Social Science Research 42(6)

Social Science Research, November 2013: Volume 42, Issue 6

From ‘What the F#@% is a Facebook?’ to ‘Who Doesn’t Use Facebook?’: The role of criminal lifestyles in the adoption and use of the Internet
Richard K. Moule Jr., David C. Pyrooz, Scott H. Decker

The impact of respondents and interviewers on interview speed in face-to-face interviews
Geert Loosveldt, Koen Beullens

Incomplete equalization: The effect of tracking in secondary education on educational inequality
Anders Holm, Mads Meier Jæger, Kristian Bernt Karlson, David Reimer

From general discrimination to segmented inequality: Migration and inequality in urban China
Yao Lu, Feng Wang

Exchange and cohesion in dyads and triads: A test of Simmel’s hypothesis
Jeongkoo Yoon, Shane R. Thye, Edward J. Lawler

Family structure and adolescent alcohol use problems: Extending popular explanations to American Indians
Tamela McNulty Eitle, Michelle Johnson-Jennings, David J. Eitle

Patterns of change in religious service attendance across the life course: Evidence from a 34-year longitudinal study
R. David Hayward, Neal Krause

American income inequality across economic and geographic space, 1970–2010
David J. Peters

Housework: Cause and consequence of gender ideology?
Daniel L. Carlson, Jamie L. Lynch

Trends in gender segregation in the choice of science and engineering majors
Allison Mann, Thomas A. DiPrete

Are environmental attitudes influenced by survey context? An investigation of the context dependency of the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale
Elizabeth F. Pienaar, Daniel K. Lew, Kristy Wallmo

Disentangling mode-specific selection and measurement bias in social surveys
Barry Schouten, Jan van den Brakel, Bart Buelens, Jan van der Laan, Thomas Klausch

Explaining monetary donations to international development organisations: A factorial survey approach
Sara Kinsbergen, Jochem Tolsma

Assessing the effect of social desirability on nativism attitude responses
Benjamin R. Knoll

Psychological distress of marital and cohabitation breakups
Lara Patrício Tavares, Arnstein Aassve

Personal networks of prisoners prior to incarceration: A comparison with the general Dutch population
Ruben de Cuyper, Anja Dirkzwager, Beate Völker, Peter van der Laan, Paul Nieuwbeerta

Living life for others and/or oneself: The social development of life orientations
Steven Hitlin, Mark H. Salisbury

Evaluating Effectively Maintained Inequality: School and post-school transitions, socioeconomic background, academic ability and curricular placement
Gary N. Marks

Classroom sex composition and first-grade school outcomes: The role of classroom behavior
Erin Pahlke, Carey E. Cooper, Richard A. Fabes

Skin color, sex, and educational attainment in the post-civil rights era
Amelia R. Branigan, Jeremy Freese, Assaf Patir, Thomas W. McDade, Kiang Liu, Catarina I. Kiefe

Peer group ties and executive compensation networks
Matthew Pittinsky, Thomas A. DiPrete

Period effects, cohort effects, and the narrowing gender wage gap
Colin Campbell, Jessica Pearlman

Housing and neighborhood quality among undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants
Matthew Hall, Emily Greenman

Black and white homebuyer, homeowner, and household segregation in the United States, 1990–2010
Mary J. Fischer

One country, three populations: Trust in police among migrants, villagers, and urbanites in China
Ivan Y. Sun, Rong Hu, Daniel F.K. Wong, Xuesong He, Jessica C.M. Li

Understanding selection bias, time-lags and measurement bias in secondary data sources: Putting the Encyclopedia of Associations database in broader context
Shaun Bevan, Frank R. Baumgartner, Erik W. Johnson, John D. McCarthy

Law & Society Review 47(4)

Law & Society Review, December 2013: Volume 47, Issue 4

Above the Roof, Beneath the Law: Perceived Justice behind Disruptive Tactics of Migrant Wage Claimants in China
Xin He, Lungang Wang and Yang Su

The way in which citizens in developing countries conceptualize legality is a critical but understudied question for legal consciousness and legal mobilization studies. Drawing on participatory observations and extensive interviews from western China, this article explores the subjective interpretations of migrant wage claimants on law and justice behind their disruptive actions. Their perception of justice differs starkly from what the law stipulates as target, evidence and proper procedures. Who shall be held responsible? What constitutes evidence? When shall they be paid? How much? Their perceptions also differ from the attitude “against the law” found among members from disadvantaged social groups in the United States. The Chinese case of legal perception is shaped by the moral precepts ingrained in the culture, and more importantly, by the lopsided relationship between migrant workers and the political and business elite. It thus points to the daunting barriers in channeling the ever-growing number of social conflicts into court.

Primetime Dispute Resolution: Reality TV Mediation Shows in China's “Harmonious Society”
Colin S. Hawes and Shuyu Kong

Through a case study of reality TV mediation shows, this article joins the debate about the recent promotion of formal and informal mediation by the Chinese government, what some scholars have called a “turn against law” (Minzner 2011). We identify three converging reasons for the sudden popularity of mediation shows on Chinese primetime television: (1) the desire of TV producers to commercially exploit interpersonal conflicts without fanning the flames of social instability; (2) the demands of official censors for TV programming promoting a “harmonious society”; and (3) the requirement for courts and other government institutions to publicly demonstrate their support for mediation as the most “appropriate” method for resolving interpersonal and neighborhood disputes. Cases drawn from two top-rated mediation shows demonstrate how they privilege morality and “human feeling” (ganqing) over narrow application of the law. Such shows could be viewed merely as a form of propaganda, what Nader has called a “harmony ideology”—an attempt by the government to suppress the legitimate expression of social conflict. Yet while recognizing that further political, social, and legal reforms are necessary to address the root causes of social conflict in China, we conclude that TV mediation shows can help to educate viewers about the benefits and drawbacks of mediation for resolving certain narrow kinds of domestic and neighborhood disputes.

Liberal Rights versus Islamic Law? The Construction of a Binary in Malaysian Politics
Tamir Moustafa

Why are liberal rights and Islamic law understood in binary and exclusivist terms at some moments, but not others? In this study, I trace when, why, and how an Islamic law versus liberal rights binary emerged in Malaysian political discourse and popular legal consciousness. I find that Malaysian legal institutions were hardwired to produce vexing legal questions, which competing groups of activists transformed into compelling narratives of injustice. By tracing the development of this spectacle in the courtroom and beyond, I show how the dueling binaries of liberal rights versus Islamic law, individual rights versus collective rights, and secularism versus religion were contingent on institutional design and political agency, rather than irreconcilable tensions between liberal rights and the Islamic legal tradition in some intrinsic sense. More broadly, the research contributes to our understanding of how popular legal consciousness is shaped by legal mobilization and countermobilization beyond the court of law.

Legislating Change? Responses to Criminalizing Female Genital Cutting in Senegal
Bettina Shell-Duncan, Katherine Wander, Ylva Hernlund and Amadou Moreau

Although the international community has recently promoted legislation as an important reform strategy for ending female genital cutting (FGC), there exist divergent views on its potential effects. Supporters argue that legal prohibition of FGC has a general deterrent effect, while others argue legislation can be perceived as coercive, and derail local efforts to end the practice. This study examines the range of responses observed in rural Senegal, where a 1999 anti-FGC law was imposed on communities in which the practice was being actively contested and targeted for elimination. Drawing on data from a mixed-methods study, we analyze responses in relation to two leading theories on social regulation, the law and economics and law and society paradigms, which make divergent predictions on the interplay between social norms and legal norms. Among supporters of FGC, legal norms ran counter to social norms, and did little to deter the practice, and in some instances incited reactance or drove the practice underground. Conversely, where FGC was being contested, legislation served to strengthen the stance of those contemplating or favoring abandonment. We conclude that legislation can complement other reform strategies by creating an “enabling environment” that supports those who have or wish to abandon FGC.

What Happens to Law in a Refugee Camp?
Elizabeth Holzer

How do people living in a refugee camp engage with legal practices, discourses, and institutions? Critics argue that refugee camps leave people in “legal limbo” depriving them of the “right to have rights” despite the presence of international humanitarian actors and the entitlements enshrined in international law. For that reason, refugee camps have become a highly visible symbol of failed human rights campaigns. In contrast, I found in an ethnography of the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa, that although people living as refugees faced chronic insecurity and injustice, they engaged extensively with several different facets of the law. I illuminate three interrelated dimensions of their experiences: (1) their development as international legal subjects; (2) their alienation from domestic legal institutions; and (3) their agency within the legal field. The article contributes to the research agenda on law in humanitarian settings an empirically grounded account of the subjective dimensions of legal alienation and mobilization in a refugee camp. More broadly, it contributes to international human rights debates by theorizing a mixed outcome of international human rights campaigns: the emergence of wards of international law, people deeply embedded in the international legal system, but alienated from local law.

Human Rights Prosecutions and the Participation Rights of Victims in Latin America
Verónica Michel and Kathryn Sikkink

Since the 1980s, there has been a significant rise in domestic and international efforts to enforce individual criminal accountability for human rights violations through trials, but we still lack complete explanations for the emergence of this trend and the variation observed in the use of human rights prosecutions in the world. In this article, we examine the role that procedural law has had in allowing societal actors to influence in this rising trend for individual criminal accountability. We do this by focusing on participation rights granted to victims, such as private prosecution in criminal cases. Based on an exploration of an original database on human rights prosecutions in Latin America and fieldwork research in three countries, we argue that private prosecution is the key causal mechanism that allows societal actors to fight in domestic courts for individual criminal accountability for human rights violations.

Addition by Subtraction? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Deportation Efforts on Violent Crime
Jacob I. Stowell, Steven F. Messner, Michael S. Barton and Lawrence E. Raffalovich

Contemporary criminological research on immigration has focused largely on one aspect of the immigration process, namely, the impact of in-migration (i.e., presence or arrival) of foreign-born individuals on crime. A related but understudied aspect of the immigration process is the impact that the removal of certain segments of the foreign-born population, and specifically undocumented or deportable aliens, has on aggregate levels of criminal violence. In an effort to cast new light on the association between forced out-flows of immigrants and crime, we begin with descriptive analyses of patterns of deportation activity across the continental United States over an eleven-year period (1994–2004). We then examine the relationship between deportation activity and violent crime rates in a multilevel framework wherein Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) are situated within border patrol sectors. The results of dynamic regression modeling indicate that changing levels of deportation activity are unrelated to changing levels of criminal violence for the sample of MSAs for the national at large. However, we also detect significant interactions by geographic location for selected violent offenses. For MSAs within sectors along the Mexican border, the deportation measure exhibits a significant negative effect on one indicator of criminal violence—the aggravated assault rate. For MSAs within non-border sectors, the effect of the deportation measures is significantly positive for the violence crime index and the aggravated assault rate. Overall, our analyses indicate that the relationship between deportation and criminal violence is complex and dependent on local context.

The Hand of the Ancestors: Time, Cultural Production, and Intellectual Property Law
Boatema Boateng

In successfully lobbying for the expansion of the copyright protection term, culture industries in the United States have used one of the temporal dimensions of intellectual property law to strengthen their control over the circulation of cultural goods. There is another less obvious way that time factors into the regulation of cultural products, and this has to do with the modes of temporality within which those products are made and their circulation regulated. In Ghana, where certain cultural products are protected as “folklore” under copyright law, cultural goods from one kind of temporality enter a regulatory framework that belongs to another. In this article, I examine these two ways of organizing time and argue that differences in ways of conceptualizing time also factor into the exercise of power over cultural products. I further argue that the Ghanaian case provides resources for radically rethinking intellectual property law.

Theoretical Criminology 17(4)

Theoretical Criminology, November 2013: Volume 17, Issue 4 

Policing and the surveillance of the marginal: Everyday contexts of social control
Megan O'’Neill and Bethan Loftus

While the surveillance practices of the private security industry have become a central preoccupation of scholarship, the surveillance power of the state has been greatly enhanced through multiple procedures of information gathering to support practices of control and management. In this article, we draw upon two different research projects to examine the surveillance work of the police and other public sector groups working in partnership, as well as the activities of police officers operating covertly. In so doing, we expose the often unintended, but nevertheless invasive and comprehensive power of state agencies to gather details of individuals in the residual working class, within mundane and innocuous policing practices. Our central argument is that these developments have occurred alongside a displacement of social policy through crime control, and represent both an acceleration and intensification of existing state approaches to the surveillance of the problematic individual. This extensive project of targeted surveillance, we contend, also calls into question current claims that the state is moving towards a system of managing deviant populations.

Mapping the margins of intersectionality: Criminological possibilities in a transnational world
Kathryn Henne and Emily Troshynski

This article contributes to recent discussions around intersectionality, a framework that captures how two or more axes of subordination overlap in practice, and its utility for criminology. Even though intersectionality offers an analytic through which to account for discursive dimensions of marginalization, feminist criticisms of intersectionality’s proliferation across disciplines suggests that the concept needs to be revisited. After contextualizing intersectionality’s tenets, we trace how feminists have addressed related issues through a transnational lens and then consider how these adaptations can help inform future criminological inquiry. We conclude with the argument that a critical re-reading of intersectionality not only enables a focused critique of mainstream criminology, but also encourages an innovative feminist praxis within the discipline.

Pathways, race and gender responsive reform: Through an abolitionist lens
Emma Russell and Bree Carlton

In this article we take stock of a recent moment in penal history in Victoria, Australia, where agencies have implemented gender responsive policies to address the disproportionate growth in women’s prison numbers, and in particular the overrepresentation of women constructed as ‘culturally diverse’. We draw upon abolitionist and intersectional frames to provide a theoretical critique of this political event. Our analysis extends beyond the unitary frame of gender, which has until recently dominated critiques in this area, to highlight the ways in which racializing logics are reproduced through such policies and practices. We explore the implications of the adoption of the criminological notion of pathways through the language of liberal feminist reform, which signifies a reinvestment in the myth of individual rehabilitation. The consequences of these discursive practices include the reproduction of pathologizing and risk-focused practices that can only yield more racializing, interventionist and expansionist responses within correctional spaces.

A genealogy of neoliberal communitarianism
Friso van Houdt and Willem Schinkel

This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the ‘penal welfarism’ it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of a paradoxical set of doctrines, discourses and techniques. This involves an emphasis on both ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘community’, protecting market and community by tightening social control, law and order and the production of rational self-controlling individuals while excluding the cultural and biological ‘risk citizen’. The article illustrates the incorporation of criminological theories as policy underpinnings, and it explicates how criminological theories can be placed in the discursive space of neoliberal communitarianism.

Assemblages of penal governance, social justice and youth justice partnerships
Patricia Gray

Youth justice in England and Wales is delivered by multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) which are expected to work in partnership with social welfare agencies to provide ‘holistic’ support that targets the interrelated personal and social needs of young offenders associated with their risk of reoffending. This article engages with criminological debates which attempt to interpret the hybrid assemblages of penal governance that have characterized late modernity in order to theorize why these partnerships have had only limited success in addressing the social context of youth crime. It will be argued, evidenced by an analysis of research data on YOT partnerships in action, that these assemblages are ‘classed’ in so much as they act as conduits for strategic elements which articulate powerful class interests (along with those of other social forces) to be translated into practice. Such strategic elements sustain class inequality and deny social justice to young people in conflict with the law.

Neoliberal prisons and cognitive treatment: Calibrating the subjectivity of incarcerated young men to economic inequalities
Ronald Kramer, Valli Rajah, and Hung-En Sung

Based on fieldwork conducted in a cognitive-treatment setting for young men in jail, this article argues that contemporary rehabilitation efforts not only manifest theories of disciplinary and risk society, but also embody ideologies of the self and economic relations that are consistent with neoliberal capitalism. Drawing from Marxist theories of penality, we show that correctional officers seek to reconfigure the subjectivity of young incarcerated men in ways that adjust them to economic inequalities. For instance, they frequently portray labor markets as accessible and readily offering stable employment opportunities. When correctional officers acknowledge structural limitations and racial inequality, they are likely to dismiss such concerns by insisting upon the power of individual choice to overcome social barriers. We consider why correctional officers embrace neoliberal ideologies and note some implications for future research.

Changing fate? Agency and the desistance process
Deirdre Healy

There is a significant conceptual divide between criminological theories that treat offenders as rational agents who freely choose their actions and those that portray offenders as individuals whose behaviour is determined by external forces. Recently, research into desistance from crime has produced a more complex and nuanced account of crime causation which acknowledges the interplay between agency and structure. Yet, while the concept of agency is frequently invoked in contemporary discourse, the variety of definitions and measures employed by researchers makes it difficult to establish a clear and consistent picture of its role. This article attempts to address this deficit by evaluating the contributions of agency-centred theories of desistance. An integrated framework, which aims to consolidate existing knowledge about agency and provide additional insights into its role in desistance, is then proposed.

British Journal of Criminology 53(6)

British Journal of Criminology, November 2013: Volume 53, Issue 6

The Banality of Security: The Curious Case of Surveillance Cameras
Benjamin Goold, Ian Loader, and Angélica Thumala

Why do certain security goods become banal (while others do not)? Under what conditions does banality occur and with what effects? In this paper, we answer these questions by examining the story of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in Britain. We consider the lessons to be learned from CCTV’s rapid—but puzzling—transformation from novelty to ubiquity, and what the banal properties of CCTV tell us about the social meanings of surveillance and security. We begin by revisiting and reinterpreting the historical process through which camera surveillance has diffused across the British landscape, focusing on the key developments that encoded CCTV in certain dominant meanings (around its effectiveness, for example) and pulled the cultural rug out from under alternative or oppositional discourses. Drawing upon interviews with those who produce and consume CCTV, we tease out and discuss the family of meanings that can lead one justifiably to describe CCTV as a banal good. We then examine some frontiers of this process and consider whether novel forms of camera surveillance (such as domestic CCTV systems) may press up against the limits of banality in ways that risk unsettling security practices whose social value and utility have come to be taken for granted. In conclusion, we reflect on some wider implications of banal security and its limits.

Is it a Crime to Produce Ecological Disorganization? Why Green Criminology and Political Economy Matter in the Analysis of Global Ecological Harms
Michael J. Lynch, Michael A. Long, Kimberly L. Barrett, and Paul B. Stretesky

We argue in this paper for a political economic approach to the study of global ecological crimes. Green criminological studies often employ case study approaches which help explain a particular green crime; however, these studies lack a coherent theoretical basis. Based on ecological Marxism and treadmill of production approaches, we outline a theoretical approach for green criminology that focuses on crimes of ecological disorganization—that is, green harms that are the result of organizing the productive forces of the economy in a manner that is consistent with capitalism. We conclude that, to truly understand and remedy green harms, a focus on political economy is necessary.

Genocide Films, Public Criminology, Collective Memory
Michelle Brown and Nicole Rafter

One cannot understand or remember the genocides of the past in any direct manner. Their inaccessibility impedes us from working toward complex understandings of these events and adequate ways of responding to them. In this paper, we bring together various strands of criminological thought by examining genocide films as a form of public criminology that is engaged in the work of memory and commemoration. We identify a specific set of genocide films that, we argue, not only constitute a key (if hitherto unrecognized) branch of visual and public criminology, but also create and transmit collective memories of the ‘crime of crimes’, provoking public understandings of atrocity and meaningful social and political responses. These films direct us toward representational strategies and interdisciplinary perspectives that advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of genocide. Attention to such efforts not only underscores the work of images in shaping criminological discourse, but also makes for a better—because more deeply informed—criminology of genocide.

In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence
Katherine Biber

This article explores the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional ‘archive’ and is sometimes used by artists, scholars, curators and others, but subject to no rules or standards. This article examines a range of instances in which criminal evidence has been used post-trial, and proposes a jurisprudence of sensitivity for responding to the harm that is sometimes done when criminal evidence leads a cultural afterlife.

Collective Efficacy, Deprivation and Violence in London
Alex Sutherland, Ian Brunton-Smith, and Jonathan Jackson

This paper examines the importance of neighbourhood context in explaining violence in London. Exploring in a new context Sampson’s work on the relationship between interdependent spatial patterns of concentrated disadvantage and crime, we assess whether collective efficacy (i.e. shared expectations about norms, values and goals, as well as the ability of members of the community to realize these goals) mediates the potential impact on violence of neighbourhood deprivation, residential stability and population heterogeneity. Reporting findings from a dataset based on face-to-face interviews with 60,000 individuals living in 4,700 London neighbourhoods, we find that collective efficacy is negatively related to police-recorded violence. But, unlike previous research, we find that collective efficacy does not mediate the statistical relationship between structural characteristics of the neighbourhood and violence. After finding that collective efficacy is unrelated to an alternative measure of neighbourhood violence, we discuss limitations and possible explanations for our results, before setting out plans for further research.

Policing British Asian Identities: The Enduring Role of the Police in Young British Asian Men’s Situated Negotiation of Identity and Belonging
Matthew Millings

Using data from ethnographic work and interviews with young British Asian men conducted in 2002 and again in 2012, this paper identifies the powerful real and imagined role the police play in these young men’s negotiation of belonging and identity. Experiences of policing are shown to meaningfully shape individual and collective claims of belonging. These negotiations are seen to contribute to, and be derived from, volatile climates of racism, fractured social relations and cultures of intolerance, rendering explicit the powerful cultural work of policing.

Police Accountability and the Commodification of Policing in China: A Study of Police/Business Posters in Guangzhou
Jianhua Xu

Based on a study of police/business posters in Guangzhou, this paper explores commodification of policing in China. It is argued that, while the commodification of policing in Western societies has its roots in the rise of neo-liberal thinking, it is unique in China for its lack of accountability of police power. Chengguan, the urban management department, is not an effective counter-power to the police in their making of illegal police/business posters due to institutional arrangement and practical reasons. The commodification of police power is not just a local police phenomenon, but a wider police institutional phenomenon. It is also part of the symbiotic relations between state power and economic capital in a wider Chinese society. Data collection involved three years’ ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth semi-structured interviews with the police, police scholars, businessmen, urban management officers, ordinary citizens and security guards.

Sentence Consistency in England and Wales: Evidence from the Crown Court Sentencing Survey
Jose Pina-Sánchez and Robin Linacre

We assess the use of sentencing guidelines for assault issued in England and Wales, and the consistency with which they are applied by judges in the Crown Court. We use data from the Crown Court Sentencing Survey (CCSS), which records data on legal factors considered in the sentencing guidelines. This gives us access to a wide range of explanatory variables, allowing us to produce more robust findings about consistency in sentencing. We first employ a standard regression model to determine how guideline factors affect sentence outcomes empirically. Second, a random slopes multilevel model is used to analyse whether these factors have been consistently applied across different Crown Court centres. Our results point to a substantial degree of consistency in sentencing.

Putting the Defendant in Their Place: Why Do We Still Use the Dock in Criminal Proceedings?
Linda Mulcahy

This article considers the extent to which the on-going use of the dock in criminal proceedings can be justified. It is argued that the use of the dock interferes with the defendant’s ability to participate in the trial, the right to counsel and the presumption of innocence. This has been recognized in some jurisdictions and, in the United Kingdom, its use has been criticized by key stakeholders in the criminal justice system. Despite the launching of campaigns for its abolition, the English dock is becoming increasingly fortified and continues to be used to incarcerate defendants in trials involving minor charges. Drawing on previously unexplored archives and data from the United States, this article seeks to understand justifications for the retention of the dock and the reasons why campaigns for its abolition have failed.

Cousins in Crime: Mobility, Place and Belonging in Indigenous Youth Co-Offending
Andrew Goldsmith and Mark Halsey

This paper examines serious repeat offending among a cohort of young Indigenous Australians dubbed the ‘Gang of 49’. Drawing chiefly on interviews, we explore the importance of mobility, place, belonging and alcohol in shaping the resilience and notoriety of this group over the past decade. We consider the broader significance of ethnic and familial ties in offenders’ lives, and explicate the complex ways in which these ties contribute overwhelmingly to offender convergence for the commission of crime but only very rarely to occasions for offender divergence from crime. In concluding, we argue that the nature of co-offending among this group is rhizomatic and thereby demands a very different law enforcement (and political) response than has pertained to date.

Opportunities for Environmental Crime: A Test of Situational Crime Prevention Theory
Wim Huisman and Judith van Erp

Recently, Situational Crime Prevention Theory (SCPT) has been proposed as an alternative to offender-based theories of white-collar crime. This paper uses the results of a cross-case analysis of 23 criminal investigations of environmental crime in the Netherlands to explore the fruitfulness of SCPT as a method of scientific study of environmental crime and the development of prevention strategies. This analysis shows that most environmental crimes are crimes of omission, while SCPT is designed for predatory crimes of commission. In addition, while it is concluded that SCPT is helpful in analysing opportunities for environmental crime, it is difficult to draw innovative prevention strategies on the basis of SCPT, since most suggestions have already been covered in contemporary models for environmental regulation.

Sociological Theory 31(3)

Sociological Theory, September 2013: Volume 31, Issue 3

Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions
Isaac Ariail Reed

This article draws on the conceptual link between power and causality to develop an account of the relational, discursive, and performative dimensions of power. Each proposed dimension of power is grounded in a different understanding of social causes: relational-realist, discursive-hermeneutic, and performative-pragmatic. For the purposes of empirical analysis, this dimensional schema crosscuts the classic sources of power typology developed by Michael Mann and others, thus rendering the conceptual apparatus for pursuing sociological research on power more complex and explanatorily effective. The schema is illustrated by an example from comparative-historical sociology: explaining the storming of the Bastille and its effects. A series of research questions for investigating the relative autonomy of performative power is proposed. Finally, the current schema is situated vis-à-vis classic sociological theories of power, including the arguments of Steven Lukes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others.

Formalist and Relationalist Theory in Social Network Analysis
Emily Erikson

Social network research is widely considered atheoretical. In contrast, in this article I argue that network analysis often mixes two distinct theoretical frameworks, creating a logically inconsistent foundation. Relationalism rejects essentialism and a priori categories and insists upon the intersubjectivity of experience and meaning as well as the importance of the content of interactions and their historical setting. Formalism is based on a structuralist interpretation of the theoretical works of Georg Simmel. Simmel laid out a neo-Kantian program of identifying a priori categories of relational types and patterns that operate independently of cultural content or historical setting. Formalism and relationalism are internally consistent theoretical perspectives, but there are tensions between them. To pave the way for stronger middle-range theoretical development, I disaggregate the two approaches and highlight the contradictions that must be addressed or resolved for the construction of any general and inclusive theory.

From Vigilance to Busyness: A Neo-Weberian Approach to Clock Time
Benjamin H. Snyder

For many social scientists, clock time is seen as either a mechanism of economic power relations that reinforces social domination or a resource that facilitates individual market-oriented action. In this article I develop a neo-Weberian perspective that presents clock time as a moral institution that shapes social action in modernity through two “time disciplines”: regularity and density. Where regularity supports a methodical life, density maintains a life of constant activity. The article traces the history of regularity and density between the fourth and twentieth centuries: from a “culture of vigilance,” which originated in Benedictine monastic culture, to a “culture of busyness,” which arose within Protestant and Renaissance culture. It shows that although we often think of busyness, time pressure, and burnout as contemporary problems, they have long been at the root of clock time culture. By extending Weber’s approach, the paper provides deeper insight into the fraught moral life of clock time in modernity.

Reasons and the Acceptance of Authoritative Speech: An Empirically Grounded Synthesis of Habermas and Bourdieu
Sebastián G. Guzmán

This article proposes an empirically grounded theory of the acceptance of authoritative speech beyond contexts of deliberation. I synthesize Habermas’s and Bourdieu’s influential theories on the topic by specifying factors that lead to either a prereflexive acceptance or a critical evaluation of the claims made by people in positions of authority. To do so, I assess each author’s theses in four types of contexts covered by three empirical studies that analyze reactions to authoritative speech. I find that people can autonomously reject authoritative speech if they have the necessary cultural resources, such as relevant personal experience or contradictory background norms, or if they are strongly motivated—for example, by disappointed expectations. Otherwise, individuals are likely to accept what authorities say without regard for reasons. The synthetic theory proposed better grasps the potentials and limitations of people’s critical capacities—a crucial task for democratic and critical sociological theory.

Critical Criminology 21(4)

Critical Criminology, November 2013: Volume 21, Issue 4

Sex Trafficking and Moral Harm: Politicised Understandings and Depictions of the Trafficked Experience
Erin O’Brien, Belinda Carpenter, Sharon Hayes

This paper explores notions of harm in sex work discourse, highlighting the extent to which essentialist ideas of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ sex have pervaded trafficking policy. In a comparative examination of Australian Parliamentary Inquiries and United States congressional hearings leading to the establishment of anti-trafficking policy, we identify the stories that have influenced legislators, and established a narrative of trafficking heavily dependent upon assumptions of the inherent harm of sex work. This narrative constructs a hierarchy of victimisation, which denies alternative discourses of why women migrate for sex work. We argue that it is not sexual commerce that is harmful, but pathological, systemic inequalities and entrenched disadvantage that are harmful. A narrow narrative of trafficking fails to adequately depict this complexity of the trafficked experience.

Belonging and Unbelonging in Encounters Between Young Males and Police Officers: The Use of Masculinity and Ethnicity/Race
Tove Pettersson

This article is based on a study in which the work of police officers has been followed on a day-to-day basis, with a special focus on the work directed at youths. The focus is on how contact is established or obstructed in the meeting between police officers and young males, and the significance of constructions of masculinity and ethnicity/race for this process. Encounters between young males and police officers are analysed from Yuval-Davis notions of belonging and unbelonging. The analysis shows how both masculinity and ethnicity/race can be used for establishing or obstructing contact between police and young males. The article also show how belonging and unbelonging is a question of negotiations that can undergo a number of shifts in the course of a given situation, and also that these negotiations take the form of a collaborative activity, even if this starts from unequal power positions. A situation that starts from an antagonistic approach may in fact, via markers of belonging, turn out quite different. But it is also pointed out that the markers of belonging in one dimension, at the same time may generate markers of unbelonging in others. Finally this developing of contact shall be understood both as a way of changing the contacts into less conflicted ways and as one of several ways of gaining more control in stigmatized areas.

Psychosocial Perspectives of Girls and Violence: Implications for Policy and Praxis
Robin A. Robinson, Judith A. Ryder

Psychosocial and feminist criminologies produce a complex etiology of adolescent female violence, and advance understanding of much female behavior that juvenile authorities formally address: mental health disturbances. When girls’ violent behaviors are considered within a psychodynamic theoretical framework, policy problems are dramatically redefined, resulting in a reformulation of the social problem, newly contextualized, and the collective responses to the troubled girls it has defined. This paper places known etiologies of violent behaviors, including case study material, in a context of extant social policies that impact and determine the social location and control of violent girls. We argue that efficacious policy responses would be psychosocially informed, and focus upon a more holistic mental health praxis, rather than criminal justice practices alone.

This is What a Police State Looks Like: Sousveillance, Direct Action and the Anti-corporate Globalization Movement
Elizabeth A. Bradshaw

Activists across the globe have increasingly incorporated digital communication technologies into their repertoire of direct action tactics to challenge state and corporate power. Examining the anti-corporate globalization protests at the September 2009 Group of Twenty (G-20) meetings in Pittsburgh, this paper explores how activists used sousveillance and counter-surveillance as direct action tactics to make excessive force by police more visible to the public. Collaborative endeavors such as the G-20 Resistance Project, the Tin Can Comms Collective and independent media centers provided activists with the necessary tactical and strategic communication networks to coordinate direct actions during the G-20 protests. Through the use of surveillance technologies widely available to the public such as video cameras, cell phones and the internet, activists created an environment of permanent visibility in which the behaviors of police were subjected to public scrutiny. The images captured by anti-globalization activists raises a salient question: Is this what a police state looks like?

Disruption is Not Permitted: The Policing and Social Control of Occupy Oakland
Mike King

Negotiated management—various forms of communication, collaboration and cooperation between police and protest organizers, often taking the form of protest permits—has been mainly theorized as a means to mitigate police violence while respecting protesters’ 1st Amendment rights. A few theorists have problematized this view, suggesting that negotiated management is a form of social control that puts various restrictions on dissent. Drawing from my research on Occupy Oakland, I build upon these critiques to illustrate how negotiated management was used as a tool of repression in two key ways, and how newer forms of repression (strategic incapacitation) are still enmeshed in its logic. First, by criminalizing legal activity among protesters, through the use of a permit, who were then subjected to police repression. Second, I show how negotiated management as a normative structure of protest was used as a form of repression, even when communication and cooperation with police were clearly rejected by the movement. I illustrate how the refusal of negotiated management was used to discredit the movement and subject it to physical repression. Rather than seeing negotiated management as an alternative to police repression and strategic incapacitation, I argue that they are two sides of the same policing project, the primary aim of which is to prevent disruptive protest.

The I-35W Bridge Collapse: Crimes of Commission and Omission Resulting from the Confluence of State Processes and Political-Economic Conditions
Casey James Schotter, Gayle Rhineberger-Dunn

The Interstate-35 West Bridge collapse offers a unique case of state crime. First, it illuminates a new topical area in the state crime literature, public infrastructure. Second, it illustrates how the bridge collapse was not a discrete act (Tombs in State Crime 1(2):170–195, 2012), but rather the outcome of relationships between different social institutions. Specifically, it demonstrates how processes within a state, in confluence with the broader political economy, produced decisions (omissions) not to invest in infrastructure repair, take expert advice, and improve coordination between agencies. Simultaneously, these same processes resulted in deliberate actions (commissions) to invest in new infrastructure rather than in maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure, and to reduce both regulatory oversight and safety procedures. We provide a detailed overview of the bridge collapse, then utilizing Kauzlarich and Kramer’s (Crimes of the American nuclear state, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1998) integrated theoretical framework, contextualize the causes of the collapse and highlight how state processes and political-economic conditions resulted in the simultaneous occurrence of crimes of omission and commission on the part of the state.

Reentry Within the Carceral: Foucault, Race and Prisoner Reentry
Liam Martin

Early research on prisoner reentry was largely practical and applied, oriented to policymakers responding to the myriad challenges presented by having millions of people leaving prisons and jails each year. More recently, scholars have drawn on critical theoretical frameworks to reformulate the problem as bound up with large-scale shifts in the nature of social control (Wacquant in Dialect Anthropol 34(4):605–620, 2010a), deep racial divisions (Nixon et al. in Race/Ethnicity: Multidiscip Glob Contexts 2(1):21–43, 2008), and transformations of the United States political economy (Hallett in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-011-9138-8, 2011). This paper continues the work of theoretical elaboration through two avenues: (1) examining the contribution that Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish can make to the conceptual development of reentry scholarship, and (2) reworking Foucauldian concepts and themes important to the study of reentry to account for their racialized characteristics.

Deconstructing Crime and Nature or, What Does Post Humanism Have to Do With Criminology?
Jenny Francis

The aim of this paper is to extend some of the theoretical concerns that Marcus Felson (2006) opens up in Crime and Nature by considering the contribution of post humanist political ecology to the construction of crime and nature that he proposes. Post humanism problematises dichotomous understandings of nature and culture as well as related binaries that follow from that division, suggesting that dominant assumptions about nature and the non human undermine antiracist and feminist efforts. While Felson (2006) takes steps towards troubling the nature/culture binary, he fails to question the constructed character of crime and crime prevention, thereby leaving unarticulated a critical problematisation of the exclusionary logics that underlie dominant practices and ways of thinking as race, sex, class and species fundamentally determine the nature of criminological knowledge. Abstracting crime from social context produces a partial analysis as spaces are reduced to their supposed propensity for criminal activity and some spaces are produced as always already criminal. Without examining and understanding how power relations intersect in the context of crime it is difficult to alter those relations to promote social justice.

American Sociological Review 78(5)

American Sociological Review, October 2013: Volume 78, Issue 5

A Broken Public? Americans’ Responses to the Great Recession
Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza

Did Americans respond to the recent Great Recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity, an expectation of state-of-the-art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion? Or did the recession erode support for government activism, in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect? We find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010, yet both fixed-effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy-attitude formation. What accounts for these surprising developments? We consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes. Analyzing the General Social Surveys panel, our results suggest political partisanship has been central. Gallup and Evaluations of Government and Society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government overreach, in which federal programs adopted during the recession and the Obama presidency propelled voters away from government. We note implications for theoretical models of opinion formation, as well as directions for partisanship scholarship and interdisciplinary research on the Great Recession.

Remembering May 4, 1970: Integrating the Commemorative Field at Kent State
Christina R. Steidl

Recent research on collective memory suggests that commemorations of difficult pasts take either a multivocal or a fragmented form. I suggest these forms exist as ideal types for the initial commemoration, but the commemorative field, as a whole, remains dynamic over time, effectively shifting between forms. This study traces the creation, maintenance, and transformation of collective memory of the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State from 1970 to 2013 using archival sources, media accounts, and participant observation. In examining the commemorative field at Kent, I theorize the existence of a third commemorative form—the integrated commemorative field, which allows for the expression of divergent narratives and the maintenance of separate commemorative spaces while simultaneously enhancing social solidarity through shared meta-narratives that stress overarching values, like human rights or scientific inquiry.

Belonging Before Believing: Group Ethos and Bloc Recruitment in the Making of Chinese Communism
Xiaohong Xu

Why did Communism take root in China during the May Fourth Movement era (1917 to 1921)? I argue that a key factor was the revolutionary vanguard’s emergence through taking over existing activist organizations. Using reports and meeting minutes of 28 organizations and individual activists’ correspondence, diaries, and memoirs as sources for comparative cross-sectional analysis and processual case studies of the organizational debates over whether to adopt Bolshevism as a unifying ism, I find that a crucial factor explaining an organization’s positive response to Communist bloc recruitment was whether it practiced ethical activism, which engendered a sectarian group ethos that meshed with Bolshevik organizational culture. By contrast, the absence of ethical activism, and the correlative mismatch in organizational ethos, was associated with a negative response to Communist recruitment efforts. Two key mechanisms—frame resonance and group discipline—mediate this selective attraction. I conclude by discussing how organization-level analysis of selective spillover between social movements enhances our understanding of both individual participants’ motivations and the distinct style in which a movement responds to its political environment.

Pulpit and Press: Denominational Dynamics and the Growth of Religious Magazines in Antebellum America
Adam Goldstein and Heather A. Haveman

Religious economies theory, which views religious organizations as akin to single-unit firms competing for adherents in local markets, has three shortcomings that we solve by reconceptualizing religious organizations and developing a new theory of religious mobilization. First, we treat religious organizations as multi-unit entities operating in interdependent markets in a national field. Second, we incorporate insights from social movement theory to challenge the exclusive focus on the impetus to mobilize (competition) by also considering the capacity to do so (resources). Third, we consider competition within organizations as well as between them. To analyze mobilization directly, we study a key religious resource, magazines. We analyze original data covering virtually all faiths and affiliated magazines in antebellum America, a time of great religious ferment. Consistent with our conception of religious organizations, we find that competition played out mostly within a national field. Consistent with resource mobilization theory, we find that the geography of religious mobilization reflected variations in the availability of resources more than variations in the intensity of competitive pressures. Conceiving of religious organizations as translocal movement organizations rather than local firms better accounts for their behavior. Our analysis sheds light on group dynamics in general by revealing how translocal groups in modern societies mobilize and build identity through group media.

Decomposing School Resegregation: Social Closure, Racial Imbalance, and Racial Isolation
Jeremy E. Fiel

Today’s typical minority student attends school with fewer whites than his counterpart in 1970. This apparent resegregation of U.S. schools has sparked outrage and debate. Some blame a rollback of desegregation policies designed to distribute students more evenly among schools; others blame the changing racial composition of the student population. This study clarifies the link between distributive processes of segregation, population change, and school racial composition by framing school segregation as a mode of social closure. I use a novel decomposition approach to determine the relative contributions of distributive processes and compositional change in the apparent resegregation of schools from 1993 to 2010. For the most part, compositional changes are to blame for the declining presence of whites in minorities’ schools. During this period, whites and minorities actually became more evenly distributed across schools, helping increase minority students’ exposure to whites. Further decompositions reveal the continued success of district-level desegregation efforts, but the greatest barrier to progress appears to be the uneven distribution of students between school districts in the same area. These findings call for new research and new policies to address contemporary school segregation.

When White Is Just Alright: How Immigrants Redefine Achievement and Reconfigure the Ethnoracial Hierarchy
Tomás R. Jiménez and Adam L. Horowitz

Research on immigration, educational achievement, and ethnoraciality has followed the lead of racialization and assimilation theories by focusing empirical attention on the immigrant-origin population (immigrants and their children), while overlooking the effect of an immigrant presence on the third-plus generation (U.S.-born individuals of U.S.-born parents), especially its white members. We depart from this approach by placing third-plus-generation individuals at center stage to examine how they adjust to norms defined by the immigrant-origin population. We draw on fieldwork in Cupertino, California, a high-skilled immigrant gateway, where an Asian immigrant-origin population has established and enforces an amplified version of high-achievement norms. The resulting ethnoracial encoding of academic achievement constructs whiteness as having lesser-than status. Asianness stands for high-achievement, hard work, and success; whiteness, in contrast, represents low-achievement, laziness, and academic mediocrity. We argue that immigrants can serve as a foil against which the meaning and status of an ethnoracial category is recast, upending how the category is deployed in daily life. Our findings call into question the position that treats the third-plus generation, especially whites, as the benchmark population that sets achievement norms and to which all other populations adjust.

When Unionization Disappears: State-Level Unionization and Working Poverty in the United States
David Brady, Regina S. Baker, and Ryan Finnigan

Although the working poor are a much larger population than the unemployed poor, U.S. poverty research devotes much more attention to joblessness than to working poverty. Research that does exist on working poverty concentrates on demographics and economic performance and neglects institutions. Building on literatures on comparative institutions, unionization, and states as polities, we examine the influence of a potentially important labor market institution for working poverty: the level of unionization in a state. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) for the United States, we estimate (1) multi-level logit models of poverty among employed households in 2010; and (2) two-way fixed-effects models of working poverty across seven waves of data from 1991 to 2010. Further, we replicate the analyses with the Current Population Survey while controlling for household unionization, and assess unionization’s potential influence on selection into employment. Across all models, state-level unionization is robustly significantly negative for working poverty. The effects of unionization are larger than the effects of states’ economic performance and social policies. Unionization reduces working poverty for both unionized and non-union households and does not appear to discourage employment. We conclude that U.S. poverty research can advance by devoting greater attention to working poverty, and by incorporating insights from the comparative literature on institutions.

Segmented Assimilation, Split Labor Markets, and Racial/Ethnic Inequality: The Case of Early-Twentieth-Century New York
Salvatore J. Restifo, Vincent J. Roscigno, and Zhenchao Qian

Assimilation and split labor market dynamics are core foci in research on immigration, race/ethnicity, and inequality. Little work, however, systematically analyzes how assimilation and group-level power dynamics within labor markets intersect relative to employment trajectories and rewards. In this article, we do so by offering integrated analyses of racial/ethnic inequalities for an important case, New York City from 1910 to 1930. Our multi-method analyses draw from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and content-coded coverage from the New York Times for the period. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate a clear racial/ethnic hierarchy as well as group-level variations in opportunity relative to industrial concentration, segregation, and discrimination. Assimilative attributes and generational status mattered, yet certain inequalities were more firmly entrenched. Most pronounced, as seen in our qualitative analyses, were processes of social closure, discrimination, and related exclusionary constraints—constraints encountered and eventually alleviated, to some degree, for new white ethnics but not for African Americans. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical utility of considering the embedded nature of assimilation within broader contexts of racial/ethnic closure in labor market opportunities and also relative to historical and contemporary eras.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 50(4)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2013: Volume 50, Issue 4 

The Causal Impact of Exposure to Deviant Peers: An Experimental Investigation
Ray Paternoster, Jean Marie McGloin, Holly Nguyen, and Kyle J. Thomas

Objectives: This study addresses the enduring question about whether exposure to deviant peers causes individuals to engage in deviance. Ample literature comments on this point, but methodological limitations prevent strong conclusions about causality. Method: The authors conducted a laboratory-based experiment under the guise of a memory/recall study for which participants could earn up to $20. All 91 participants had the opportunity to cheat on a computer-based word recall task by clicking on up to four links that provided access to the words in order to illegitimately earn more money for their performance. In the treatment condition (n = 47), subjects were exposed to a confederate who indicated an intention to cheat, justified this behavior, and cheated on the task. Results: Whereas none of the participants in the control condition cheated on this task, 38 percent of the participants in the treatment condition did. This effect endures when controlling for various attributes of participants in regression models. Supplemental analyses underscore the notion that clicking on the links reflected cheating rather than curiosity. Conclusions: This experiment provides evidence that exposure to a deviant peer can cause individuals to engage in deviance. Future experimental work should focus on determining the precise mechanism/mechanisms responsible.

Spatial, Temporal and Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Maritime Piracy
Elio Marchione and Shane D. Johnson

Objectives: To examine patterns in the timing and location of incidents of maritime piracy to see whether, like many urban crimes, attacks cluster in space and time. Methods: Data for all incidents of maritime piracy worldwide recorded by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency are analyzed using time-series models and methods originally developed to detect disease contagion. Results: At the macro level, analyses suggest that incidents of pirate attacks are concentrated in five subregions of the earth’s oceans and that the time series for these different subregions differ. At the micro level, analyses suggest that for the last 16 years (or more), pirate attacks appear to cluster in space and time suggesting that patterns are not static but are also not random. Conclusions: Much like other types of crime, pirate attacks cluster in space, and following an attack at one location the risk of others at the same location or nearby is temporarily elevated. The identification of such regularities has implications for the understanding of maritime piracy and for predicting the future locations of attacks.

Estimating a Dose–Response Relationship Between Time Served in Prison and Recidivism
Benjamin Meade, Benjamin Steiner, Matthew Makarios, and Lawrence Travis

Objectives: Estimate the dose–response relationship between time served in prison and offenders’ odds of recidivism. Methods: Using a large, representative sample of adult offenders released from prison under postrelease supervision in the state of Ohio, we examine the relationship between the length of time these offenders served in prison and their odds of recidivism during the year following their release. Multivariate logistic regression and analyses involving propensity score matching for ordered doses are both used to estimate the time served–recidivism relationship. Results: Analyses of these data revealed that offenders confined for longer periods of time had lower odds of recidivism, but these odds were only substantively lower for those offenders who served the longest periods of time in prison. Findings suggest the inverse effect of time served was not realized until after offenders have been confined for at least five years. Conclusion: Study findings indicate that the specific deterrent effect of prison sentences may be limited, and sentences less than five years may be reduced in order to save costs without a substantial threat to public safety.

Child Abuse and Neglect, Developmental Role Attainment, and Adult Arrests
Maureen A. Allwood and Cathy Spatz Widom

This study examines whether developmental role attainment in three areas (high school graduation, employment, and marriage) mediates the relationship between childhood abuse and neglect and adult arrest. Children with documented cases of physical and sexual abuse and neglect (before age 11) and a comparison group of nonabused or neglected children were matched on age, sex, race, and approximate socioeconomic status (N = 1,169) and followed-up and interviewed at approximate age 29. Arrest records were collected from law enforcement agencies. Childhood abuse and neglect predicted decreased likelihood of graduating from high school, current employment, and current marriage and greater likelihood of juvenile and adult arrest. Each of these developmental roles partially mediated the relationship between childhood abuse and neglect and adult arrest. The importance of these three developmental milestones and implications of the results for intervening with abused and neglected youth are discussed.

A Life-course Perspective on Adolescents’ Attitudes to Police: DARE, Delinquency, and Residential Segregation
Amie M. Schuck

Objectives: Describe the developmental trajectory of perceptions of the police by youth as they transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Method: A longitudinal experiment to evaluate the impact of the D.A.R.E. program (N = 1,773). Latent variable growth modeling was used. Results: A dramatic decline in the favorable attitudes of youth toward the police begins in about seventh grade. More negative perceptions of police are associated with minority racial status, negative experiences with officers, involvement in the delinquent subculture, and greater expressions of skewed legal norms. There is a long-term positive effect of D.A.R.E. on attitudes toward the police, particularly for African American youth. Conclusion: The study highlights the importance of theorizing about perceptions of the police from a life course perspective. Findings raise new policy questions about the long-term impact of school-based programs, such as D.A.R.E., and the role of multiple reference groups in the formation of minorities’ attitudes. More research is needed to gain a better understanding of the cognitive and experiential processes involved in attitude formation.

Changes in Criminal Offending around the Time of Marriage
Torkild Hovde Lyngstad and Torbjørn Skardhamar

Objectives: The authors investigate whether the argument from life-course criminology that marriage leads to reduction in crime or whether the mechanisms leading to lower crime rates might take effect in a period of courtship before the transition to marriage. Method: Using data from population-wide, longitudinal Norwegian administrative registers, the authors estimate within-individual offending propensities before and after marriage for all men marrying in Norway 1997–2001. This approach allows for studying how offending develops over a decade around the time of marriage, for those men who actually marry. Results: The propensity to offend declines sharply prior to marriage. After marriage, there is a small increase in offending. This holds both for all offenses and when the analysis is restricted to felony offenses. Conclusions: The analysis provides no evidence for an effect of marriage on offending. Rather, the results suggest that the lower offending rates of marrieds develop over the years prior to marriage rather than as a consequence of the marriage.

A Stab in the Dark?: A Research Note on Temporal Patterns of Street Robbery
Lisa Tompson and Kate Bowers

Objectives: Test the influence of darkness in the street robbery crime event alongside temperature. Methods: Negative binomial regression models tested darkness and temperature as predictors of street robbery. Units of analysis were four 6-hr time intervals in two U.K. study areas that have different levels of darkness and variations of temperature throughout the year. Results: Darkness is a key factor related to robbery events in both study areas. Traversing from full daylight to full darkness increased the predicted volume of robbery by a multiple of 2.6 in London and 1.2 in Glasgow. Temperature was significant only in the London study area. Interaction terms did not enhance the predictive power of the models. Conclusion: Darkness is an important driving factor in seasonal variation of street robbery. A further implication of the research is that time of the day patterns are crucial to understanding seasonal trends in crime data.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 650

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 2013: Volume 650

Evaluating the Effects of the Great Recession
Sheldon Danziger

Federal Government Activism and the Political Response

The Macroeconomic Policy Paradox: Failing by Succeeding
Alan S. Blinder

Political Effects of the Great Recession
Larry M. Bartels

Effects on Employment, Wealth, Retirement Security, and the Social Safety Net

Failing the Test? The Flexible U.S. Job Market in the Great Recession
Richard B. Freeman

Wealth Disparities Before and After the Great Recession
Fabian T. Pfeffer, Sheldon Danziger, and Robert F. Schoeni

The Effects of the Great Recession on the Retirement Security of Older Workers
Alicia H. Munnell and Matthew S. Rutledge

The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net
Robert A. Moffitt

Effects on Education, Health, Family, and Children

Expanding Enrollments and Contracting State Budgets: The Effect of the Great Recession on Higher Education
Andrew Barr and Sarah E. Turner

The Great Recession and Health: People, Populations, and Disparities
Sarah A. Burgard, Jennifer A. Ailshire, and Lucie Kalousova

The Effects of the Great Recession on Family Structure and Fertility
Andrew Cherlin, Erin Cumberworth, S. Philip Morgan, and Christopher Wimer

Effects of the Great Recession on Child Development
Ariel Kalil

State and Local Variations in Responses to the Recession

State Fiscal Policy during the Great Recession: Budgetary Impacts and Policy Responses
Andrea Louise Campbell and Michael W. Sances

The Effects of Local Economic Conditions on Confidence in Key Institutions and Interpersonal Trust after the Great Recession
Lindsay A. Owens and Karen S. Cook

Critical Criminology 21(3)

Critical Criminology, September 2013: Volume 21, Issue 3

Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue: “Crucial Critical Criminology”
David Kauzlarich

Cultural Criminology and the Politics of Meaning
Jeff Ferrell

Cultural criminology focuses on situational, subcultural, and mediated constructions of meaning around issues of crime and crime control. In this sense cultural criminology is designed for critical engagement with the politics of meaning, and for critical intervention into those politics. Yet the broader enterprise of critical criminology engages with the politics of meaning as well; in confronting the power relations of justice and injustice, critical criminologists of all sorts investigate the social and cultural processes by which situations are defined, groups are categorized, and human consequences are understood. The divergence between cultural criminology and other critical criminologies, then, may be defined less by meaning than by the degree of methodological militancy with which meaning is pursued. In any case, this shared concern with the politics of meaning suggests a number of innovations and interventions that cultural criminologists and other critical criminologists might explore.

Confronting Progressive Retreatism and Minimalism: The Role of a New Left Realist Approach
Walter S. DeKeseredy & Martin D. Schwartz

Left realists continue to offer progressive ways of studying and solving various types of crime in the streets, in the “suites,” and in intimate relationships. This article briefly describes the central themes, assumptions, and concepts of left realism and charts new directions in research, theory, and policy. Special attention is devoted to using new electronic technologies and to responding to the rabid corporatization of institutions of higher learning.

Transformative Feminist Criminology: A Critical Re-thinking of a Discipline
Meda Chesney-Lind & Merry Morash

This essay makes the case for a transformative critical feminist criminology, one that explicitly theorizes gender, one that requires a commitment to social justice, and one that must increasingly be global in scope. Key to this re-thinking of a mature field is the need to expand beyond traditional positivist notions of “science,” to embrace core elements of a feminist approach to methodology, notably the epistemological insights gleaned from a new way of thinking about research, methods, and the relationship between the knower and the known. Other key features of contemporary feminist criminology include an explicit commitment to intersectionality, an understanding of the unique positionality of women in the male dominated fields of policing and corrections, a focus on masculinity and the gender gap in serious crime, a critical assessment of corporate media and the demonization of girls and women of color, and a recognition of the importance of girls’ studies as well as women’s studies to the development of a global, critical feminist criminology.

Intersectional Criminology: Interrogating Identity and Power in Criminological Research and Theory
Hillary Potter

Intersectional criminology is a theoretical approach that necessitates a critical reflection on the impact of interconnected identities and statuses of individuals and groups in relation to their experiences with crime, the social control of crime, and any crime-related issues. This approach is grounded in intersectionality, a concept developed from the tenets of women of color feminist theory and activism. To demonstrate how intersectionality is useful in criminology, this article reviews a sampling of feminist and critical research conducted on Black girls’ and women’s experiences with crime, victimization, and criminal legal system processes. This research demonstrates the interlaced social impacts of race, gender, femininity/masculinity ideals, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. This article also provides a basis for widely deploying an intersectional approach throughout the field of criminology across all social identities and statuses.

Peacemaking Criminology
Hal Pepinsky

This is an overview of the work of criminologists that informs how people build trust, safe and social security in the face of violent social differences. The article begins with a story of how the term “peacemaking” came to “criminology.” A theory of peacemaking emerging from this beginning is then stated, including a review of criminological literature that informs the theory. The theory is grounded in a paradigmatic departure from criminology’s tradition—the study of crime and criminality—to proposing instead of studying what replaces human separation with cooperation and mutual trust. This paradigm implies that stories of dispute handling are its most authoritative data, especially stories people tell about their own relations. It also implies new ways of evaluating the fruits of adopting a peacemaking paradigm for learning and living.

Postmodernism and Thinking Quantum Holographically
Dragan Milovanovic

Postmodern analysis has suggested new directions in critical criminology. We first situate the development of postmodern analysis, particularly chaos, catastrophe, Lacanian psychoanalytic, and edgework theory. One more recent derivative of a postmodern approach, and as of yet undeveloped, is quantum holography. This article develops a process-informational paradigm rooted in quantum holography. We argue that the noosphere we operate within needs to be challenged. We argue, moreover, criminology lacks a subject, a viable agent. We offer Schema QD, an inter- and intra- subjective agent that is neither a transcendental nor passive subject. We provide short examples of applications in this area meant as suggestive not exhaustive, and conclude with future directions.

Green Criminology and Crimes of the Economy: Theory, Research and Praxis
Vincenzo Ruggiero & Nigel South

This paper describes several key developments and dimensions in the field of ‘green criminology’ and discusses some of the relevant debates and controversies arising. It then outlines overlaps and connections with other areas of work within critical criminology. The central focus of the paper is on crimes of the economy as they affect the environment and a substantive, illustrative case study is provided on environmental crimes and harms associated with the oil industry. The paper concludes with some critical observations on where directions in theory, policy and practice may need to turn in a post-growth world.

The New School of Convict Criminology Thrives and Matures
Stephen C. Richards

This article discusses the past, present, and future of the New School of Convict Criminology (CC). A short history, including a discussion of literature, major works, and research studies is provided as is a review of Convict Criminology Group origination, membership, and activities. A first attempt at formal Convict Criminology Theory construction is presented alongside four research hypotheses. University prejudice and exclusion, as well as criminal justice hate words, are also addressed. The conclusion explores the future of CC and requests support for the movement.

Journal of Marriage and Family 75(5)

Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2013: Volume 75, Issue 5

SPECIAL SECTION–Stepfamilies in Later Life

Stepfamilies in Later Life
Suzan van der Pas, Theo G. van Tilburg and Merril Silverstein

Who Is in the Stepfamily? Change in Stepparents' Family Boundaries Between 1992 and 2009
Bianca Suanet, Suzan van der Pas and Theo G. van Tilburg

Complex Families and Late-Life Outcomes Among Elderly Persons: Disability, Institutionalization, and Longevity
Liliana E. Pezzin, Robert A. Pollak and Barbara S. Schone

Parents' Partnership Decision Making After Divorce or Widowhood: The Role of (Step)Children
Jenny de Jong Gierveld and Eva-Maria Merz

Family Structure and Parent–Child Contact: A Comparison of Native and Migrant Families
Anja Steinbach

What Narrows the Stepgap? Closeness Between Parents and Adult (Step)Children in Germany
Oliver Arránz Becker, Veronika Salzburger, Nadia Lois and Bernhard Nauck

Dementia Caregiving in the Context of Late-Life Remarriage: Support Networks, Relationship Quality, and Well-being
Carey Wexler Sherman, Noah J. Webster and Toni C. Antonucci

Coresidence and Geographic Proximity of Mothers and Adult Children in Stepfamilies
Judith A. Seltzer, Jenjira J. Yahirun and Suzanne M. Bianchi

Adult Children's Relationships With Married Parents, Divorced Parents, and Stepparents: Biology, Marriage, or Residence?
Matthijs Kalmijn

Brief Reports

Dating Relationships in Older Adulthood: A National Portrait
Susan L. Brown and Sayaka K. Shinohara

Does Child-Care Quality Mediate Associations Between Type of Care and Development?
Kristin S. Abner, Rachel A. Gordon, Robert Kaestner and Sanders Korenman

Generosity and the Maintenance of Marital Quality
Jeffrey Dew and W. Bradford Wilcox

Of General Interest

Continuity and Change in Mothers' Favoritism Toward Offspring in Adulthood
J. Jill Suitor, Megan Gilligan and Karl Pillemer

Cyclical Cohabitation Among Unmarried Parents in Fragile Families
Lenna Nepomnyaschy and Julien Teitler

Family Instability and the Transition to Adulthood
Paula Fomby and Stacey J. Bosick

Paternal Incarceration and Father–Child Contact in Fragile Families
Amanda Geller

Daily Spillover of Low-Income Mothers' Perceived Workload to Mood and Mother–Child Interactions
Anna Gassman-Pines

Journal of Criminal Justice 41(5)

Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2013: Volume 41, Issue 5

Genetics and Antisocial Behaviors 

Genetic and environmental influences on antisocial behavior  
Catherine Tuvblad, Kevin M. Beaver

The genetic and environmental overlap between aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behavior in children and adolescents using the self-report delinquency interview (SR-DI)
Pan Wang, Sharon Niv, Catherine Tuvblad, Adrian Raine, Laura A. Baker

Purpose: This study investigated genetic and environmental commonalities and differences between aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behavior (ASB) in male and female child and adolescent twins, based on a newly developed self-report questionnaire with good reliability and external validity -- the Self-Report Delinquency Interview (SR-DI). Methods: Subjects were 780 pairs of twins assessed through laboratory interviews at three time points in a longitudinal study, during which the twins were: (1) ages 9-10 years; (2) age 11-13 years, and (3) age 16-18 years. Results: Sex differences were repeatedly observed for mean levels of ASB. In addition, diverse change patterns of genetic and environmental emerged, as a function of sex and form of ASB, during the development from childhood to adolescence. Although there was some overlap in etiologies of aggressive and non-aggressive ASB, predominantly in shared environmental factors, their genetic overlap was moderate and the non-shared environmental overlap was low. Conclusions: Taken together, these results reinforced the importance of differentiating forms of ASB and further investigating sex differences in future research. These results should be considered in future comparisons between youth self-report and parental or teacher report of child and adolescent behavior, and may help elucidate commonalities and differences among informants.

Aggression and rule-breaking: Heritability and stability of antisocial behavior problems in childhood and adolescence
Sharon Niv, Catherine Tuvblad, Adrian Raine, Laura A. Baker

Purpose: This twin study examined the structure of genetic and environmental influences on aggression and rule-breaking in order to examine change and stability across the span of childhood to mid-adolescence. Methods: Behavioral assessments were conducted at two time points: age 9–10 years and 14–15 years. Using behavioral genetics biometric modeling, the longitudinal structure of influences was investigated. Results: Aggression and rule-breaking were found to be influenced by a latent common factor of antisocial behavior (ASB) within each wave of data collection. The variance in the childhood-age common factor of ASB was influenced by 41% genetics, 40% shared environment and 19% nonshared environment. In adolescence, 41% of variance in the common factor were novel and entirely genetic, while the remainder of variance was stable across time. Additionally, both aggression and rule-breaking within each wave were found to have unique influences not common across subscales or across waves, highlighting specificity of genetic and environmental effects on different problem behaviors at both ages. Conclusions: This research sheds light on the commonality of influences on different forms of antisocial behavior. Future research into interventions for antisocial behavior problems in youth could focus on adolescence-specific environmental influences.

Biological protective factors for antisocial and criminal behavior
Jill Portnoy, Frances R. Chen, Adrian Raine

Purpose: Although risk factors are typically the focus of criminological research, increasingly researchers are interested in identifying protective factors that reduce the probability of antisocial behavior, either in the presence or absence of risk factors. Biosocial researchers are in an opportune position to research factors that protect against the development of antisocial behavior in high-risk individuals, given biosocial criminology’s focus on the interaction between biological and social factors. The purpose of this article is to review neuropsychological and psychophysiology research into protective factors. Results: Of the neuropsychological factors, high IQ has the best-replicated protective effects, though executive functioning is also a promising candidate as a protective factor. High resting heart rate, as well as enhanced autonomic fear conditioning and attentional processing may also have protective effects. Conclusions: Though research into biological protective factors is currently limited, there is promising evidence that biological factors could help us to better understand why some individuals do not become antisocial or criminal in the presence of high social risk. Neuropsychological and psychophysiological measures are relatively easier and less costly to operationalize than other biological measures, making them promising candidates for criminological researchers who would like to incorporate biological measures into their research designs.

Genetic and environmental contributions to stability and change in levels of self-control
Kevin M. Beaver, Eric J. Connolly, Joseph A. Schwartz, Mohammed Said Al-Ghamdi, Ahmed Nezar Kobeisy

Purpose: There has been an emerging body of research estimating the stability in levels of self-control across different sections of the life course. At the same time, some of this research has attempted to examine the factors that account for both stability and change in levels of self-control. Missing from much of this research is a concerted focus on the genetic and environmental architecture of stability and change in self-control. Methods: The current study was designed to address this issue by analyzing a sample of kinship pairs drawn from the Child and Young Adult Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (CNLSY). Results: Analyses of these data revealed that genetic factors accounted for between 74 and 92 percent of the stability in self-control and between 78 and 89 percent of the change in self-control. Shared and nonshared environmental factors explained the rest of the stability and change in levels of self-control. Conclusions: A combination of genetic and environmental influences is responsible for the stability and change in levels of self-control over time.

Evidence for a heritable brain basis to deviance-promoting deficits in self-control
James R. Yancey, Noah C. Venables, Brian M. Hicks, Christopher J. Patrick

Purpose: Classic criminological theories emphasize the role of impaired self-control in behavioral deviancy. Reduced amplitude of the P300 brain response is reliably observed in individuals with antisocial and substance-related problems, suggesting it may serve as a neurophysiological indicator of deficiencies in self-control that confer liability to deviancy. Methods: The current study evaluated the role of self-control capacity—operationalized by scores on a scale measure of trait disinhibition—in mediating the relationship between P300 brain response and behavioral deviancy in a sample of adult twins (N = 419) assessed for symptoms of antisocial/addictive disorders and P300 brain response. Results: As predicted, greater disorder symptoms and higher trait disinhibition scores each predicted smaller P300 amplitude, and trait disinhibition mediated observed relations between antisocial/addictive disorders and P300 response. Further, twin modeling analyses revealed that trait disinhibition scores and disorder symptoms reflected a common genetic liability, and this genetic liability largely accounted for the observed phenotypic relationship between antisocial-addictive problems and P300 brain response. Conclusions: These results provide further evidence that heritable weaknesses in self-control capacity confer liability to antisocial/addictive outcomes and that P300 brain response indexes this dispositional liability. 

Teenage childbirth and young adult criminal convictions: A quasi-experimental study of criminal outcomes for teenage mothers
Claire A. Coyne, Nathalie M.G. Fontaine, Niklas Långström, Paul Lichtenstein, Brian M. D’Onofrio

Purpose: Teenage childbirth is associated with poor psychosocial outcomes for teen mothers. One example is that teen mothers have higher rates of antisocial behavior. The extant research has not been able to determine if teenage motherhood is independently associated with criminal behavior, or if the association is due to selection factors associated with both teenage childbirth and criminal behavior. Methods: We used longitudinal data from Swedish national registers and sibling-comparisons (both full- and half-siblings) to identify the extent to which there is an independent association between teenage childbirth and mothers’ likelihood of criminal conviction between ages 20-30, or if the association is confounded by familial (including genetic or environmental) factors that make sisters similar. Results: Women who began childbearing as teenagers were more likely to be convicted of a crime in young adulthood compared to women who delayed childbearing. When sisters were compared, the association between teenage childbirth and criminal convictions disappeared. Multivariate behavior genetic analyses suggest genetic and shared environmental account for the association. Conclusions: The statistical association between teenage childbirth and early adulthood criminal convictions is confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors that influence both the likelihood of teenage childbirth and risk of early adulthood criminal conviction.

Do peer group norms moderate the expression of genetic risk for aggression?
Mara Brendgen, Alain Girard, Frank Vitaro, Ginette Dionne, Michel Boivin

Purpose: Using a genetically informed design based on 192 Monozygotic and Dizygotic twin pairs assessed in kindergarten, this study examined whether the expression of genetic risk for physical aggression or for relational aggression varies depending on the peer group’s injunctive behaviour norms. Methods: Physical aggression and relational aggression, as well as injunctive peer group norms in regard to these behaviours, were measured via peer nominations in the twins’ kindergarten classes. Results: Peer groups varied considerably in terms of the level of acceptability of both physical and relational aggression. Bivariate Cholesky modeling revealed a significant gene-environment interaction, indicating that a strong genetic disposition for physical aggression was much more likely to be expressed when peer group injunctive norms were favourable to such behaviour. In contrast, genetic factors essentially played no role in explaining inter-individual differences when peer group norms discouraged physical aggression. Relational aggression was generally less explained by genetic influences and more by environmental influences regardless of peer group norms, but environmental influences became even more important when peer group norms favoured such behaviour. Conclusions: These findings speak to the importance of the peer group in shaping aggression already in young children by either condoning or penalizing such behaviour.

Psychopathic Personality and Negative Parent-to-Child Affect: A Longitudinal Cross-lag Twin Study
Catherine Tuvblad, Serena Bezdjian, Adrian Raine, Laura A. Baker

Purpose: Previous studies that have explored the relationship between parenting style and children’s antisocial behavior have generally found significant bidirectional effects, whereby parenting behaviors influence their child’s antisocial outcomes, but a child’s behaviors also lead to changes in parenting style. Methods: The present study investigated the genetic and environmental underpinnings of the longitudinal relationship between negative parent-to-child affect and psychopathic personality in a sample of 1,562 twins. Using a biometrical cross-lag analysis, bidirectional effects were investigated across two waves of assessment when the twins were ages 9-10 and 14-15, utilizing both caregiver and youth self-reports. Results: Results demonstrated that negative parental affect observed at ages 9-10 influenced the child’s later psychopathic personality at ages 14-15, based on both caregiver and youth self-reports. For these ‘parent-driven effects’, both genetic and non-shared environmental factors were important in the development of later psychopathic personality during adolescence. There were additional ‘child-driven effects’ such that children’s psychopathic personality at ages 9-10 influenced negative parent-to-child affect at ages 14-15, but only within caregiver reports. Conclusions: Thus, children’s genetically influenced psychopathic personality seemed to evoke later parental negativity at ages 14-15, highlighting the importance of investigating bidirectional effects in parent-child relationships to understand the development of these traits.

Psychopathic personality and utilitarian moral judgment in college students
Yu Gao, Simone Tang

Purpose: Although psychopathy is characterized by amoral behavior, literature on the association between psychopathy and moral judgment pattern is mixed. Recent evidence suggests that this may be due to the moderation effect of anxiety (Koenigs, Kruepke, Zeier, & Newman, 2011). The current study aims to examine the psychopathy-utilitarian judgment association in college students. Method: In this study, a group of 302 college students completed a moral judgment test involving hypothetical dilemmas. Their psychopathic traits were assessed by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory – Short Form (PPI-SF) (Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). Results: Individuals with higher psychopathic traits were more likely to make utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Furthermore, the association between utilitarian responses and psychopathy was more salient for the behavioral factor of psychopathy (PPI-II), and this association was mediated by self-reported aggression. However, the moderating effect of anxiety was not found. Conclusions: These results build upon work on utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathic individuals in a non-incarcerated, non-institutionalized sample, and have important implications for the behavioral correction system.

Genetic risk factors correlate with county-level violent crime rates and collective disadvantage
J.C. Barnes, Brian B. Boutwell, Kevin M. Beaver

Purpose: Social scientists have a rich tradition of uncovering the neighborhood, structural, and ecological correlates of human behavior. Results from this body of evidence have revealed that living in disadvantaged communities portends myriad negative outcomes, including antisocial behaviors. Though it has long been argued that associations between neighborhood factors and individual-level outcomes may, at least partially, reflect genetic selection, a paucity of research has empirically investigated this possibility. Methods: The current study examined whether known genetic risk factors for antisocial behavior were predictive of exposure to disadvantage and violent crime measured at the county level. Drawing on genotypic data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a dopamine risk scale was created based on respondents’ genotypes for DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4. County-level disadvantage was measured via Census data and violent crime rates were measured via the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Results: Findings revealed that individuals with a greater number of dopamine risk alleles were more likely to live in a disadvantaged county and were more likely to live in a county with higher violent crime rates.

Stressful life events and adolescent drug use: Moderating influences of the MAOA gene
John M. Stogner, Chris L. Gibson

Purpose: Though stressful life events appear to impact the likelihood and frequency of substance use among adolescents, these effects are often varied and inconsistent. We suggest that the polymorphic MAOA gene may be partially responsible for variable susceptibility to environmental pressures and substance use. More specifically, we hypothesize that adolescents possessing low activity alleles for the MAOA genotype are more likely to respond to stressful life experiences by initiating substance use. Methods: The genetic subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health was analyzed (2,574 adolescents) using logistic regression models for each gender. Respondents’ self-reports of eight key stressors were used to create a composite life stress scale which was allowed to interact with a variable that represented the number of low activity MAOA alleles. Results: For males, a significant interaction emerged between stressful life experiences and the MAOA gene for alcohol (p = .029) and marijuana (p = .039) initiation. For females, the interaction was not significant in each model. Conclusions: MAOA interacts with life stress to increase the likelihood of substance use initiation for males. Those with a low activity MAOA allele are more likely to initiate substance use than those with a high activity allele when exposed to stressful experiences.