.g., women’s and peace or environmental and gay rights) appear together at protest events. They argue that both cultural similarity and status differences between two social movement issues are the underlying mechanisms that shape joint protest and the resultant ideational linkages between issues. Finally, they show that the linking of issues at protest events results in changes in the prominence of a given issue in the social movement sector.

Coevolution in Management Fashion: An Agent-Based Model of Consultant-Driven Innovation
David Strang, Robert J. David, and Saeed Akhlaghpour

The rise of management consultancy has been accompanied by increasingly marked faddish cycles in management techniques, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship are not well understood. The authors develop a simple agent-based framework that models innovation adoption and abandonment on both the supply and demand sides. In opposition to conceptions of consultants as rhetorical wizards who engineer waves of management fashion, firms and consultants are treated as boundedly rational actors who chase the secrets of success by mimicking their highest-performing peers. Computational experiments demonstrate that consultant-driven versions of this dynamic in which the outcomes of firms are strongly conditioned by their choice of consultant are robustly faddish. The invasion of boom markets by low-quality consultants undercuts popular innovations while simultaneously restarting the fashion cycle by prompting the flight of high-quality consultants into less densely occupied niches. Computational experiments also indicate conditions involving consultant mobility, aspiration levels, mimic probabilities, and client-provider matching that attenuate faddishness.