Sunday, February 24, 2013

Criminology 51(1)

Criminology, February 2013: Volume 51, Issue 1

The Place Of Context: A Theory And Strategy For Criminology's Hard Problems
Robert J. Sampson
I present a theoretical framework and analytic strategy for the study of place as a fundamental context in criminology, with a focus on neighborhood effects. My approach builds on the past 15 years of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and from a recent book unifying the results. I argue that “ecometrics” can be applied at multiple scales, and I elaborate core principles and guiding hypotheses for five problems: 1) legacies of inequality and developmental neighborhood effects; 2) race, crime, and the new diversity; 3) cognition and context, above all the social meaning of disorder; 4) the measurement and sources of collective efficacy in a cosmopolitan world; and 5) higher order structures beyond the neighborhood that arise in complex urban systems. Although conceptually distinct, these hard problems are interdependent and ultimately linked to a frontier in criminology: contextual causality.

Shaping Citizen Perceptions of Police Legitimacy: A Randomized Field Trial of Procedural Justice
Lorraine Mazerolle, Emma Antrobus, Sarah Bennett and Tom R. Tyler
Exploring the relationship between procedural justice and citizen perceptions of police is a well-trodden pathway. Studies show that when citizens perceive the police acting in a procedurally just manner—by treating people with dignity and respect, and by being fair and neutral in their actions—they view the police as legitimate and are more likely to comply with directives and cooperate with police. Our article examines both the direct and the indirect outcomes of procedural justice policing, tested under randomized field trial conditions. We assess whether police can enhance perceptions of legitimacy during a short, police-initiated and procedurally just traffic encounter and how this single encounter shapes general views of police. Our results show significant differences between the control and experimental conditions: Procedurally just traffic encounters with police (experimental condition) shape citizen views about the actual encounter directly and general orientations toward the police relative to business-as-usual traffic stops in the control group. The theorized model is supported by our research, demonstrating that the police have much to gain from acting fairly during even short encounters with citizens.

Foot Patrol in Violent Crime Hot Spots: The Longitudinal Impact of Deterrence and Posttreatment Effects of Displacement
Evan T. Sorg, Cory P. Haberman, Jerry H. Ratcliffe and Elizabeth R. Groff
This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman's (1990) concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multilevel growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a decaying deterrent effect during the course of the experiment, whereas those staffed for 12 weeks did not. None of the beats had residual deterrence effects relative to the control areas. The displacement uncovered had decayed during the 3 months after the experiment, and it is theoretically plausible that previously displaced offenders returned to the original target areas causing inverse displacement. These results are discussed in the context of Durlauf and Nagin's (2011) recent proposal that prison sentences should be shortened, mandatory minimum statutes repealed, and the cost savings generated by these policy changes shifted into policing budgets to convey more effectively the certainty of detection. It is concluded that if Durlauf and Nagin's proposal is to succeed, then more holistic policing strategies would likely be necessary. Foot patrol as a specific policing tactic seems to fit nicely into a variety of policing paradigms, and suggestions for incorporating them to move beyond strictly enforcement-based responses are presented.

Viewing Things Differently: The Dimensions of Public Perceptions of Police Legitimacy
Justice Tankebe
Legitimacy (or “the right to exercise power”) is now an established concept in criminological analysis, especially in relation to policing. Substantial empirical evidence shows the importance of legitimacy in securing law-abiding behavior and cooperation from citizens. Yet adequate theorization has lagged behind empirical evidence, and there has been a conflation of legitimacy with the cognate concepts of “trust” and of “obligation to obey the law.” By drawing on the work of Beetham (1991) and others (e.g., Bottoms and Tankebe, ), this study tests the hypothesis that the contents of the multiple dimensions of police legitimacy comprise procedural fairness, distributive fairness, lawfulness, and effectiveness. The study also investigates the relative influence of legitimacy and feelings of obligation on citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the police. Using data from London, the results substantiate the hypothesized dimensions of police legitimacy. In addition, legitimacy was found to exhibit both a direct influence on cooperation that is independent of obligation and an indirect influence that flows through people's felt obligations to obey the police. Implications for future research are discussed.

Does Imprisonment Alter The Life Course? Evidence On Crime And Employment From A Natural Experiment
Charles E. Loeffler
Ex-prisoners consistently manifest high rates of criminal recidivism and unemployment. Existing explanations for these poor outcomes emphasize the stigmatizing effects of imprisonment on prisoners seeking postrelease employment as well as the deleterious effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ attitudes and capabilities. However, these explanations must be distinguished from selection effects in the criminal sentencing process, which also could explain some or all of these poor outcomes. To distinguish between criminogenic and selection explanations for ex-prisoners’ postrelease experience, I analyze data from a natural experiment in which criminal cases were assigned randomly to judges with sizable sentencing disparities. Using these exogenous sentencing disparities, I produce unbiased estimates of the causal effects of imprisonment on the life course. The results of this analysis suggest that selection effects could be sufficiently large to account for prisoners’ poor postrelease outcomes because judges with large sentencing disparities in their use of imprisonment had similarly high caseload unemployment and criminal recidivism rates.

The Elusive Relationship Between Community Organizations And Crime: An Assessment Across Disadvantaged Areas Of The South Bronx
Lee Ann Slocum, Andres F. Rengifo, Tiffany Choi And Christopher R. Herrmann
Several theoretical perspectives posit a negative association between the extent of a neighborhood's organizational infrastructure and crime; yet, empirical support for this proposition has been limited in that researchers generally examine only a few types of organizations or combine them into one aggregate measure. Studies with few measures may omit organizations that are effective at reducing crime, whereas those using aggregate measures obscure differences across organizations in their ability to control crime. Using data from 74 block groups in the South Bronx, NY, this research seeks to specify more clearly the relationship between organizations and crime in a disadvantaged urban environment. We examine the relationship among nine different types of organizations and violent and property crime controlling for prior crime, land use, and area sociodemographic characteristics. Consistent with theories that highlight the importance of organizations for establishing ties outside the neighborhood, we find that block groups with more organizations that bridge to the larger community experience a decrease in crime. Property crime also is reduced in block groups with more organizations that promote the well-being of families and children. We find that schools are associated with an increase in property crime, whereas the effects of other organizations are context specific and vary based on neighborhood racial composition, commercial land use, and disadvantage.

Law & Society Review 47(1)

Law & Society Review, March 2013: Volume 47, Issue 1

Real Interrogation: What Actually Happens When Cops Question Kids
Barry C. Feld
Although the Supreme Court repeatedly cautioned that youthfulness adversely affects juveniles' ability to exercise Miranda rights or make voluntary statements, it endorsed the adult waiver standard—knowing, intelligent, and voluntary—to gauge juveniles' Miranda waivers. By contrast, developmental psychologists question whether young people understand or possess the competence necessary to exercise Miranda rights. This article analyzes quantitative and qualitative data of interrogations of three hundred and seven (307) sixteen- and seventeen-year old youths charged with felony offenses. It reports how police secure Miranda waivers, the tactics they use to elicit information, and the evidence youths provide. The findings bear on three policy issues—procedural safeguards for youths, time limits for interrogations, and mandatory recording of interrogations.

Symbol and Substance: Effects of California's Three Strikes Law on Felony Sentencing
John R. Sutton
California's “three strikes and you're out” law is the most notorious example of the wave of mandatory sentencing policies that many states enacted beginning in the late 1970s. While advocates and critics predicted the law would have profound effects on aggregate punishment trends and individual case outcomes, Feeley and Kamin's analysis of previous sentencing reforms suggested the law's impact would be mainly symbolic because local officials would ignore, subvert, or nullify its major provisions. While aggregate analyses have tended to confirm this argument, so far there has been no systematic test of the law's effect on individual cases. This analysis uses multilevel models applied to case-level data from 12 urban California counties to test hypotheses about shifts in average punitiveness, the relative influence of legal and extralegal factors on sentencing, and the uncertainty of sentencing outcomes. Results mostly support Feeley and Kamin's symbolic interpretation, but also reveal important substantive impacts: since Three Strikes, sentences have become harsher, particularly in politically conservative counties, and black felons receive longer prison sentences.

Facing Your Criminal Record: Expungement and the Collateral Problem of Wrongfully Represented Self
Amy Myrick
While substantial sociolegal research has analyzed the deleterious effects of criminal records on life outcomes, little has examined the records themselves, or their relationship to the people they represent. In this article I take a novel tact, treating criminal records as the material, textual documentations of an individual's past. I then observe expungement seekers—people who encounter their own records—to understand their reactions. From this data, I use inductive theories of symbolic interactionism to theorize another collateral effect of the criminal record: it represents people in ways that depersonalize their social identities, and prevents them from communicating corrective self-understandings to the governing bodies that author the records. I conclude with my main theoretical contribution: “having a criminal record,” literally, means having a textual proxy that the state has authored on its own terms, without input from the people whom it permanently represents, and while concealing from those people the apparatus behind authorship. As a consequence, the criminal records system serves as a barrier to reciprocal communication between ex-arrestees and a legal system that represents them in ways that they may want to contest. This “wrongful representation” is a collateral effect of having a criminal record that impedes the ability of ex-arrestees to manage or repair their relationship with the state that has punished them.

Judicial Independence across Democratic Regimes: Understanding the Varying Impact of Political Competition
Aylin Aydin
One of the most prominent explanations of the creation and maintenance of independent judiciary is the “insurance theory” that proposes a positive relationship between political competition and judicial independence. But, does intense political competition inevitably lead to higher levels of judicial independence across all types of democracies? Conducting a large-N cross-country analysis over 97 democratic countries, this study shows that as democratic quality across countries changes, the impact of political competition on judicial independence changes as well. The empirical findings reveal that while in advanced democracies high levels of political competition enhances judicial independence, in developing democracies political competition significantly hampers the independence of the courts.

Liberalism and Its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law
Uday Chandra
Liberalism is widely regarded as a modern intellectual tradition that defends the rights and freedoms of autonomous individuals. Yet, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, liberal theorists and lawmakers have struggled to defend the rights and freedoms of political subjects whom they regard as “primitive,” “backward,” or “indigenous.” Liberalism thus recurrently encounters its primitive other, a face-off that gives rise to a peculiar set of dilemmas and contradictions for political theory and law. In what ways can postcolonial law rid itself of its colonial baggage? How can the ideal of universal liberal citizenship overcome paternalistic notions of protection? How might “primitive” subjects become full and equal citizens in postcolonial societies? To explore these dilemmas and contradictions, I study the intellectual trajectory of “primitivism” in India from the construction of so-called tribal areas in the 1870s to legal debates and official reports on tribal rights in contemporary India. Through a close reading of these legal provisions for tribal peoples and places, I explore the continuing tension between the constitutional ideal of liberal citizenship and the disturbing reality of tribal subjecthood produced by colonial and postcolonial Indian states.

The Indirect Influence of Politics on Tort Liability of Public Authorities in English Law
Dan Priel
The scope of negligence liability of public authorities in English law has undergone significant changes in the Post-World War II period, first expanding and then, from the mid-1980s, retracting. This article tries to explain why this happened not by focusing, as is common in most commentary on this area of law, on changing doctrinal “tests,” but rather by tying it to changes in the background political ideology. My main contention is that political change has brought about a change in the law, but that it did so by affecting the scope of the political domain, and by implication, also the scope of the legal one. More specifically, I argue that Britain's Post-War consensus on the welfare state has enabled the courts to expand state liability in accordance with emerging notions of the welfare state without seeming to take the law into controversial territory. When Thatcher came to power, the welfare state was no longer in consensus, thus making further development of legal doctrines on welfarist lines appear politically contentious. The courts therefore reverted back to older doctrines that seemed less politically charged in the new political atmosphere of the 1980s.

An Analysis of Policy-Based Congressional Responses to the U.S. Supreme Court's Constitutional Decisions
Bethany Blackstone
While Congress can attempt to overrule constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court by initiating the constitutional amendment process, an amendment is rarely a practicable option. Instead, Congress regularly tries to modify the impact of constitutional decisions with ordinary legislation. I analyze policy-based responses to the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions that were initiated in Congress between 1995 and 2010. For each responsive proposal, I consider the relationship between the proposed legislation and the Court's legal holding and the relationship between the proposal and the public policy associated with the Court's decision. I find that Congress enjoys considerable success in reversing the policy impacts of the Court's decisions but is limited in its ability to overcome the Court's legal rules.

Journal of Criminal Justice 41(2)

Journal of Criminal Justice, March 2013: Volume 41, Issue 2

Introduction to the special issue: Psychology of crime  
Glenn D. Walters
Psychology misrepresented in many criminology and criminal justice textbooks. Need for a more accurate portrayal of psychology's contributions to crime. Variety of different clinical psychological models and perspectives examined

Community-based alternatives for justice-involved individuals with severe mental illness: Diversion, problem-solving courts, and reentry
David DeMatteo, Casey LaDuke, Benjamin R. Locklair, Kirk Heilbrun
Adults with severe mental illness are overrepresented in criminal justice system. Criminal justice system has made noteworthy advances for handling these offenders. Community-based alternatives have varying degrees of empirical support

Individual-level interventions for alcohol-related violen Expanding targets for inclusion in treatment programs
Mary McMurran
Individual-level interventions for alcohol-related aggression need to be updated. Incorporate treatment components based on recent research. Social information processing is a useful framework. This is an integrative narrative review. Focus on automatic processing, knowledge strucures, emotions, response selection

An exploration of the association between criminal thinking and community program attrition
Damon Mitchell, Raymond Chip Tafrate, Tom Hogan, Mark E. Olver
Analyzed criminal thinking and program attrition in two community programs. Overall levels of criminal thinking higher in non-completers. Disregard for others was strongest pattern in day reporting center non-completers. Demand for excitement was strongest pattern in sober house non-completers. Pattern of results suggest criminal thinking may be related to program responsivity

Is a separate diagnostic category defensible for paraphilic coercion?
Raymond A. Knight, Judith Sims-Knight, Jean-Pierre Guay
MIDSA self-report responses were gathered from 529 sex offenders in MA and MN. EFA, IRT, and taxometrics explored the structure of an Agonistic Continuum. This Continuum is distributed as a dimension, ranging from noncoercion through sadism. No data in the review or analyses supported PCD and sadism as separate disorders. Implications discussed for DSM-5, legal decisions, research, and clinical utility

Disentangling the relationship between delinquency and hyperactivity, low achievement, depression, and low socioeconomic status: Analysis of repeated longitudinal data
Ivy N. Defoe, David P. Farrington, Rolf Loeber
Analyses of longitudinal Pittsburgh Youth Study. Repeated measures from age 11 to age 15. Low academic achievement has the most important influence on delinquency. Hyperactivity and low SES have indirect influences on delinquency via low achievement. Delinquency influences depression rather than the reverse

Evaluating the positive and negative benefits of crime: Development and validation of the Decisional Balance Scale for Adolescent Offenders (DBS-AO)
Mandy J. Jordan, Richard Rogers, Craig S. Neumann, Bradley Norlander
Data from 238 adolescent offenders from a maximum-security institution. Development of the Decisional Balance Scale for Adolescent Offenders (DBS-AO). The DBS-AO resulted in a good fit for a three factor model. The DBS-AO exhibited good construct validity with the Stages of Change Scale.

Dynamic risk assessment: A validation study
Robert D. Morgan, Daryl G. Kroner, Jeremy F. Mills, Catherine Serna, Brendan McDonald
Re-Entry: Dynamic Risk Assessment study examined dynamic predictors of outcomes. Sample consisted of 133 released offenders. 7-wave data collection procedure was used with measures of static and dynamic risk. Obtained adequate reliability but convergent validity of measures were unstable. Dynamic risk factors did not contribute to the predictive power of static variables

Using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory to identify subtypes of antisocial personality disorder
Jennifer Cox, John F. Edens, Melissa S. Magyar, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Kevin S. Douglas, Norman G. Poythress
Study 1 assessed the replicability of previously derived ASPD subtypes. ASPD subtypes differed on theoretical variables and behavioral outcomes. Study 2 evaluated utility of classification system in independent dataset. Groups differed in useful ways including recidivism type and institutional misconduct. Evidence for personality and behavioral differences in ASPD offenders

Antisocial cognition and crime continuity: Cognitive mediation of the past crime-future crime relationship
Glenn D. Walters, Matt DeLisi
Data from 812 members of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Criminality and antisocial cognition measured with self-report items. Antisocial cognition capable of mediating the past crime-future crime relationship. Mediational effect robust to pre-treatment effects of four criminological theories

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Theory and Society 42(1)

Theory and Society, January 2013: Volume 42, Issue 1

Associating, mobilizing, politicizing: local developmental agency from without
László Bruszt and Balázs Vedres
Decades of increase in external aid programs sparked a wide range of criticisms pointing to misaligned interests, lack of accountability, and the reproduction of developmental traps. The success of development from without is more likely if it generates domestic developmental agency. In this article, we contribute by conceptualizing and measuring dimensions of developmental agency. Our research analyzes the strategic case of European Union regional development programs in Eastern Europe, where this external organization spent nearly a decade on establishing local developmental agency. We collected survey data of 1200 local organizations from two regions each in Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We examine the post-accession position of organizations that participated in pre-accession assistance programs. We test a hypothesis of marginalization in the framework of recentralized developmental governance, and we examine links between patterns of pre-accession involvement and post-accession developmental agency. We identify factors that might make external developmental programs more likely to foster local developmental agency.

For a postcolonial sociology
Julian Go
Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution.

The political economy of memory: the challenges of representing national conflict at ‘identity-driven’ museums
Robyn Autry
This article investigates how national histories marred by racial conflict can be translated into narratives of group identity formation. I study the role of “identity-driven” museums in converting American’s racial past into a metanarrative of black identity from subjugation to citizenship. Drawing on a thick description of exhibitions at 15 museums, interviews with curators and directors, museum documents, and newspaper articles, I use the “political economy of memory” as a framework to explain how ideological and material processes intersect in the production of exhibitions. I show that in addition to struggles over the truth and interpretive styles, more prosaic issues of funding, attendance, and institutional capacity-building hve an impact on representational selectivities. I explain how these issues affect black museums operating during the civil rights and post-civil rights eras. I consider the motivations and consequences of “remembering” national histories of violence and intolerance through the prism of group identity formation.

Ideas in action: the politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839
Elisabeth Anderson
This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors’ expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes.

Journal of Criminal Justice 41(1)

Journal of Criminal Justice, January 2013: Volume 41, Issue 1

Fear of crime, incivilities, and collective efficacy in four Miami neighborhoods
Marc L. Swatt, Sean P. Varano, Craig D. Uchida, Shellie E. Solomon
Coefficients of social process variables are compared across four neighborhoods. Coefficients for perceptions of collective efficacy on fear of crime vary. Coefficients for perceptions of incivilities on fear of crime do not vary. Heterogeneity was also observed for other important theoretical relationships.

Early starters: Which type of criminal onset matters most for delinquent careers?
Matt DeLisi, Tricia K. Neppl, Brenda J. Lohman, Michael G. Vaughn, Jeffrey J. Shook
Arrest onset was most consistently related to antisocial outcomes. Antisocial behavioral onset was associated with psychopathic personality. Juvenile court referral onset was not associated with delinquent careers. Youths with ADHD or CD diagnoses experienced earlier onset than their peers.

Discouraging window breakers: The lagged effects of police activity on crime
Jonathan W. Caudill, Ryan Getty, Rick Smith, Ryan Patten, Chad R. Trulson
This study provided mixed support for Broken Windows-based order maintenance policing. Order-maintenance policing failed to reduce significantly violent crime over a 26-month period. One measure of order-maintenance policing – non-traffic citations – significantly reduced reported property crimes.

Maternal versus adolescent reports of self-control: Implications for testing the general theory of crime
Ryan C. Meldrum, Jacob T.N. Young, Callie Harbin Burt, Alex R. Piquero
The strength of the association between self-control and delinquency varies by informant type. The strength of the association between parenting and self-control varies by informant type. Self-reported and other-reported measures of self-control cannot be used interchangeably.

Attempting to reduce firearms violence through a Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative (CAGI): An evaluation of process and impact
Edmund F. McGarrell, Nicholas Corsaro, Chris Melde, Natalie K. Hipple, Timothy Bynum, Jennifer Cobbina
CAGI cities experienced a lagged decline in gun homicide. There was evidence of a contemporaneous enforcement effect on gun homicide. The impact on gun homicide was modest and did not appear to be sustained. Most CAGI jurisdictions could not provide reliable estimates of gang crime. Most sites had difficulty implementing a coordinated, comprehensive program.

Childhood broken homes and adult violen An analysis of moderators and mediators
Delphine Theobald, David P. Farrington, Alex R. Piquero
Experiencing a broken home up to the age of 14 predicted violent criminal conviction by age 50. The effect on violent conviction was moderated by nervous disposition and harsh discipline. The effect of broken home on later violent conviction was mediated by several variables. The most important mediators were self-reported violence and hyperactivity. In sum, the ‘broken homes effect’ is more nuanced and can lead to distinct outcomes in a myriad of ways.

Bullying victimization and adolescent mental health: General and typological effects across sex
Michael G. Turner, M. Lyn Exum, Robert Brame, Thomas J. Holt
Reported bullying victimization rates varied across verbal (50.0%), physical, (29.0%), and cyber (13.0%) bullying measures. Females and males who were verbally bullied experienced higher rates of depression than those who were not bullied. No significant gender differences in suicide ideation emerged across females and males who experienced any type of bullying.

Theoretical Criminology 17(1)

Theoretical Criminology, February 2013: Volume 17, Issue 1

Nordic Exceptionalism revisited: Explaining the paradox of a Janus-faced penal regime
Vanessa Barker
Nordic penal regimes are Janus-faced: one side relatively mild and benign; the other intrusive, disciplining and oppressive. This paradox has not been fully grasped or explained by the Nordic Exceptionalism thesis which overstates the degree to which Nordic penal order is based on humaneness and social solidarity, an antidote to mass incarceration. This essay examines the split in the foundation of the Swedish welfare state: it simultaneously promotes individual well-being in the social sphere but enables intrusive deprivations of liberty and in some cases, violates the principles of human rights. The backbone of the welfare state, Folkhemmet, the People’s Home, is at once demos, democratic and egalitarian and ethnos, a people by blood, exclusionary and essentialist. The lack of individual rights and an ethno-cultural conception of citizenship make certain categories of people such as criminal offenders, criminal aliens, drug offenders and perceived ‘others’, particularly foreign nationals, vulnerable to deprivation and exclusion.

Irregular border-crossing deaths and gender: Where, how and why women die crossing borders
Sharon Pickering and Brandy Cochrane
In a global era of increased securitization of migration between the developed and developing world this article undertakes a gendered analysis of the ways women die irregularly crossing borders. Through an examination of datasets in Europe, the USA and Australia it finds women are more likely to die crossing borders at the harsh physical frontiers of nation-states rather than at increasingly policed ‘internal border’ sites. The reasons why women are dying are not clearly discernible from the data, yet based on the extant literature it is reasonable to conclude that gendered social practices within families, and within countries of origin and transit, as well as the practices of smuggling markets, are key contributing factors.

With God on my side: The paradoxical relationship between religious belief and criminality among hardcore street offenders
Volkan Topalli, Timothy Brezina, and Mindy Bernhardt
Research has found that many street offenders anticipate an early death, making them less prone to delay gratification, more likely to discount the future costs of crime, and thus more likely to offend. Ironically, many such offenders also hold strong religious convictions, including those related to the punitive afterlife consequences of offending. To reconcile these findings, we interviewed 48 active street offenders to determine their expectation of an early demise, belief in the afterlife, and notions of redemption and punishment. Despite the deterrent effects of religion that have been highlighted in prior research, our results indicate that religion may have a counterintuitive criminogenic effect in certain contexts. Through purposeful distortion or genuine ignorance, the hardcore offenders we interviewed are able to exploit the absolvitory tenets of religious doctrine, neutralizing their fear of death to not only allow but encourage offending. This suggests a number of intriguing consequences for deterrence theory and policy.

‘A lockdown facility … with the feel of a small, private college’: Liberal politics, jail expansion, and the carceral habitus
Judah Schept
While scholarship has identified neoliberalism, punitive and racialized public policy, and a supportive culture of punishment as giving rise to mass incarceration in the United States, little work has examined how communities come to participate in the production of the carceral state. Using an ethnographic case study of a proposed ‘justice campus’, a carceral expansion project in a politically progressive Midwestern city, this article illuminates the capacity of mass incarceration to structure individual and community dispositions and, in doing so, to imbue even oppositional politics. At the same time, communities may adopt, reformulate, and rearticulate the symbolic work and material manifestations of mass incarceration in order to fit specific political-cultural contexts. As such, this article argues that mass incarceration is both more forceful and more subject to diverse and context-specific formulations than has been previously argued. The corporal and discursive inscription of carcerality into individual and community bodies suggests the presence of a carceral habitus and offers one way to comprehend not only mass incarceration’s pervasive presence, but also its hegemonic operations even among and through people and communities who purport to reject it.

Discourse, practice and the production of the polysemy of security
Prashan Ranasinghe
While ‘security’ has now become a central theme in criminology, the literature on it is limited (and, limiting). One of the major issues plaguing the literature is definitional, that is, that it is often unclear what is meant by ‘security’. As noted by numerous scholars, what is needed is empirical documentation about what ‘security’ is to a variety of actors. In this article, I explore what ‘security’ looks and feels like to particular actors working in an emergency shelter. In so doing, I explicate the discursive production of the polysemy of ‘security’ by exploring the ways that ‘security’ is thought about, made sense of and put into practice.

From intuition to database: Translating justice
Neil Hutton
The article tells the story of the development of a Sentencing Information System for the High Court in Scotland from its genesis as an exploratory research project to its final implementation in the court. The article uses Actor Network Theory to understand how the database was assembled through the social practices of academic researchers, government officials, judges and court officers. It offers a corrective to theories which exaggerate the de-humanizing effect of information technology and argues that an Actor Network Theory approach is not incompatible with an understanding of how institutionally located power operates through social practices.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology 29(1)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2013; Volume 29, Issue 1

Special Issue: Deterrence and Capital Punishment

What Do Panel Studies Tell Us About a Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment? A Critique of the Literature
Aaron Chalfin, Amelia M. Haviland & Steven Raphael
Objectives We provide a critical review of empirical research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment that makes use of state and, in some instances, county-level, panel data. Methods We present the underlying behavioral model that presumably informs the specification of panel data regressions, outline the typical model specification employed, discuss current norms regarding “best-practice” in the analysis of panel data, and engage in a critical review. Results The connection between the theoretical reasoning underlying general deterrence and the regression models typically specified in this literature is tenuous. Many of the papers purporting to find strong effects of the death penalty on state-level murder rates suffer from basic methodological problems: weak instruments, questionable exclusion restrictions, failure to control for obvious factors, and incorrect calculation of standard errors which in turn has led to faulty statistical inference. The lack of variation in the key underlying explanatory variables and the heavy influence exerted by a few observations in state panel data regressions is a fundamental problem for all panel data studies of this question, leading to overwhelming model uncertainty. Conclusions We find the recent panel literature on whether there is a deterrent effect of the death penalty to be inconclusive as a whole, and in many cases uninformative. Moreover, we do not see additional methodological tools that are likely to overcome the multiple challenges that face researchers in this domain, including the weak informativeness of the data, a lack of theory on the mechanisms involved, and the likely presence of unobserved confounders.

Pitfalls in the Use of Time Series Methods to Study Deterrence and Capital Punishment
Kerwin Kofi Charles & Steven N. Durlauf
Objectives Evaluate the use of various time series methods to measure the deterrence effect of capital punishment. Methods The analysis of the time series approach to deterrence is conducted at two levels. First, the mathematical foundations of time series methods are described and the link between the time series properties of aggregate homicide and execution series and individual decision making is developed. Second, individual studies are examined for logical consistency. Results The analysis concludes that time series methods used to study the deterrence effects of capital punishment suffer from fundamental limitations and fail to provide credible evidence. The common limitation of these studies is their lack of attention to identification problems. Suggestions are made as to directions for future work that may be able to mitigate the weaknesses of the current literature. Conclusions Time series studies of capital punishment suffer from sufficiently serious identification problems that existing empirical findings are compatible with either the presence or the absence of a deterrent effect.

Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence
Robert Apel
Objectives A survey of empirical research concerning the determinants of an individual’s perceptions of the risk of formal sanctions as a consequence of criminal behavior. The specific questions considered are: (1) How accurate is people’s knowledge about criminal sanctions? (2) How do people acquire and modify their subjective probabilities of punishment risk? (3) How do individuals act on their risk perceptions in specific criminal contexts? Methods Three broad classes of extant studies are reviewed. The first is the relationship between objective sanctions, sanction enforcement, and risk perceptions—research that includes calibration studies and correlational studies. The second is the relationship between punishment experiences (personal and vicarious) and change in risk perceptions, in particular, research that relies on formal models of Bayesian learning. The third is the responsiveness of would-be offenders to immediate environmental cues—a varied empirical tradition that encompasses vignette research, offender interviews, process tracing, and laboratory studies. Results First, research concerning the accuracy of risk perceptions suggests that the average citizen does a reasonable job of knowing what criminal penalties are statutorily allowed, but does a quite poor job of estimating the probability and magnitude of the penalties. On the other hand, studies which inquire about more common offenses (alcohol and marijuana use) from more crime-prone populations (young people, offenders) reveal that perceptions are consistently better calibrated to actual punishments. Second, research on perceptual updating indicates that personal experiences and, to a lesser degree, vicarious experiences with crime and punishment are salient determinants of changes in risk perceptions. Specifically, individuals who commit crime and successfully avoid arrest tend to lower their subjective probability of apprehension. Third, research on the situational context of crime decision making reveals that risk perceptions are highly malleable to proximal influences which include, but are not limited to, objective sanction risk. Situational risk perceptions appear to be particularly strongly influenced by substance use, peer presence, and arousal level. Conclusions The perceptual deterrence tradition is theoretically rich, and has been renewed in the last decade by creative empirical tests from a variety of social scientific disciplines. Many knowledge gaps and limitations remain, and ensuing research should assign high priority to such considerations as sampling strategies and the measurement of risk perceptions.

Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Understanding Disparate Results
Steven N. Durlauf, Chao Fu & Salvador Navarro
Objectives Investigate how different model assumptions have driven the conflicting findings in the literature on the deterrence effect of capital punishment. Methods The deterrence effect of capital punishment is estimated across different models that reflect the following sources of model uncertainty: (1) the uncertainty about the probability model generating the aggregate murder rate equation, (2) the uncertainty about the determinants of an individual’s choice of committing a murder or not, (3) the uncertainty about state level heterogeneity, and (4) the uncertainty about the exchangeability between observations with zero murder case and those with positive murder cases. Results First, the estimated deterrence effects exhibit great dispersion across models. Second, a particular subset of models—linear models with constant coefficients—always predict a positive deterrence effect. All other models predict negative deterrence effects. Third, the magnitudes of the point estimates of deterrence effects differ mainly because of the choice of linear versus logistic specifications. Conclusions The question about the deterrence effect of capital punishment cannot be answered independently from substantive assumptions on what determines individual behavior. The need for judgment cannot be escaped in empirical work.

Deterrence and the Death Penalty: Partial Identification Analysis Using Repeated Cross Sections
Charles F. Manski & John V. Pepper
Objectives Researchers have used repeated cross sectional observations of homicide rates and sanctions to examine the deterrent effect of the adoption and implementation of death penalty statutes. The empirical literature, however, has failed to achieve consensus. A fundamental problem is that the outcomes of counterfactual policies are not observable. Hence, the data alone cannot identify the deterrent effect of capital punishment. This paper asks how research should proceed. We seek to make transparent how assumptions shape inference. Methods We study the identifying power of relatively weak assumptions restricting variation in treatment response across places and time. We perform empirical analysis using state-level data in the United States in 1975 and 1977. Results The results are findings of partial identification that bound the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Under the weakest restrictions, there is substantial ambiguity: we cannot rule out the possibility that having a death penalty statute substantially increases or decreases homicide. This ambiguity is reduced when we impose stronger assumptions, but inferences are sensitive to the maintained restrictions. Conclusions Imposing certain assumptions implies that adoption of a death penalty statute increases homicide, but other assumptions imply that the death penalty deters it. Thus, society at large can draw strong conclusions only if there is a consensus favoring particular assumptions. Without such a consensus, data on sanctions and murder rates cannot settle the debate about deterrence. However, data combined with weak assumptions can bound and focus the debate.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

British Journal of Criminology 53(2)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2013: Volume 53, Issue 2

Crime and War in Afghanistan: Part I: The Hobbesian Solution
John Braithwaite and Ali Wardak
This article views Afghanistan less as a war, and more as a contest of criminalized justice systems. The Taliban came to power because they were able to restore order to spaces terrorized by armed gangs and Mujahideen factions. After the Taliban’s ‘defeat’ in 2001, their resurgence was invited by the failure of state justice and security institutions. The Taliban returned with a parallel court system that most Afghans viewed as more effective and fair than the state system. Polls suggest judges were perceived as among the most corrupt elements of a corrupt state. Police were widely perceived as thieves of ordinary people’s property, not protectors of it. While the US diagnosis of anomie in Afghanistan up to 2009 was aptly Hobbesian, its remedy of supporting President Hamid Karzai as a Leviathan was hardly apt. The West failed to ask in 2001 ‘What is working around here to provide people security?’. One answer to that question was jirga/shura. A more Jeffersonian rural republicanism that learnt from local traditions of dispute resolution defines a path not taken.

Crime and War in Afghanistan: Part II: A Jeffersonian Alternative?
Ali Wardak and John Braithwaite
In Part I of this article, US President, Barack Obama, is reported as saying to his inner circle that their objective in Afghanistan is not to build a Jeffersonian democracy. Part II is about the idea that a more Jeffersonian architecture of rural republicanism in tune with Afghan traditions is a remedy to limits of the Hobbesian analysis of cases like Afghanistan in Part I. Anomic spaces where policing and justice do not work are vacuums that can attract tyrannical forms of law and order, such as the rule of the Taliban. Peace with justice cannot prevail in the aftermath of such an occupation without a reliance on both local community justice and state justice that are mutually constitutive. Supporting checks on abuse of power through balancing local and national institutions that deliver justice is a more sustainable peace-building project than regime change and top-down re-engineering of successor regimes.

Community-Driven Youth Justice and the Organizational Consequences of Coercive Governance
Randolph R. Myers and Tim Goddard
This article offers a descriptive analysis of the youth crime prevention and intervention strategies of three community-based organizations in the western United States. The article first identifies shared philosophies and practices of organizations that orient to crime as a product of social injustice. It then casts light on the broader issues of cultural resonance and specific governmental hindrances faced by organizations, including how the tracking of performance measures and market-based funding schemes impact the actual operation of community approaches. Through this analysis, the article sketches some of the key elements needed for constructing a theoretical framework to explain how neo-liberal forces may lead to the proliferation or demise of organizations working to create a progressive alternative to United States-style youth justice.

Sentencing Riot-Related Offending: Where Do the Public Stand?
Julian V. Roberts and Mike Hough
This article examines public attitudes to the sentencing offences associated with the rioting which took place in England in August 2011. Findings are based on a nationally representative survey of adults. The study uses a randomized split-sample experimental design to compare sentencing preferences for actual offences committed during the riots with preferences for similar offences committed under normal circumstances. The riot sub-sample generally ‘sentenced’ more severely than the non-riot sub-sample, but much less severely than the courts. The majority also thought that a non-custodial sentence with a reparative element was an acceptable alternative to custody. These trends suggest an unusual divergence of perspectives between the community and the courts: although the public are generally critical of the courts for leniency, with respect to non-violent offending during the riots, the latter appear more punitive.

Pressures to Plead Guilty: Factors Affecting Plea Decisions in Hong Kong’s Magistrates’ Courts
Kevin Kwok-yin Cheng
Guilty pleas are the primary mode of case dispositions in the common law world, and its propensity is seen to undermine due process principles. Hong Kong for many remains a steadfast protector of due process despite its handover back to China. The written law in Hong Kong, while emphasizing the importance of ensuring defendants make their plea decisions free from any improper pressure, neglects the intrinsic pressures brought upon by having to go through the criminal justice process. Results from courtroom observations in two Hong Kong magistrates’ courts indicate that defendants who made an admission, represented themselves and were denied bail were more likely to plead guilty. Overall, defendants plead guilty to terminate as quickly as possible the ‘punishment’ of being caught up in the criminal justice system.

Business and The Risk of Crime in China
Roderic Broadhurst, Brigitte Bouhours, and Thierry Bouhours
The results of a large victimization survey conducted in 2006 of 5,117 businesses in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Xi’an are reported. Over one-quarter (26.2 per cent) of businesses reported at least one incident of crime over the past year, but higher risks of commercial crimes (i.e. fraud, bribery, extortion and intellectual property offences) than common crime (i.e. robbery, assault and theft) were found. Across the cities, the rate of commercial crime (22.6 per cent) was 3.4 times that of common crime (6.7 per cent) and businesses in Shenzhen were at higher risk of commercial crime (27.9 per cent) than those in Xi’an (25.3 per cent) and Hong Kong and Shanghai (19.5 per cent). Just over 6 per cent of respondents mentioned incidents of bribery. Larger businesses were most at risk especially of fraud and differences between the cities were small. The survey shows that the level of crime reported by businesses located in China was lower than other emerging economies as well as Western and Eastern Europe. Explanations about the level of crime against business in China are discussed at the macro level using Durkheimian ideas about modernization and crime and at the meso/micro levels by drawing from opportunity and routine activity theories.

Involvement in Crime, Individual Resources and Structural Constraints: Processes of Cumulative (Dis)Advantage in a Stockholm Birth Cohort
Anders Nilsson, Olof Bäckman, and Felipe Estrada
In this article, we study how a central welfare outcome, labour market attachment, develops for different groups defined on the basis of their criminal involvement over the life course. Can we see the pattern of increasing inter-group disparities in labour market attachment that would be predicted by cumulative disadvantage theories? If so, is this a result of the criminal history of individuals or should criminal involvement be seen as one element in a negative life trajectory in a more general sense? And what role do circumstances at the structural level play in such a process? The Swedish economic recession of the 1990s and an examination of how a Stockholm cohort entered, lived through and then exited the unemployment crisis provide an opportunity to study how macro events affect different groups of individuals in a specific socio-historical situation. Our results show that both individual resources and historical events at the structural level are important when it comes to describing individual biographies and events in the life course.

Daily Trends and Origin of Computer-Focused Crimes Against a Large University Computer Network: An Application of the Routine-Activities and Lifestyle Perspective
David Maimon, Amy Kamerdze, Michel Cukier, and Bertrand Sobesto
Cybercrime has been the focus of public attention during the last decade. However, within the criminological field, no prior research initiatives have been launched in an effort to better understand this phenomenon using computer network data. Addressing this challenge, we employ the classical routine-activities and lifestyle perspective to raise hypotheses regarding the trends and origin of computer-focused crime incidents (i.e. computer exploits, port scans, and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks) against a large university computer network. We first propose that computer-focused crimes against a university network are determined by the university users’ daily activity patterns. In addition, we hypothesize that the social composition of the network users determines the origin of computer attacks against the university network. We use data recorded between the years 2007 and 2009 by an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to test these claims. Consistently with our theoretical expectations, two important findings emerge. First, computer attacks are more likely to occur during university official business hours. Second, an increase in the number of foreign network users substantially increases the number of computer-focused crimes originating from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses linked with these users’ countries of origin. Future directions for subsequent studies are discussed.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 50(1)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, February 2013: Volume 50, Issue 1

The Effects of Security Threats on Antecedents of Police Legitimacy: Findings from a Quasi-Experiment in Israel
Tal Jonathan-Zamir and David Weisburd
Objectives: Examine the relative importance of “police performance” and “procedural justice” as antecedents of police legitimacy in situations of acute security threats, in comparison to situations of “no threat.” Method: A unique security situation in Israel allowed for a natural experiment. Using survey data and a multivariate regression approach, the authors compare the importance of “procedural justice” and “police performance” in “Sderot,” an Israeli town facing immediate security threats, with other Israeli communities that did not suffer from specific security threats at the time. Results: As expected, assessments of police performance did increase in importance for the public under threat. At the same time and contrary to the authors' hypothesis, evaluations of procedural justice did not decline in importance, and, what is more, procedural justice remained the primary antecedent of police legitimacy in both conditions. Conclusions: There does not seem to be a zero-sum game between “police performance” and “procedural justice” in predicting police legitimacy. Moreover, procedural justice is consistently the primary antecedent of police legitimacy, even when the public is faced with the stressful situation of immediate security threats. The authors encourage future research to replicate their analysis in different settings and particularly under different conditions of security threats.

Journey to Grow: Linking Process to Outcome in Target Site Selection for Cannabis Cultivation
Martin Bouchard, Eric Beauregard, and Margaret Kalacska
Objectives: To test whether there is a relationship between characteristics of the journey to an outdoor cannabis cultivation site and the total number of plants grown. Methods: Spatial data on the location of a sample of 132 cultivation sites derived from aerial detection policing efforts is used. TwoStep cluster analysis is employed to derive profiles of cultivation sites based on three measures of distance (i.e., distance to road, to water, and elevation) and regression analysis is used to examine their implications for the number of plants grown. Results: Four types of cultivation sites are found: prime, rugged, dry, and remote. Prime sites are fairly close to roads and water sources and are at relatively low elevation. They grow the greatest number of plants (mean = 171). Low elevation is the single most important factor correlate of operation size. Further, remote sites (both further from road and at higher elevation) tend to be larger. Conclusions: A majority of growers are capable of identifying “prime” locations in which the tradeoff between rewards and security appears to be maximized. This study is limited by the fact that there was no information available on the offenders themselves. Future research should employ interviews to clarify decision-making processes.

The Monetary Costs of Crime to Middle Adulthood: Findings from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development
Alex R. Piquero, Wesley G. Jennings, and David Farrington
Objectives: Monetary cost estimates of criminal careers have been limited to specific samples, specific ages, and focused on the United States. This article is the first to examine the costs of a life course of crime in the United Kingdom. Method: This study uses longitudinal data from 411 South London males from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) to derive costs-of-crime estimates from childhood to middle adulthood (ages 10 to 50). Additional features include a calculation of cost estimates across distinct offending trajectories and centering on costs per offender. Results: Offending over the life course imposes a considerable amount of economic and social costs and these costs are differentially distributed across offending trajectories. The cost of high-rate chronic offending is nearly two and a half to ten times greater than the cost of high adolescence peaked offending, very low-rate chronic offending, and low adolescence peaked offending, respectively. It is estimated that a male high-rate chronic offender on average would impose an annual cost of £18 ($29) per U.K. citizen or a lifetime cost of £742 ($1,185) per U.K. citizen. Conclusions: As the average and total costs of crime were significantly different across offending trajectories, with high-rate chronics imposing the most financial burden, adopting prevention and intervention strategies aimed at reducing the number of high-rate chronics and/or speeding up their eventual desistance will offer many savings to the public and perhaps turn those negative costs into positive contributions.

Illegal Behavior, Neighborhood Context, and Police Reporting by Victims of Violence
Mark T. Berg, Lee Ann Slocum, and Rolf Loeber
Objectives. To assess (1) if robberies and assaults are less likely to be reported when the victim is engaged in crime and if this relationship can be explained by characteristics of the incident, victim, or the victim’s neighborhood and (2) if neighborhood context moderates the effects of offending on reporting. Methods. The data include 832 victimizations reported in the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS). All data are self-reported except neighborhood disadvantage and crime rates, which were measured using census data and police records, respectively. Data are analyzed using random intercept models. Findings. Victimizations are less likely to be reported when the victim is more involved in crime and this relationship is not fully explained by characteristics of the victim, incident, or the victim’s neighborhood. The effect of offending on reporting is stronger for incidents in which the victim resided in a high-crime or disadvantaged neighborhood. Conclusions. Victims' offending is an important correlate of reporting; however, the assumption that criminals are unwilling or unable to use formal social control seems to apply mainly to those who reside in disadvantaged or high-crime neighborhoods. Future research should explore why offenders' willingness to report varies by neighborhood context.

Marriage and Offending among a Cohort of Disadvantaged African Americans
Elaine Eggleston Doherty and Margaret E. Ensminger
Objectives: Drawing on Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control, this research tests the generalizability of the marriage effect on desistance from crime. Specifically, do urban African American men and women living in the United States benefit from marriage similarly to Whites? Methods: The authors use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to analyze the relationship between marriage and official arrest counts among African American male and female first graders from Woodlawn, an inner-city community in Chicago, first assessed in 1966 and followed up at three time points (ages 16, 32, and 42). Results: The authors find strong evidence of a marriage effect for the males across crime type, with a reduction in offending between 21 percent and 36 percent when in a state of marriage. The findings for females were less consistent across crime type, a 10 percent reduction in the odds of a property arrest and a 9 percent increase in the odds of a drug arrest when in a state of marriage. Conclusions: Their findings provide evidence in favor of the generality of Sampson and Laub’s theory, at least for males. However, the authors were not able to evaluate the mechanisms of desistance and identify this as an area of future research.

Alcohol Outlets and Community Levels of Interpersonal Violence: Spatial Density, Outlet Type, and Seriousness of Assault
This study examined the association between alcohol outlets and violence. Employing Cincinnati block groups as units of analysis, the authors estimated spatially lagged regression models to determine if the variation in spatial density of alcohol outlets is related to the spatial density of simple and aggravated assaults. The authors estimated separate models for off-premise outlets, bars, and restaurants. The results revealed a positive and significant association between outlet density and assault density. This association held for simple and aggravated assaults and for total outlet density and the density of each type of outlet. Further tests showed the outlet-violence association to be stronger for off-premise outlets relative to bars and restaurants and for simple relative to aggravated assaults. Estimation of attributable fractions (AFs) showed that off-premise outlets may account for approximately one-quarter and one-third of simple and aggravated assaults, respectively.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Social Problems 60(1)

Social Problems, February 2013: Volume 60, Issue 1

Presidential Address: The Art of Activism
Wendy Simonds

Controlling Sex in the Name of “Public Health”: Social Control and Michigan HIV Law
Trevor Hoppe
In the state of Michigan, people infected with HIV are required by law to disclose their HIV-positive status to their sexual partners. Michigan public health laws enacted in the 1980s provide guidance for health officials tasked with investigating and managing what are termed “health threat to others” cases. Based on interviews with local health officials responsible for managing “health-threat” cases, I argue that the surveillance strategies employed by officials to identify these cases can be understood as an important site of social control. The first, “formal” technique for controlling HIV-positive residents involves health officials in a minority of participating jurisdictions actively cross-referencing epidemiological surveillance technologies such as HIV testing and contact tracing in order to identify potential health-threat cases. The second, “informal” technique is characterized by “third party” phone reports received by health officials from local residents who accuse others in their community, who they suspect are HIV positive, of not disclosing. Through an original analysis of the strategies employed by health officials to control HIV-positive residents, this article brings the theoretical insights of the sociological literature on social control to bear on the field of public health.

Inside the Pyramid of Disputes: Naming Problems and Filing Grievances in California Prisons
Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness
Previous literature on disputing and legal mobilization suggests that stigmatized, self-blaming, and/or vulnerable populations often face insurmountable barriers to naming a situation as injurious and claiming redress. Contrary to what one would expect from this literature, prisoners in the United States—among the most stigmatized and vulnerable of populations—file tens of thousands of grievances annually. To explore this apparent paradox, we draw on an unprecedented data set comprised of interviews with a random sample of 120 men in three California prisons. Our data reveal that these prisoners are willing and able to name problems, and most of them have filed at least one grievance. While some expressed self-blame and most said there was retaliation for filing a grievance, the majority overcame these impediments to filing. We argue that the context of prison—a total institution in which law is a hypervisible force—enhances this form of legal mobilization by prisoners, trumping the social and psychological factors that the context otherwise produces and that in other populations tamp down claims making. The pattern of these prisoners' claims, however, reveals that they are by no means immune to the countervailing pressures. While staff disrespect was named frequently as a problem in prison, grievances against staff were relatively rare. In concluding, we note that the U.S. Supreme Court recently found California prisons violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a finding that reveals the inadequacy of the inmate appeals system despite prisoners' repeated efforts to hold the state accountable.

Class in Name Only: Subjective Class Identity, Objective Class Position, and Vote Choice in American Presidential Elections
Benjamin Sosnaud, David Brady and Steven M. Frenk
Partly because of the widespread tendency for Americans to think of themselves as “middle class,” subjective class identity often does not correspond to objective class position. This study evaluates the extent to which American voters' subjective class identities differ from their objective class positions. We then evaluate the implications of such differences for voting behavior using American National Election Studies data from eight recent presidential elections. Coding respondents according to whether subjective class identity is higher or lower than objective class position, we construct a novel schema of inflated, deflated, and concordant class perceptions. We find that there are substantial differences between Americans' subjective and objective social class: over two-thirds of the upper-middle class have a deflated perception of their class position, only half of the middle class have concordant perceptions, and more than a third of the working class have inflated perceptions. We also find that this divergence varies depending on sociodemographic factors, and especially race and education. The analyses initially show a pattern that those with inflated class perceptions are more likely to vote Republican. However, this relationship is not significant once we control for race and income.

Slicing the Pie: State Policy, Class Organization, Class Integration, and Labor's Share of Israeli National Income
Tali Kristal
In this article, I underline a less commonly acknowledged outcome of the neoliberal revolution. Following the shift from social protection to economic liberalism, in many rich countries workers' share of national income has declined and capitalists' share has increased. To better understand this link between neoliberalism and workers' share of national income, I develop a new political economy approach that stresses the importance of state policy, class organization, and organizational unity for determining how national income is distributed between workers and capitalists. I apply this conceptualization to the dynamics of labor's share in Israel, once a socialist economy with little inequality, which today has become one of the world's most unequal. A detailed account of three stages in the Israeli political economy characterized by distinct inequality outcomes and time-series equations estimating the changes in labor's share from 1955 to 2005 reveal that market-oriented state policies, workers' disorganization, and the growing fragmentation within organized labor led to a decline in labor's share during the current stage of liberal capitalism.

The Determinants of the Number of White Supremacist Groups: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis
Rachel M. Durso and David Jacobs
What social and political conditions help explain the number of white supremacist groups? This study uses pooled time-series cross-sectional methods to assess the explanatory power of three racial threat accounts. First, since lynchings indicated intense animosity against blacks that may persist, anti-black hate groups should be especially numerous where lynching rates were substantial in the distant past. Second, where or when white political and cultural dominance is threatened by large or growing black populations, additional white supremacist groups should be present. And third, these anti-black movements often recruit by emphasizing the links between race and violent street crime. Since the public mistakenly believes that most violent crimes are committed by blacks who victimize whites, larger numbers of hate groups should be present where murder rates are most substantial. With other theoretically plausible determinants such as unemployment and college completion rates held constant, the results confirm these three threat theory predictions.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 646

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 2013: Volume 646 

Transitioning to Adulthood in Asia: School, Work, and Family Life
Wei-Jun Jean Yeung and Cheryll Alipio

Transitions to Adulthood: What We Can Learn from the West
Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr.

The Changing Transitions to Adulthood across Southeast Asia: A Census Approach to Cross-National Comparisons
Quamrun Nahar, Peter Xenos, and Jeofrey Abalos

The Transition Tempo and Life Course Orientation of Young Adults in Taiwan
Lang-Wen Wendy Huang

The Transition to Adulthood among Japanese Youths: Understanding Courtship in Japan
Hiroshi Ishida

The Changing Role of Women’s Earnings in Marriage Formation in Japan
Setsuya Fukuda

The Transition to Adulthood among Korean Youths: Transition Markers in Productive and Reproductive Spheres
Hyunjoon Park

Coming of Age in Times of Change: The Transition to Adulthood in China
Wei-Jun Jean Yeung and Shu Hu

Lost in Transformation? The Employment Trajectories of China’s Cultural Revolution Cohort
Qianhan Lin

Negotiating Marriage and Schooling: Nepalese Women’s Transition to Adulthood
Yingchun Ji

Young Men in the Philippines: Mapping the Costs and Debts of Work, Marriage, and Family Life
Cheryll Alipio

Youth, Gender, and the Workplace: Shifting Opportunities and Aspirations in an Indonesian Industrial Town
Suzanne Naafs

American Sociological Review 78(1)

American Sociological Review, February 2013: Volume 78, Issue 1

2012 Presidential Address: Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias
Erik Olin Wright
This address explores a broad framework for thinking sociologically about emancipatory alternatives to dominant institutions and social structures, especially capitalism. The framework is grounded in two foundational propositions: (1) Many forms of human suffering and many deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and social structures. (2) Transforming existing institutions and social structures in the right way has the potential to substantially reduce human suffering and expand the possibilities for human flourishing. An emancipatory social science responding to these propositions faces four broad tasks: specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions; using these moral principles as the standards for diagnosis and critique of existing institutions; developing an account of viable alternatives in response to the critique; and proposing a theory of transformation for realizing those alternatives. The idea of “real utopias” is one way of thinking about alternatives and transformation.

Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage
Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines, and Katrina Leupp
Changes in the nature of marriage have spurred a debate about the consequences of shifts to more egalitarian relationships, and media interest in the debate has crystallized around claims that men who participate in housework get more sex. However, little systematic or representative research supports the claim that women, in essence, exchange sex for men’s participation in housework. Although research and theory support the expectation that egalitarian marriages are higher quality, other studies underscore the ongoing importance of traditional gender behavior and gender display in marriage. Using data from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, this study investigates the links between men’s participation in core (traditionally female) and non-core (traditionally male) household tasks and sexual frequency. Results show that both husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency, suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners.

Gender and Time for Sleep among U.S. Adults
Sarah A. Burgard and Jennifer A. Ailshire
Do women really sleep more than men? Biomedical and social scientific studies show longer sleep durations for women, a surprising finding given sociological research showing women have more unpaid work and less high-quality leisure time compared to men. We assess explanations for gender differences in time for sleep, including compositional differences in levels of engagement in paid and unpaid labor, gendered responses to work and family responsibilities, and differences in napping, bedtimes, and interrupted sleep for caregiving. We examine the overall gender gap in time for sleep as well as gaps within family life-course stages based on age, partnership, and parenthood statuses. We analyze minutes of sleep from a diary day collected from nationally representative samples of working-age adults in the American Time Use Surveys of 2003 to 2007. Overall and at most life course stages, women slept more than men. Much of the gap is explained by work and family responsibilities and gendered time tradeoffs; as such, gender differences vary across life course stages. The gender gap in sleep time favoring women is relatively small for most comparisons and should be considered in light of the gender gap in leisure time favoring men at all life course stages.

More Is More or More Is Less? Parental Financial Investments during College
Laura T. Hamilton
Evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance, but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement. Two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions. Some studies operate from a more-is-more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress. In contrast, a more-is-less perspective, rooted in a different model of rational behavior, suggests that parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement. I adjudicate between these frameworks, using data from nationally representative postsecondary datasets to determine what effect financial parental investments have on student GPA and degree completion. The findings suggest seemingly contradictory processes. Parental aid decreases student GPA, but it increases the odds of graduating—net of explanatory variables and accounting for alternative funding. Rather than strategically using resources in accordance with parental goals, or maximizing on their ability to avoid academic work, students are satisficing: they meet the criteria for adequacy on multiple fronts, rather than optimizing their chances for a particular outcome. As a result, students with parental funding often perform well enough to stay in school but dial down their academic efforts. I conclude by highlighting the importance of life stage and institutional context for parental investment.

A Reconsideration of the Fatherhood Premium: Marriage, Coresidence, Biology, and Fathers’ Wages
Alexandra Killewald
Past research that asserts a fatherhood wage premium often ignores the heterogeneity of fathering contexts. I expect fatherhood to produce wage gains for men if it prompts them to alter their behavior in ways that increase labor-market productivity. Identity theory predicts a larger productivity-based fatherhood premium when ties of biology, coresidence with the child, and marriage to the child’s mother reinforce one another, making fatherhood, and the role of financial provider in particular, salient, high in commitment, and clear. Employer discrimination against fathers in less normative family structures may also contribute to variation in the fatherhood premium. Using fixed-effects models and data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), I find that married, residential, biological fatherhood is associated with wage gains of about 4 percent, but unmarried residential fathers, nonresidential fathers, and stepfathers do not receive a fatherhood premium. Married residential fathers also receive no statistically significant wage premium when their wives work full-time. About 15 percent of the wage premium for married residential fathers can be explained by changes in human capital and job traits.

Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third-Party Policing for Inner-City Women
Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez
Recent decades have witnessed a double movement within the field of crime control characterized by the prison boom and intensive policing, on the one hand, and widespread implementation of new approaches that assign policing responsibilities to non-police actors, on the other. The latter development has been accomplished by expansion of third-party policing policies; nuisance property ordinances, which sanction landlords for their tenants’ behavior, are among the most popular. This study, an analysis of every nuisance citation distributed in Milwaukee over a two-year period, is among the first to evaluate empirically the impact of coercive third-party policing on the urban poor. Properties in black neighborhoods disproportionately received citations, and those located in more integrated black neighborhoods had the highest likelihood of being deemed nuisances. Nearly a third of all citations were generated by domestic violence; most property owners abated this “nuisance” by evicting battered women. Landlords also took steps to discourage tenants from calling 911; overrepresented among callers, women were disproportionately affected by these measures. By looking beyond traditional policing, this study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of new crime control strategies for women from inner-city neighborhoods.

Racial Variation in the Effect of Incarceration on Neighborhood Attainment
Michael Massoglia, Glenn Firebaugh, and Cody Warner
Each year, more than 700,000 convicted offenders are released from prison and reenter neighborhoods across the country. Prior studies have found that minority ex-inmates tend to reside in more disadvantaged neighborhoods than do white ex-inmates. However, because these studies do not control for pre-prison neighborhood conditions, we do not know how much (if any) of this racial variation is due to arrest and incarceration, or if these observed findings simply reflect existing racial residential inequality. Using a nationally representative dataset that tracks individuals over time, we find that only whites live in significantly more disadvantaged neighborhoods after prison than prior to prison. Blacks and Hispanics do not, nor do all groups (whites, blacks, and Hispanics) as a whole live in worse neighborhoods after prison. We attribute this racial variation in the effect of incarceration to the high degree of racial neighborhood inequality in the United States: because white offenders generally come from much better neighborhoods, they have much more to lose from a prison spell. In addition to advancing our understanding of the social consequences of the expansion of the prison population, these findings demonstrate the importance of controlling for pre-prison characteristics when investigating the effects of incarceration on residential outcomes.