Criminology 53(2)

Criminology, May 2015: Volume 53, Issue 2

The 2014 Sutherland Address: The Law Of Crime Concentration And The Criminology Of Place
David Weisburd

According to Laub (2004), criminology has a developmental life course with specific turning points that allow for innovations in how we understand and respond to crime. I argue that criminology should take another turn in direction, focusing on microgeographic hot spots. By examining articles published in Criminology, I show that only marginal attention has been paid to this area of study to date—often termed the criminology of place. I illustrate the potential utility of a turning point by examining the law of crime concentration at place, which states that for a defined measure of crime at a specific microgeographic unit, the concentration of crime will fall within a narrow bandwidth of percentages for a defined cumulative proportion of crime. By providing the first cross-city comparison of crime concentration using a common geographic unit, the same crime type, and examining a general crime measure, I find strong support for a law of crime concentration. I also show that crime concentration stays within a narrow bandwidth across time, despite strong volatility in crime incidents. By drawing from these findings, I identify several key research questions for future study. In conclusion, I argue that a focus on the criminology of place provides significant opportunity for young scholars and has great promise for advancing criminology as a science.

Friends With My Future Self: Longitudinal Vividness Intervention Reduces Delinquency
Jean-Louis Van Gelder, Eva C. Luciano, Marleen Weulen Kranenbarg And Hal E. Hershfield

In a field experiment, we use a novel method to test whether instilling a greater sense of vividness of the future self motivates people to act in a more future-oriented way and reduces their delinquent involvement. We manipulate vividness of the future self by having participants, a sample of high-school youth (N = 133), “befriend” an avatar representing their future self on a social network website. For 7 days, they reply to short messages from their future self designed to trigger thinking about that distant self. Using repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), we find that participants who had been linked to their future self report less delinquent involvement, whereas controls did not. Furthermore, the results of a nonparametric bootstrapping procedure show that this effect is mediated by changes in vividness of the future self, such that increases in vividness lead to lower self-reported delinquency. We conclude that vividness of the future self holds promise not only as a cognitive explanation for the failure to make informed cost–benefit trade-offs but also for interventions aiming to reduce delinquency.

Historical Contingencies And The Evolving Importance Of Race, Violent Crime, And Region In Explaining Mass Incarceration In The United States
Michael C. Campbell, Matt Vogel And Joshua Williams

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state-level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nation's South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarceration's rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.

Racially Homophilous Social Ties And Informal Social Control
Barbara D. Warner, Kristin Swartz And Shila René Hawk

Social disorganization theory argues that racial/ethnic heterogeneity is a key neighborhood characteristic leading to social disorganization and, consequently, higher levels of crime. Heterogeneity's effect is argued to be a result of its fragmentation of social ties along racial/ethnic lines, which creates racially homophilous social networks with few ties bridging racial/ethnic groups. Most studies of social ties in social disorganization models, however, have examined their quantity and left unaddressed the extent to which ties are within or across different racial groups. This study goes beyond previous studies by examining the effects of both racially homophilous and interracial friendship networks on informal social control. Using multilevel models and data from 66 neighborhoods with approximately 2,300 respondents, we found that heterogeneity actually increased the average percentage of residents with interracial friendship networks, but the percentage of residents with interracial networks decreased the likelihood of informal social control. In contrast, the percentage of residents with White racially homophilous networks increased the likelihood of informal social control. Examining the microcontext of individuals’ networks, however, we found residents with interracial ties reported higher likelihoods of informal social control and that this effect was enhanced in neighborhoods with higher percentages of non-White racially homophilous networks.

Police Response To Domestic Violence: Situations Involving Veterans Exhibiting Signs Of Mental Illness
Fred E. Markowitz And Amy C. Watson

Drawing on attribution theory, research on police discretion, and public attitudes toward mental illness, we examine attributional processes in police decision making in response to domestic violence situations involving veterans and nonveterans with signs of mental illness. Using data from experimental vignettes varying veteran status, victim injury, and suspect compliance administered to a sample of 309 police officers, the results indicate that 1) veterans are perceived as less responsible for troublesome behavior but more dangerous than nonveterans, 2) suspects’ veteran status has a significant effect on officers’ preference for mental health treatment versus arrest, and 3) part of the effect of veteran status on officer response is mediated by internal and external attributions for problematic behavior and by perceptions of dangerousness. The study empirically demonstrates countervailing processes in police decision making—recognition of the causes for troublesome behavior and the need for mental health treatment on the one hand and concern for community safety and enforcing the law on the other.

Women's Gender Performances And Cultural Heterogeneity In The Illegal Drug Economy
Heidi Grundetjern

Based on interviews with 32 female drug dealers in Norway, this study investigates different gender performances among women situated in the illegal hard drug economy—a context with strong gendered “rules of the game.” Using grounded theory methods, I have identified four predominant patterns in which women enact their gendered identities being part of the drug economy: performing emphasized femininity in the context of marginalization; performing street masculinity; employing a feminine business model; and last, flexible use of cultural repertoires. The findings suggest that different gender performances among dealers are rooted in variations in the cultural tool kits they have at their disposal. I find that the content of women's cultural tool kits varied with three sociodemographic factors: 1) age, 2) time of entrée to the drug economy, and 3) educational and employment history. Combined, these influenced the type of gender performances the dealers tended to use as well as their position in the drug market hierarchy. The research suggests that those dealers using cultural repertoires flexibly are the most successful as they skillfully employed the model best suited for the context they were in.

Delinquent Peer Influence On Offending Versatility: Can Peers Promote Specialized Delinquency?
Kyle J. Thomas

The consistent and robust relationship between peers and frequency of offending is often cited as evidence that friends play an important role in adolescent behavioral tendencies. But Warr (2002) has argued that the empirical support for peer perspectives remains equivocal in part because research has not demonstrated that individuals and their peers display similarities in the qualitative form of their delinquent behavior (i.e., the tendency to specialize in delinquent acts). By using data from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) evaluation (N = 1,390) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth) (N = 1,848), this study seeks to fill this void in the literature by examining whether having friends who display specialization in specific delinquent acts relative to other offense types predicts an individual's own tendency to display specializing in those same crime types. Consistent with peer influence perspectives, the results of multilevel latent-trait models (Osgood and Schreck, 2007) suggest that individuals who associate with friends who demonstrate specialization in violence, theft, and substance use are more likely to display greater levels of specialization in those offense types themselves.