Journal of Quantitative Criminology 30(3)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, September 2014: Volume 30, Issue 3

A Sensitivity Analysis of Egocentric Measures of Peer Delinquency to Latent Homophily: A Research Note
Jacob T. N. Young

Objectives: Egocentric measures of peer delinquency, obtained through a census of a social network, have become the preferred operationalization for examining the relationships between social influence and delinquency. Studies regressing ego’s delinquency on the delinquency of nominated friend/s (i.e. alter/s) conclude that a statistically significant coefficient provides evidence of social influence. However, the inferences drawn from these studies may be biased by the introduction of artificial statistical dependence as a consequence of using social network data in a regression framework. Recent work (Shalizi and Thomas Sociol Methods Res 40:211–239, 2011) shows that latent homophily, or unmeasured confounding of observables, may lead to nonzero estimates of social influence, even if there is no causal significance. To examine this possibility, sensitivity analyses have been created (e.g. VanderWeele and Arah Epidemiology 22:42–52, 2011; VanderWeele Sociol Methods Res 40:240–255, 2011) to determine the robustness of an estimated coefficient to latent homophily. Methods: In this research note, I examine the robustness of estimates for social influence from two articles (Haynie Am J Sociol 106:1013–1057, 2001; Meldrum et al. J Res Crime Delinq 46:353–376, 2009) using egocentric measures of peer delinquency.Results: Findings indicate that for large, precise point estimates, highly improbable conditions are needed to explain away the effects of social influence. However, less precise point estimates (i.e. large standard errors) are more sensitive to latent homophily.Conclusions: The analyses indicate that studies using egocentric measures should conduct sensitivity tests, particularly when the estimated effect is weak and/or has a relatively large standard error. Scripts written in the free programming language R (R Core Team R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, 2012) are provided for researchers to conduct such analyses.

Risky Facilities: Crime Radiators or Crime Absorbers? A Comparison of Internal and External Levels of Theft
Kate Bowers

Objectives: To undertake the first exploration of the nature of the relationship between internal crime (those that happen within facilities) and external crime (those occurring outside but in the nearby locale of facilities). The following questions are addressed. Do those localities that suffer high volumes of crime internally within their facilities also suffer high levels of crime in their immediate external environment? How is this influenced by the distribution of internal theft across facilities? What are the likely mechanisms for any relationship found?Methods: Spatial regression is used to explore these relationships using data for 30,144 incidents of theft from a Metropolitan area of the UK arranged into small 50 × 50 m grid squares. Variables used in the analysis include counts of external and internal theft, counts of victimized and ‘risky’ facilities, indicators of land-use and a proxy for the on-street population.Results: There is found to be a strong positive relationship between internal and external theft that appears to be strengthened by the existence of facilities suffering particularly high crime volumes. Results suggest that internal theft problems precede external ones and that the physical concentration of chronically risky facilities is a particularly strong predictor of external theft problems.Conclusions: An argument is made that risky facilities act as crime ‘radiators’, causing crime in the immediate environment as well as internally. This has implications for crime prevention policy in terms of facility placement and management.

Partying, Cruising, and Hanging in the Streets: Gangs, Routine Activities, and Delinquency and Violence in Chicago, 1959–1962
Lorine A. Hughes & James F. Short

Objectives: Examine relationships between routine activities, character contests in the form of “signifying,” and general delinquency and fighting in a street gang context.Methods: Samejima’s (Estimation of latent ability using a response pattern of graded scores. Psychometrika monograph supplement 17. Psychometric Society, Richmond, VA, Retrieved 10 Aug 2011, from http://www.psychometrika.org/journal/online/MN17.pdf, 1969) graded response models and multilevel ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using data from Short and Strodtbeck (Group process and gang delinquency. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965) study of street gangs in Chicago, 1959–1962. The primary sample consists of 490 boys representing 10 black gangs, 4 white gangs, 9 black lower-class groups, 4 white lower-class groups, 2 black middle-class groups, and 2 white middle-class groups.Results: Unstructured and unsupervised socializing with peers significantly increased the likelihood of delinquency among the boys and explained a significant portion of the group-level gang effect. In addition, the more time the boys spent hanging in the streets and attending parties, the more likely they were to participate in signifying, which, in turn, increased their risk of fighting.Conclusions: Findings provide evidence that gangs contribute to delinquency partly through their effect on the routine activities of members. Findings also suggest that signifying is an important mechanism by which unstructured and unsupervised socializing with peers leads to violence.

Immigration and the Changing Nature of Homicide in US Cities, 1980–2010
Graham C. Ousey & Charis E. Kubrin

Objectives: Previous research has neglected to consider whether trends in immigration are related to changes in the nature of homicide. This is important because there is considerable variability in the temporal trends of homicide subtypes disaggregated by circumstance. In the current study, we address this issue by investigating whether within-city changes in immigration are related to temporal variations in rates of overall and circumstance-specific homicide for a sample of large US cities during the period between 1980 and 2010.Methods: Fixed-effects negative binomial and two-stage least squares (2SLS) instrumental variable regression models are used to analyze data from 156 large US cities observed during the 1980–2010 period.Results: Findings from the analyses suggest that temporal change in overall homicide and drug homicide rates are significantly related to changes in immigration. Specifically, increases in immigration are associated with declining rates for each of the preceding outcome measures. Moreover, for several of the homicide types, findings suggest that the effects of changes in immigration vary across places, with the largest negative associations appearing in cities that had relatively high initial (i.e., 1970) immigration levels.Conclusions: There is support for the thesis that changes in immigration in recent decades are related to changes in rates of lethal violence. However, it appears that the relationship is contingent and varied, not general.

Counterterrorism and Radical Eco-Groups: A Context for Exploring the Series Hazard Model
Jennifer Varriale Carson

Objective: This study examines whether radical eco-groups have been deterred by legal sanctions. From a rational choice framework, I argue that members of these groups weigh costs and benefits. I measure an increase in costs, or an objective deterrence effect, through four federal sentencing acts targeted at reducing the criminal behavior of these groups [the tree-spiking clause of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADA), the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA)] and hypothesize that this legislation decreased the hazard of subsequent attacks.Methods: This research is a quasi-experimental design utilizing the 1,068 illegal incidents perpetrated in the name of the environment, animal, or both as extracted from the Eco-Incidents Database. Using series hazard modeling, I examine the time until the next incident, serious incident, and ideologically specific incident in relation to dummy variables operationalizing the enactment dates of the above legislation.Results: All in all, the results are somewhat consistent with a rational choice framework and my hypotheses. The ADA decreased the hazard of another attack (11 %) and environment-only attack (15 %), while at the same time increasing the hazard of a terrorist, damage, and animal-related attack. AETA decreased the hazard of all (47 %), damage (42 %), and the behavior it was aimed at, that of animal-only incidents (52 %). However, neither the AEPA, nor AEDPA had a significant effect on any of the outcomes.Conclusions: Overall, radical eco-groups were deterred by legal sanctions, but these findings are legislation and outcome specific in addition to including displacement effects.

Adverse Neighborhood Conditions and Sanction Risk Perceptions: Using SEM to Examine Direct and Indirect Effects
Byungbae Kim , Travis C. Pratt & Danielle Wallace

Objectives: The present study examines how individuals’ sanction risk perceptions are shaped by neighborhood context.Methods: Using structural equation modeling on data from waves 6 and 7 of the National Youth Survey, we assess the direct and indirect relationships between adverse neighborhood conditions and two dimensions of sanction risk perceptions: the certainty of punishment and perceived shame. In addition, the role of shame as a mediator between neighborhood context and certainty of punishment is also investigated.Results: The results indicate that adverse neighborhood conditions indirectly affect both forms of sanction risk perceptions, and additional results show that perceived shame fully mediates the effect of neighborhood conditions on perceptions of the certainty of punishment.Conclusions: The perceptual deterrence/rational choice perspective will need to be revised to accommodate more explicitly the role of neighborhood context in shaping sanction risk perceptions.

Quantifying the Exposure of Street Segments to Drinking Places Nearby
Elizabeth R. Groff

Objectives: Introduce and test the relative efficacy of two methods for modeling the impact of cumulative ‘exposure’ to drinking facilities on violent crime at street segments.Methods: One method, simple count, sums the number of drinking places within a distance threshold. The other method, inverse distance weighted count, weights each drinking place within a threshold based on its distance from the street segment. Closer places are weighted higher than more distant places. Distance is measured as the street length from a street segment to a drinking place along the street network. Seven distance thresholds of 400, 800, 1,200, 1,600, 2,000, 2,400 and 2,800 feet are tested. A negative binomial regression model controlling for socio-economic characteristics, opportunity factors and spatial autocorrelation is used to evaluate which of the measure/threshold combinations produce a better fit as compared to a model with no exposure measures.Results: Exposure measured as an inverse distance weighted count produces the best fitting model and is significantly related to violent crime at longer distances than simple count (from 400 to 2,800 feet). Exposure to drinking places using a simple count is significantly related to violent crime up to 2,000 feet. Both models indicate the influence of drinking places is highest at shorter distance thresholds.Conclusions: Both researchers and practitioners can more precisely quantify the influence of drinking places in multivariate models of street segment level violent crime by incorporating proximity in the development of a cumulative exposure measure. The efficacy of using exposure measures to quantify the influence of other types of facilities on crime patterns across street segments should be explored.

The Direct and Indirect Effects of Offender Drug Use on Federal Sentencing Outcomes
Cassia C. Spohn , Byungbae Kim , Steven Belenko & Pauline K. Brennan

Objectives: The federal sentencing guidelines constrain decision makers’ discretion to consider offenders’ life histories and current circumstances, including their histories of drug use and drug use at the time of the crime. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that judges are required to take the offender’s drug use into account in making bail and pretrial detention decisions and the ambiguity inherent in decisions regarding substantial assistance departures allows consideration of this factor. In this paper we build upon and extend prior research examining the impact of an offender’s drug use on sentences imposed on drug trafficking offenders.Methods: We used data from three U.S. District Courts and a methodologically sophisticated approach (i.e., path analysis) to test for the direct and indirect (i.e., through pretrial detention and receipt of a substantial assistance departure) effects of an offender’s drug use history and use of drug at the time of the crime, to determine if the effects of drug use varies by the type of drug, and to test for the moderating effect of type of crime. Results: We found that although the offender’s history of drug use did not affect sentence length, offenders who were using drugs at the time of the crime received longer sentences both as a direct consequence of their drug use and because drug use at the time of the crime increased the odds of pretrial detention and increased the likelihood of receiving a substantial assistance departure. We also found that the effects of drug use varied depending on whether the offender was using crack cocaine or some other drug and that the type of offense for which the offender was convicted moderated these relationships. Conclusions: Our findings illustrate that there is a complex array of relationships between drug use and key case processing decisions in federal courts.

Journal of Criminal Justice 42(5)

Journal of Criminal Justice, September 2014: Volume 42, Issue 5

Sexual crime and place: The impact of the environmental context on sexual assault outcomes
Ashley Hewitt, Eric Beauregard

Purpose: Using the rational choice perspective, the current study investigates the impact that the environment and offending behavior have on serial sexual crime event outcomes. Methods: The effects of time and place factors, as well as offender modus operandi strategies, on sexual crime event outcomes are tested using Generalized Estimating Equations on a sample of 361 crime events committed by 72 serial sex offenders. Results: Time and place do impact serial stranger sexual offenders’ modus operandi strategies, but the place characteristics of the crime have more of an effect on the offender’s behavior than do the temporal conditions during which the event occurs. Subsequent analyses indicate that temporal and place factors, as well as offender modus operandi strategies, predict whether the offender completes the rape, his reaction to victim resistance, and the level of physical force that he inflicts on the victim, but not whether the victim is forced to commit sexual acts on the offender. Conclusions: Serial stranger sexual offenders are effective decision-makers who adapt their strategies to the physical environment in which they commit their crimes, but their degree of rationality can vary as some outcomes are more dependent on the context than the offender and his actions.

A Critical Examination of the “White Victim Effect” and Death Penalty Decision-Making from a Propensity Score Matching Approach: The North Carolina Experience
Wesley G. Jennings, Tara N. Richards, M. Dwayne Smith, Beth Bjerregaard, Sondra J. Fogel

Purpose: Death penalty research has rather consistently demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between defendant race and victim race in general, and for the Black defendant/White victim race dyad specifically. The bulk of this evidence has been derived from correlational studies and from cases over relatively condensed time frames. Methods: The current study uses data from North Carolina (n = 1,113) over several decades (1977–2009) to evaluate the link between defendant/victim racial dyad and jury death penalty decision-making. Results: Results suggest that there is an apparent “White victim effect” that can be observed in death penalty decision-making in traditional logistic regression models. Yet, once cases are matched via propensity score matching on approximately 50 case characteristics/confounders including the type of aggravators and mitigators accepted by the jury in addition to the number of aggravators and mitigators accepted, the relationship is rendered insignificant. Furthermore, these results hold for a defendant of any race killing a White victim and for the “most disadvantaged” situation for Black defendants (e.g., cases with White victims). Conclusions: The “White victim effect” on capital punishment decision-making is better considered as a “case effect” rather than a “race effect.”

The association between psychopathic personality traits and health-related outcomes
Kevin M. Beaver, Joseph L. Nedelec, Christian da Silva Costa, Ana Paula Poersch, Mônica Celis Stelmach, Micheli Cristina Freddi, Jamie M. Gajos, Cashen Boccio

Purpose: Psychopathy and psychopathic personality traits (PPT) have been linked to a long list of negative life outcomes. To date, however, few studies have provided a systematic analysis of whether psychopathic personality traits contribute to increased health burden. The current study was designed to address this gap in the literature. Method: This study analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and employed a measure of PPT derived from the five-factor model of personality. Analyses were conducted using OLS, logistic, and Poisson regression techniques. Results: The results revealed that relatively higher scores on psychopathic personality traits were associated with a slight increase in a wide range of negative health outcomes. These significant associations were detected for both males and females. Conclusions: We speak to the importance of these findings for the potential to reduce health burden among psychopaths and those who score relatively high on measures of psychopathic personality traits.

The persistence of early childhood physical aggression: Examining maternal delinquency and offending, mental health, and cultural differences
Stacy Tzoumakis, Patrick Lussier, Raymond R. Corrado

Purpose: To examine the persistence of physical aggression in preschoolers and associated correlates (i.e., socio-demographic, socioeconomic, criminality, parenting practices, maternal mental health). Methods: One-year follow-ups are completed with 240 mothers and their preschool children (boys and girls) from the Vancouver Longitudinal Study on the Psychosocial Development of Children. A series of structural equation models are examined. Results: Maternal psychological symptoms, juvenile delinquency, and adult offending are associated with higher levels of physical aggression in their offspring. Children of non-Caucasian mothers and those born outside of North are less physically aggressive. Cultural differences in the correlates of physical aggression were identified. Conclusions: Maternal past delinquency, current adult offending, and mental health are important factors in the development of children’s physical aggression. The findings suggest that there are multiple pathways leading to chronic physical aggression, which may be culturally-based. Cultural differences should be taken into account when developing programs and intervening with families of children with behavioral problems.

Neighborhood factors related to the likelihood of successful informal social control efforts
Barbara D. Warner

Purpose: To expand conceptualizations of informal social control in social disorganization and collective efficacy theories to include responses to informal social control, and to examine neighborhood level predictors of responses to informal social control. Methods: The study uses surveys of approximately 2300 residents across 66 neighborhoods, supplemented with census data at the block group level. Results: Neighborhood mobility decreased the odds of positive responses to informal social control, measured as both “giving in” and “talking it out” when you have a disagreement with your neighbor. Disadvantage was found to decrease only the odds of “giving in.” Neighborhood level measures of social cohesion and faith in the police were also found to increase the odds of responding positively to informal social control efforts. In contrast, social ties were not found to significantly affect the likelihood of positive responses to informal social control. Conclusions: The findings from this study broaden support of collective efficacy theory and concepts related to efficacious neighborhoods. While previous studies have raised questions about the measurement of informal social control, the findings in this paper offer support to earlier studies by providing a different approach to the conceptualization and measurement of informal social control.

Social Science Research 48

Social Science Research, November 2014: Volume 48

Third-grade retention and reading achievement in Texas: A nine year panel study
Jon Lorence

Understanding the links between education and smoking
Vida Maralani

Tracing the cigarette epidemic: An age-period-cohort study of education, gender and smoking using a pseudo-panel approach
Tord F. Vedøy

Life satisfaction across nations: The effects of women’s political status and public priorities
Richard York, Shannon Elizabeth Bell

Is the social volcano still dormant? Trends in Chinese attitudes toward inequality
Martin King Whyte, Dong-Kyun Im

Intimate partner victimization, poor relationship quality, and depressive symptoms during young adulthood
Monica A. Longmore, Wendy D. Manning, Peggy C. Giordano, Jennifer E. Copp

Social welfare support and homicide: Longitudinal analyses of European countries from 1994 to 2010
Patricia L. McCall, Jonathan R. Brauer

Homonegativity among first and second generation migrants in Europe: The interplay of time trends, origin, destination and religion
Koen Van der Bracht, Bart Van de Putte

College quality and hourly wages: Evidence from the self-revelation model, sibling models and instrumental variables
Nicolai T. Borgen

Identifying predictors of survey mode preference
Jolene D. Smyth, Kristen Olson, Morgan M. Millar

Abortion attitudes in context: A multidimensional vignette approach
Jason D. Hans, Claire Kimberly

Intelligence and childlessness
Satoshi Kanazawa

When do doctors follow patients’ orders? Organizational mechanisms of physician influence
Daniel A. Menchik, Lei Jin

NIMBYism – A re-examination of the phenomenon
Peter Esaiasson

The consequences of unrealized occupational goals in the transition to adulthood
Jessica Halliday Hardie

The misunderstood consequences of Shelley v. Kraemer
Yana Kucheva, Richard Sander

Friendship networks and the social structure of opportunities for contact and interaction
Johannes Stauder

Political polarization on support for government spending on environmental protection in the USA, 1974–2012
Aaron M. McCright, Chenyang Xiao, Riley E. Dunlap

The dynamic relationships between union dissolution and women’s employment: A life-history analysis of 16 countries
Maike van Damme, Matthijs Kalmijn

Predictors of self-protective behaviors in non-sexual violent encounters: The role of victim sex in understanding resistance
Ráchael A. Powers

Corrigendum to “Social mobility in 20 modern societies: The role of economic and political context” [Social Sci. Res. 41 (2012) 527–538]
Meir Yaish, Robert Andersen

The British Journal of Criminology 54(5)

The British Journal of Criminology, September 2014: Volume 54, Issue 5

Editor's choice: Fieldwork, Biography and Emotion: Doing Criminological Autoethnography
Stephen Wakeman

This article presents an introductory yet critical overview of autoethnographic research in criminological contexts. Drawing on experiences of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer of these drugs myself, the article demonstrates how the domains of fieldwork, biography and the emotions intersect to render clear a progressive account of heroin addiction. However, this is offset against some negative occurrences directly reducible to doing ethnography where biographical congruence exists between the researcher and the researched. Ultimately, it is argued here that an increased consideration of the self—biographically and emotionally—both permits and facilitates the presentation of analytic yet stylized data in the form of what is termed below, ‘lyrical criminology’.

Temple Looting in Cambodia: Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network
Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis

Qualitative empirical studies of the illicit antiquities trade have tended to focus either on the supply end, through interviews with looters, or on the demand end, through interviews with dealers, museums and collectors. Trafficking of artefacts across borders from source to market has until now been something of an evidential black hole. Here, we present the first empirical study of a statue trafficking network, using oral history interviews conducted during ethnographic criminology fieldwork in Cambodia and Thailand. The data begin to answer many of the pressing but unresolved questions in academic studies of this particular criminal market, such as whether organized crime is involved in antiquities looting and trafficking (yes), whether the traffic in looted artefacts overlaps with the insertion of fakes into the market (yes) and how many stages there are between looting at source and the placing of objects for public sale in internationally respected venues (surprisingly few).

The Protector’s Choice: An Application of Protection Theory to Somali Piracy
Anja Shortland and Federico Varese

What explains the variation in piracy along the coasts of Somalia? We answer this question by drawing upon Protection Theory and a new data set of piracy incidents. First, we make a distinction between pirates and protectors of piracy (authorities and local clans). We show that authorities offer shelter and protection to pirates in areas remote from trade routes and when they face challenges over political control. Theoretically, the paper identifies the moment when a protector decides to switch from protecting crime to protecting legitimate trading activities; it also highlights a preserve effect of electoral democracy in unstable contexts, namely the strong incentives to rely on organized criminals to fund electoral competition and secessionist aspirations. We conclude by offering comparative remarks on the trajectory of the nation-building project in Somalia and suggest that building infrastructures, fostering regional trade and more generally providing alternative sources of income to local communities is the best way to fight piracy.

What Is Policeness? On Being Police in Somalia
Alice Hills

This article uses the notion of policeness to explore the essence of what police are, what makes for a police and what makes it recognized as such. Western ideas of police are based on a specific understanding of what a police organization is, but this is not necessarily the case in the global South. Based on the experience of Somalia’s police forces, it appears that while there is something universally distinctive about police organizations, police are best understood as a project reflecting political and social processes within unequal fields of power. Ultimately, policeness, which alludes to the symbolic and coercive functions associated with police, is a matter of perception.

The Crime Triangle of Kidnapping for Ransom Incidents in Colombia, South America: A ‘Litmus’ Test for Situational Crime Prevention
Stephen F. Pires, Rob T. Guerette, and Christopher H. Stubbert

Crime science research over the last few decades has shown that crime tends to concentrate, most notably spatially and temporally. These and other concentrations oriented by the crime triangle (victims, offenders and places) offer important implications for the development of effective prevention initiatives. Yet, these findings have mostly been derived from analysis of conventional domestic crimes leaving questions as to whether similar patterning occurs among less studied crime types, such as kidnappings. This study examined 9,696 kidnapping incidents (2002–2011) in Colombia, South America, to see whether kidnappings for ransom exhibit similar concentrations according to the crime triangle framework. Results suggest that kidnappings indeed have spatio-temporal and other concentrations, which could be used to guide policy makers and policing organizations in the formulation of strategic preventive action, rather than relying on reactive efforts after kidnapping incidents have already occurred.

Extra-legal Protection in China: How Guanxi Distorts China’s Legal System and Facilitates the Rise of Unlawful Protectors
Peng Wang

This paper incorporates the concept of guanxi—a Chinese version of personal connections, networks or social capital—into the discussion of police corruption and the rise of extra-legal protectors. Using published materials and fieldwork data collected from two Chinese cities (Chongqing and Qufu), it demonstrates how guanxi distorts China’s legal system by facilitating the buying and selling of public offices and promoting the formation of corrupt networks between locally based criminals and government officials. China’s weak legal framework encourages individuals and entrepreneurs to employ guanxi networks to obtain private protection from alternative suppliers (e.g. corrupt government officials and street gangsters) in order to protect property rights, facilitate transactions and fend off government extortion.

An Ethnographic Study of the Policing of Internal Borders in the Netherlands: Synergies Between Criminology and Anthropology
Paul Mutsaers

Tense contact between the police and migrants in Western societies remains to be an important topic in police scholarship. In sociological studies of the police, this matter is ascribed to the discretionary authority of individual officers that is sanctioned by their departments—not to official policy or direct ethnic or racial orientations. This article (1) discusses the ‘policing of migration’ literature that claims the exact opposite; (2) applies this literature to the Dutch context in order to show that migrants are increasingly and deliberately targeted for control by numerous public, semi-public and private agencies; (3) empirically explores the ramifications of such ‘internal border control’ and (4) argues in favour of a synergy between criminological and anthropological work on this topic.

Similar Punishment?: Comparing Sentencing Outcomes in Domestic and Non-Domestic Violence Cases
Christine E. W. Bond and Samantha Jeffries

Despite shifts in Western liberal democracies towards stronger criminal justice responses to domestic violence, the issue of sentencing disparity between domestic and non-domestic violence offending cases remains largely neglected. Using a population of cases sentenced in the New South Wales (Australia) lower courts between January 2009 and June 2012, we report multivariate analyses of the sentencing of domestic violence and non-domestic violence offences. Results show that when sentenced under statistically similar circumstances, domestic violence offenders are less likely than those convicted of crimes outside of domestic contexts to be sentenced to prison although the substantive impact is small. Further, of those imprisoned, domestic violence offenders receive significantly shorter sentenced terms. Our findings also suggest that, for domestic violence offences, there may be a ‘punishment cost’ to being older, male and Indigenous. The role of outmoded stereotypical assumptions around domestic violence in sentencing decision making is discussed.

Becoming a Desister: Exploring the Role of Agency, Coping and Imagination in the Construction of a New Self
Deirdre Healy

It is thought that agency plays an important role in the transition from the identity of ‘offender’ to ‘ex-offender’. Yet, despite a growing theoretical literature, little is known about how people use agency in their interactions with the social world to achieve valued goals. This article aims to (1) establish whether agentic action is facilitated by the ability to imagine a credible new self and (2) investigate the situational coping mechanisms that desisters use to overcome barriers to change and achieve meaningful lives. It presents the results of an exploratory study which involved in-depth interviews with a sample of adult men who were in the process of desisting from crime. The results suggested that the ability to imagine a credible future self was associated with agency, coping and well-being.

Social Solidarity, Penal Evolution and Probation
Fergus McNeill and Matt Dawson

Compared to the sociology of the prison, the sociology of probation has been much neglected. In Europe and the United States, that neglect is beginning to be addressed by a number of scholars, both empirically and conceptually. Where these scholars have looked to the founding figures in the sociology of punishment, they have tended to examine probation through a Foucauldian or Marxist lens. This paper takes a different direction, re-examining Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and penal evolution to try to offer some analytical resources for making sense of probation’s historical development and contemporary struggles. In so doing, we hope to illustrate both the continuing value of Durkheimian analyses of penality and the need to extend such analyses beyond the prison. More broadly, we aim to briefly illustrate and to stimulate new cultural analyses of probation’s historical emergence and contemporary adaptations.

Imagined Communities and the Death Penalty in Britain, 1930–65
Lizzie Seal

Based on research into qualitative responses to capital punishment in mid twentieth-century Britain, this article examines how letter writers to the Home Office constructed imagined communities in relation to capital cases. It uncovers a shift in these responses from creating respectable, local communities in the period 1930–45, when most letter writers had a personal connection to the condemned, to the creation of the imagined national community from the late 1940s onwards, when most correspondents in relation to high profile cases were not connected to the condemned. These post-war letters reveal how meanings of Britishness, particularly in relation to the important symbol of ‘British justice’, were negotiated in relation to capital punishment.

Brooding Over the Dark Figure of Crime: The Home Office and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in the Run-up to the British Crime Survey
Matthieu de Castelbajac

There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of the British Crime Survey. This article shows how the dark-figure metaphor was popularized in England, and how some of its notable promoters used it as an argument against victim surveys. It then focuses on two strategic sites for criminological research in England during the late 1960s and 1970s, the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and the Home Office. Despite some internal division, both institutions rejected early proposals for victim surveys. The first attempt to replicate victim surveys in England was almost thwarted by censors in the Institute and the ministry. The relevance of this historical process for the present criminological scene is discussed in the final section.

Hate Crime Victimization in Wales: Psychological and Physical Impacts Across Seven Hate Crime Victim Types
Matthew L. Williams and Jasmin Tregidga

This paper presents findings from the All Wales Hate Crime Project. Most hate crime research has focused on discrete victim types in isolation. For the first time, internationally, this paper examines the psychological and physical impacts of hate crime across seven victim types drawing on quantitative and qualitative data. It contributes to the hate crime debate in two significant ways: (1) it provides the first look at the problem in Wales and (2) it provides the first multi-victim-type analysis of hate crime, showing that impacts are not homogenous across victim groups. The paper provides empirical credibility to the impacts felt by hate crime victims on the margins who have routinely struggled to gain support.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 655

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2014: Volume 655

The Role of State Policy in Promoting College Access and Success

State Policies and Higher Education Attainment
Michael K. McLendon and Laura W. Perna

The Persistence of Unaligned K–12 and Higher Education Systems: Why Have Statewide Alignment Efforts Been Ineffective?
Laura W. Perna and Michael Armijo

Assessing the Promise of California’s Early Assessment Program for Community Colleges
Michal Kurlaender

The Role of State Policy in Promoting College Affordability
Jennifer A. Delaney

State-Level Responses to the Access and Completion Challenge in the New Era of Austerity
William Doyle and William Zumeta

Pricing Out the Disadvantaged? The Effect of Tuition Deregulation in Texas Public Four-Year Institutions
Stella M. Flores and Justin C. Shepherd

The Role of Institutional and State Aid Policies in Average Student Debt
James Monks

Financing College Opportunity: Factors Influencing State Spending on Student Financial Aid and Campus Appropriations, 1990 through 2010
Michael K. McLendon, David A. Tandberg, and Nicholas W. Hillman

Performance Funding for Higher Education: Forms, Origins, Impacts, and Futures
Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya M. Jones, Hana Lahr, Rebecca S. Natow, Lara Pheatt, and Vikash Reddy

Evaluating Impacts of Performance Funding Policies on Student Outcomes in Higher Education
Amanda Rutherford and Thomas Rabovsky

Insights and Implications for State Policy-Makers
Laura W. Perna, Michael W. Klein, and Michael K. McLendon

Critical Criminology 22(3)

Critical Criminology, September 2014: Volume 22, Issue 3

Slaughtering the Bison, Controlling Native Americans: A State Crime and Green Criminology Synthesis
Christopher J. Moloney & William J. Chambliss

We demonstrate the usefulness and importance of achieving descriptive and explanatory synthesis between the fields of state crime and green criminology when analyzing events that embody both state and “green” crime elements. Utilizing the case of the nineteenth century North American bison slaughter (1865–1890), we present an analysis that attends to the state and green crime elements present in this singular event and show that the bison slaughter exemplifies the type of case that benefits from a synthesis of the state and green criminology perspectives. That is, we can best understand the bison slaughter and other similar events when drawing jointly upon the resources offered by the state and green criminology fields. We conclude this paper with an explanation of the bison slaughter that utilizes a political–economic framework and the complementary concepts of structural contradictions and hegemony, showing, among other things, that political economy is one vital approach that meets the explanatory goals of both state crime and green criminology, aiding our understanding of cases like the bison slaughter. As the world moves forward into a future defined by various ecological, political and economic insecurities, scholars from both disciplines will increasingly encounter events that are impossible to fully understand without engaging with each other. This paper is thus an attempt to motivate the sowing of cross-disciplinary seeds of heightened collaboration between state crime scholars and green criminologists.

Beyond the Ghetto: Police Power, Methamphetamine and the Rural War on Drugs
Travis Linnemann & Don L. Kurtz

Viewing police as important cultural producers, we ask how police power fashions structures of feeling and social imaginaries of the “war on drugs” in small towns of the rural Midwest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a collection of interviews focusing on police officers’ beliefs about the causes of crime and drug use, we locate a narrative of rural decline attributed to the producers and users of methamphetamine. We argue this narrative supports punitive and authoritarian sensibilities and broader narcopolitical projects more generally and ignores long-standing social inequalities observed in rural communities. As such, the cultural work of rural police provides important insight to the shape and direction of late-modern crime control beyond the familiar terrains of the city and its “ghetto.”

Constitutive Criminology and the ‘War on Terror’
Shamila Ahmed

This article presents a constitutive criminological perspective of the ‘war on terror’. The article will first deconstruct the ‘war on terror’; showing how constitutive criminology provides a framework in which foreign policy, the UK state; the police, and society can be systematically analyzed in relation to one another. Second, the article explores how constitutive criminology enables a critical analysis of the dominant state-centric ‘war on terror’ discourse. The article through discussing the multifaceted ‘war on terror’ demonstrates the relevance of constitutive criminology, as a non state centric approach to critical perspectives in criminology.

The Normality of Political Administration and State Violence: Casuistry, Law, and Drones
Dawn L. Rothe & Victoria E. Collins

Large unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) equipped with missiles and bombs or battle-equipped have progressively become the newest wave in “warfare.” We argue that the use of drones for targeted assassinations is merely a new technological tool for state violence that is increasingly becoming a regular exercise of the US power in the construction and reification of the broader social geopolitical order. Further, it is through law, domestic and international, that state violence, wars and the use of drones for targeted assassinations are legitimated and are a normality, and continuation of, the political management of the state. Taken with the core of humanitarian law that legitimates war and state violence, we suggest that the use of drones can be interpreted within the body of legislation, political discourse, and laws that serve to normalize and legitimize their use: no different than such processes that occurred with the technological advances that offered military tanks, aerial bombing, projectile missiles or even nuclear and chemical weapons.

“Mom, They are Going to Kill My Dad!” A Personal Narrative on Capital Punishment From a Convict Criminology Perspective
D. J. Williams , Debra Bischoff , Teresa Casey & James Burnett

Capital punishment, although opposed by numerous scholars and banned in several countries, continues to be practiced in many locations under a popular rationale associated with retributive justice. While there has been extensive debate on this issue for decades among scholars, policymakers, correctional professionals, and the media; other important voices, specifically the voices of family members of executed convicts, have been ignored or discounted. Situated within a convict criminology perspective, this paper focuses on a personal narrative of how the issue of capital punishment was experienced by the partner (second author of this paper) of an executed convict. This narrative powerfully illustrates complexities and unintended social injustices toward family members that can occur from capital punishment.

Green and Grey: Water Justice, Criminalization, and Resistance
Bill McClanahan

Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, ‘green criminology’ has focused on environmental crimes and harms affecting non-human and human life, ecosystems, and the planet as a whole. Describing global trends toward privatization of water supply systems and the criminalization of several water conservation activities and tactics, this paper employs theoretical perspectives offered by green, cultural, and critical criminologies, focusing on overt resistance to water privatization and oppressive regulations governing rainwater storage and residential water recycling. Taking a critical theoretical perspective, this paper examines water access and autonomy, individuals and groups openly resisting the criminalization of household water reuse and storage, and the cultural significance of water. This paper concludes with an exploration of the potential benefits of a green cultural criminology.

Creep and Normalisation: Exploring a Strategy of Social Control
Ashley Carver

In the post 9/11 world, expansion of extraordinary powers of control through criminal justice is an important area of study. However criminological study of how these powers expand into unintended areas of criminal justice is currently underdeveloped. A few notable authors have set out complimentary templates that can provide basic tools to understanding the processes by which extraordinary laws are normalised into not so extraordinary activity. By analysing, understanding and unifying the existing literature in this area, this article seeks to amalgamate the studies of control creep and normalisation of the extraordinary into one comprehensive school of thought capable of recognising, and analysing unjustified expansion of state power. Furthermore this article will analyse the G8/G20 Meetings in Ontario, Canada to demonstrate how the processes of creep and normalisation have intentionally been used to criminalise legitimate protest.

A Lust for Treasure and a Love of Gold…or Desperation? Global Facilitation of Piracy, Neoliberal Policies and the Control of the Somali Pirate
Victoria E. Collins

The issue of piracy is most often framed as being the product of dangerous individuals plundering and murdering for personal gain. What is less often discussed are the state, political, economic, and corporate interests that intersect with piracy (i.e. the corporate interest demand for protection of global shipping routes that are instrumental for capital accumulation in the world market). Here I utilize the concept of crimes of globalization to demonstrate that the motivations that undergird policies aimed at controlling piracy today are not dissimilar to those promoted through international financial institutions in their effort to advance the economic interests of highly empowered countries at the expense of addressing localized needs.

Annual Review of Sociology 40

Annual Review of Sociology, 2014: Volume 40

Making Sense of Culture
Orlando Patterson

Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable
Felix Elwert and Christopher Winship

Measurement Equivalence in Cross-National Research
Eldad Davidov, Bart Meuleman, Jan Cieciuch, Peter Schmidt, and Jaak Billiet

The Sociology of Empires, Colonies, and Postcolonialism
George Steinmetz

Data Visualization in Sociology
Kieran Healy and James Moody

Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research
Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy

Social Isolation in America
Paolo Parigi and Warner Henson

War
Andreas Wimmer

60 Years After Brown: Trends and Consequences of School Segregation
Sean F. Reardon and Ann Owens

Panethnicity
Dina Okamoto and G. Cristina Mora

A Comparative View of Ethnicity and Political Engagement
Riva Kastoryano and Miriam Schader

(When) Do Organizations Have Social Capital?
Olav Sorenson and Michelle Rogan

The Political Mobilization of Firms and Industries
Edward T. Walker and Christopher M. Rea

Political Parties and the Sociological Imagination: Past, Present, and Future Directions
Stephanie L. Mudge and Anthony S. Chen

Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad

The One Percent
Lisa A. Keister

Immigrants and African Americans
Mary C. Waters, Philip Kasinitz, and Asad L. Asad

Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence
Divya Vaid

Incarceration, Prisoner Reentry, and Communities
Jeffrey D. Morenoff and David J. Harding

Intersectionality and the Sociology of HIV/AIDS: Past, Present, and Future Research Directions
Celeste Watkins-Hayes

Ethnic Diversity and Its Effects on Social Cohesion
Tom van der Meer and Jochem Tolsma

Warmth of the Welcome: Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration Policy in the United States
Elizabeth Fussell

Hispanics in Metropolitan America: New Realities and Old Debates
Marta Tienda and Norma Fuentes

Transitions to Adulthood in Developing Countries
Fatima Juárez and Cecilia Gayet

Race, Ethnicity, and the Changing Context of Childbearing in the United States
Megan M. Sweeney and R. Kelly Raley

Where, When, Why, and For Whom Do Residential Contexts Matter? Moving Away from the Dichotomous Understanding of Neighborhood Effects
Patrick Sharkey and Jacob W. Faber

Gender and Urban Space
Daphne Spain

Somebody's Children or Nobody's Children? How the Sociological Perspective Could Enliven Research on Foster Care
Christopher Wildeman and Jane Waldfogel

Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality: The Latin American Case
Florencia Torche

A Critical Overview of Migration and Development: The Latin American Challenge
Raúl Delgado-Wise

Transiciones a la Vida Adulta en Países en Desarrollo
Fatima Juárez and Cecilia Gayet

Crime & Delinquency 60(6)

Crime & Delinquency, September 2014: Volume 60, Issue 6

Recidivism Among Released State Prison Inmates Who Received Mental Health Treatment While Incarcerated
William H. Fisher, Stephanie W. Hartwell, Xiaogang Deng, Debra A. Pinals, Carl Fulwiler, and Kristen Roy-Bujnowski

This study assesses the likelihood of rearrest among a cohort of all adults (N = 1,438) released from the Massachusetts state prison system who received mental health services while they were incarcerated. All individuals were followed for 24 months. The analysis focused on four classes of variables: demographic characteristics, clinical history, criminal justice history, and postrelease supervision. These analyses showed that criminal history factors—a juvenile record and a history of multiple previous incarcerations—were significant risk factors, but that clinical factors, including a history of substance abuse, were not. Overall, the models developed here look much like the ones that would be observed in the general offender population. The implications of these findings for criminal justice and mental health policy are discussed.

Using a Criminally Involved Population to Examine the Relationship Between Race/Ethnicity, Structural Disadvantage, and Methamphetamine Use
Andrew M. Fox and Nancy Rodriguez

Limited empirical focus has been given to identifying individual and structural correlates of methamphetamine use. Although race (i.e., being White) is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of methamphetamine users, few studies have examined whether race/ethnicity is a significant predictor of such illicit drug use. Research has also shown that cocaine and opiate use is associated with disadvantage; however, studies have yet to examine the relationship between structural disadvantage and methamphetamine use. Using national data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program, this study examines the prevalence of methamphetamine and explores the relationship between race/ethnicity, structural disadvantage, and methamphetamine use. Findings reveal that race/ethnicity and structural disadvantage are significant predictors of methamphetamine use. Additionally, findings show an interactive effect between race/ethnicity, structural disadvantage, and methamphetamine use. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Period Effects in the Impact of Vietnam-Era Military Service on Crime Over the Life Course
Leana Allen Bouffard

Many life course studies are based on a few cohorts of individuals born in the early part of the 20th century. Despite the significance of military service in the life course, few studies have addressed the consequences of military service on offending trajectories. This study explores the relationship between military service and patterns of offending in three cohorts of men. Analyses examine both the impact of military service as well as the potential period effects of service during different periods of the Vietnam War. Results suggest that between-individual differences in military service significantly affect criminal behavior. However, the specific direction of the effect depends on when during the Vietnam era these men entered the military. Implications of these results are discussed.

The Subjective Impact of Contact With the Criminal Justice System: The Role of Gender and Stigmatization
Andrew James McGrath

Labeling theory suggests that contact with the criminal justice system leads to feelings of stigmatization, which will consequently have the counterproductive effect of increasing offending. The current study investigated this phenomenon by (a) interviewing 394 young people sentenced in the New South Wales Children’s Court about their emotional reactions to the experience and (b) testing whether differences in these emotional reactions were related to increases or decreases in reoffending. It was found that feeling stigmatized after the hearing was a significant predictor of reoffending for the young women, but not the young men, in the sample. In addition, young men with previous convictions who reported feeling stigmatized were less likely to reoffend. The implications of these findings for the way in which young offenders are treated are discussed.

Comparative Effectiveness of California’s Proposition 36 and Drug Court Programs Before and After Propensity Score Matching
Elizabeth Evans, Libo Li, Darren Urada, and M. Douglas Anglin

California’s voter-initiated Proposition 36 (Prop 36) program is often unfavorably compared with drug courts but little is empirically known about the comparative effectiveness of the two approaches. Using statewide administrative data, analyses were conducted on all Prop 36 and drug court offenders with official records of arrest and drug treatment. Propensity score matching was used to create equivalent groups, enabling comparisons of success at treatment discharge, recidivism over 12 months posttreatment entry, and the magnitude of behavioral changes. Significant behavioral improvements occurred for both Prop 36 and drug court offenders, but although more Prop 36 offenders were successful at discharge, more recidivated over a period of 12 months. Core programmatic differences likely contributed to the differences in outcomes. Policy implications are discussed.

Sedentary Activities, Peer Behavior, and Delinquency Among American Youth
Robert G. Morris and Matthew C. Johnson

Delinquent behavior of one’s peers is one of the most robust predictors of adolescent delinquency. However, no study to date has explored the role of this relationship among those who engage in high rates of nonproductive sedentary activities (e.g., video gaming, TV viewing, and watching movies); a growing public health concern. Here, this issue is explored using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Findings support a direct relationship between certain sedentary behaviors and most types of delinquency. Furthermore, results indicate that the impact of peer delinquency on adolescent delinquency is partially confounded by above-average participation in computer gaming. Implications for research on sedentary behavior and delinquency (regarding both policy and theory development) are discussed in the context of cultural evolution into the digital age.