Sunday, August 30, 2015

Social Forces 94(1)

Social Forces, September 2015: Volume 94, Number 1

Economic Sociology

The Financial Premium in the US Labor Market: A Distributional Analysis
Ken-Hou Lin
Using both cross-sectional and panel data, this article revisits the evolution of the financial premium between 1970 and 2011 with a distributional approach. I report that above-market compensation was present in the finance sector in the 1970s, but concentrated mostly at the bottom of the earnings distribution. The financial premium observed since the 1980s, however, is largely driven by excessive compensation at the top, a development that increasingly contributes to the national concentration of earnings. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that the financial premium for top earners remained robust in the early 2000s, when deregulation slowed down, and in the aftermath of the recent financial meltdown. These findings are inconsistent with the account that the earnings differential is driven by unobserved skill difference and demand shocks but supportive of the institutional account of rising inequality.

Learning from Performance: Banks, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and the Credit Crisis
Kim Pernell-Gallagher
This article investigates how firms in competitive markets use external examples to assess the value of novel practices, focusing on the substantively important case of collateralized debt obligation (CDO) underwriting among US investment and commercial banks, 1996–2007. Diffusion researchers have struggled to adjudicate between competing mechanisms of social contagion, including imitation and learning. I use event-history methods to examine how banks responded to the activities and results of other CDO underwriters. I show that banks learned superstitiously from the share price performance of other CDO underwriters; as the popularity of CDO underwriting increased, banks became even more attentive to confirmatory evidence on this dimension. These findings suggest important refinements to theories of social contagion, especially neoinstitutional theory. By focusing on ordinary organizational processes in an extraordinary context, I uncover an alternative explanation for the rise of complex securitization, with implications for current understandings of the credit crisis.

Entrepreneurship

Status Beliefs and the Spirit of Capitalism: Accounting for Gender Biases in Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Sarah Thébaud
In this article, I develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that widely shared cultural beliefs about men’s and women’s abilities in entrepreneurship (i.e., “gender status beliefs”) systematically influence the social interactions during which an entrepreneur, particularly an innovative entrepreneur, seeks support from potential stakeholders for his or her new organization. To evaluate this argument, I conducted three experimental studies in the United Kingdom and the United States in which student participants were asked to evaluate the profiles of two entrepreneurs and to make investment decisions for each. The studies manipulated the gender of the entrepreneur and the innovativeness of the business plan. The main finding is consistent across studies: gender status beliefs disadvantage typical women entrepreneurs vis-à-vis their male counterparts, but innovation in a business model has a stronger and more positive impact on ratings of women’s entrepreneurial ability and overall support for their business ideas than it does for men’s. However, the strength of these patterns varies significantly depending on the societal and industry context of the new venture in question. Findings indicate that gender status beliefs can be understood as an important “demand-side” mechanism contributing to gender inequality in aggregate entrepreneurship rates and a micro-level factor affecting the likelihood that a new and novel organization will emerge and survive.

Social Belonging and Economic Action: Affection-Based Social Circles in the Creation of Private Entrepreneurship
Dali Ma
Most social network studies following Granovetter’s (1985) vision of embeddedness have either focused on instrumental relations or lumped instrumentality and sentimentality together. This study seeks to clarify whether social relations that primarily build on sentimentality can impact economic action. Based on the context of Chinese market transition, this paper found that general managers that had affection-based social circles, that is, small groups in which people enjoy being together, were more likely to start a private firm after being laid off. In contrast, business-based social circles, defined as small groups mainly formed on business interests, did not have a significant interactive effect with layoff. These findings are consistent with the argument that affection-based social circles help managers experiencing job loss maintain a stable and positive self-identity, and that these circles also exert less constraint over radical career change.

Education

Expectations on Track?: High School Tracking and Adolescent Educational Expectations
Kristian Bernt Karlson
This paper examines the role of adaptation in expectation formation processes by analyzing how educational tracking in high schools affects adolescents’ educational expectations. I argue that adolescents view track placement as a signal about their academic abilities and respond to it in terms of modifying their educational expectations. Applying a difference-in-differences approach to the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that being placed in an advanced or honors class in high school positively affects adolescents’ expectations, particularly if placement is consistent across subjects and if placement contradicts tracking experiences in middle school. My findings support the hypothesis that adolescents adapt their educational expectations to ability signals sent by schools.

How Has Educational Expansion Shaped Social Mobility Trends in the United States?
Fabian T. Pfeffer, Florian R. Hertel
This contribution provides a long-term assessment of intergenerational social mobility trends in the United States across the 20th and early 21st centuries and assesses the determinants of those trends. In particular, we study how educational expansion has contributed to the observed changes in mobility opportunities for men across cohorts. Drawing on recently developed decomposition methods, we empirically identify the contribution of each of the multiple channels through which changing rates of educational participation shape mobility trends. We find that a modest but gradual increase in social class mobility can nearly exclusively be ascribed to an interaction known as the compositional effect, according to which the direct influence of social class backgrounds on social class destinations is lower among the growing number of individuals attaining higher levels of education. This dominant role of the compositional effect is also due to the fact that, despite pronounced changes in the distribution of education, class inequality in education has remained stable while class returns to education have shown no consistent trend. Our analyses also provide a cautionary tale about mistaking increasing levels of social class mobility for a general trend toward more fluidity in the United States. The impact of parental education on son’s educational and class attainment has grown or remained stable, respectively. Here, the compositional effect pertaining to the direct association between parental education and son’s class attainment counteracts a long-term trend of increasing inequality in educational attainment tied to parents’ education.

Migration and Immigration

Beyond “White by Law”: Explaining the Gulf in Citizenship Acquisition between Mexican and European Immigrants, 1930
Cybelle Fox, Irene Bloemraad
Between 1790 and 1952, naturalization was reserved primarily for “free white persons.” Asian immigrants were deemed non-white and racially ineligible for citizenship by legislation and the courts. European immigrants and, importantly, Mexican immigrants were considered white by law and eligible for naturalization. Yet, few Mexicans acquired US citizenship. By 1930, only 9 percent of Mexican men had naturalized, compared to 60 percent of southern and eastern Europeans and 80 percent of northern and western Europeans. If Mexicans were legally white, why did they rarely acquire citizenship in the early decades of the 20th century? We go beyond analyses focused on formal law or individual-level determinants to underscore the importance of region and non-white social status in influencing naturalization. Using 1930 US Census microfile data, we find that while individual characteristics (e.g., length of residence and literacy) explain some of the gulf in citizenship, the context of reception mattered nearly as much. Even if Mexicans were “white by law,” they were often judged non-white in practice, which significantly decreased their likelihood of naturalizing. Moreover, the more welcoming political and social climate of the Northeast and Midwest, where most European migrants lived, facilitated their acquisition of American citizenship.

Hispanics at the Starting Line: Poverty among Newborn Infants in Established Gateways and New Destinations
Daniel T. Lichter, Scott R. Sanders, Kenneth M. Johnson
High rates of Hispanic fertility raise an important question: Do Hispanic newborn babies start life’s race behind the starting line, poor and disadvantaged? To address this question, we link the newborn infants identified with the new fertility question in the 2006–2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to the poverty status of mothers. Our results document the disproportionately large share (40 percent) of Hispanic babies who are born into poverty. The prospect of poverty is especially high in new Hispanic destinations, especially those in rural areas. For Hispanic newborn babies, poverty cannot be reduced to supply-side explanations that emphasize maladaptive behavioral decision-making of parents, that is, nonmarital or teen childbearing, low educational attainment, acquisition of English language skills, or other dimensions of human capital. Hispanics in new destinations often start well behind the starting line—in poverty and with limited opportunities for upward mobility and an inadequate welfare safety net. The recent concentration of Hispanic poverty in new immigrant destinations portends continuing intergenerational inequality as today’s newborn infants make their way to productive adult roles.

The Resurgence of Race in Spain: Perceptions of Discrimination Among Immigrants
René D. Flores
The contemporary relevance of the concept of “race” has been increasingly questioned around the world. In Europe, researchers often look with skepticism at the US emphasis on race, instead highlighting the capacity of culture, especially religion, to explain native opposition to immigrants. Using two distinct data sets, I examine self-reports of discrimination among immigrants in Spain, where elites have long denied racial differences, to understand how the reported salience of boundaries based on race, nationality, and religion change with acculturation. I find that reports of both nationality- and race-based discrimination are relatively common for newcomers, while reports of religion-based discrimination are quite rare. Yet, unlike reports of racial discrimination, reports of nationality discrimination decrease over time as immigrants’ cultural differences decline due to their cultural assimilation. For second-generation immigrants, especially non-Europeans, race replaces nationality as the primary explanation for discrimination experiences and reports of religious discrimination grow even more infrequent. I conclude that, from the perspective of immigrants, the recent transformation of Spain into a new immigrant destination has gone hand in hand with the emergence of race as the main symbolic boundary marginalizing non-European immigrants in Spain.

Negotiating Migration, Performing Gender
Anju Mary Paul
Increasing numbers of independent women labor migrants leave countries in the Global South every year to work overseas. However, our understanding of how exactly gender and migration intersect at the decision-making moment is still inadequate. The new economics of labor migration (NELM) argument that individual migration is a household-level decision has been criticized by feminist scholars for ignoring the gendered social norms and inequitable intra-household power distribution that can make it difficult for prospective independent female labor migrants to leave their homes to work overseas. To reconcile NELM with gender reality, I propose an explicitly gendered, “negotiated migration model” that separates the pre-migratory process into three parts: an individual-level aspiration, the household-/family-level negotiation, and only then, the migration decision. The intermediate negotiation phase is a dynamic, two-sided, discursive site where both the aspiring migrant and her relatives engage in gendering practices and gender performances to bolster their respective positions. Interviews with 139 Filipino migrant domestic workers reveal that successful female migrants win their families’ support by coopting gendered scripts prevalent in Philippine society. Rather than attempting to “undo” gender, these women reframe their migration aspirations as a duty, rather than a right, to migrate, and a logical extension of their traditional, supporting roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and/or mothers. Thus, even though these women migrants break gender barriers when it comes to their independent labor migration, they do so by “doing,” rather than “undoing,” gender.

Housing and Poverty

Eviction’s Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health
Matthew Desmond, Rachel Tolbert Kimbro
Millions of families across the United States are evicted each year. Yet, we know next to nothing about the impact eviction has on their lives. Focusing on low-income urban mothers, a population at high risk of eviction, this study is among the first to examine rigorously the consequences of involuntary displacement from housing. Applying two methods of propensity score analyses to data from a national survey, we find that eviction has negative effects on mothers in multiple domains. Compared to matched mothers who were not evicted, mothers who were evicted in the previous year experienced more material hardship, were more likely to suffer from depression, reported worse health for themselves and their children, and reported more parenting stress. Some evidence suggests that at least two years after their eviction, mothers still experienced significantly higher rates of material hardship and depression than peers.

Housing Policy and Urban Inequality: Did the Transformation of Assisted Housing Reduce Poverty Concentration?
Ann Owens
Poverty concentration reflects long-standing inequalities between neighborhoods in the United States. As the poverty concentration paradigm gained traction among policymakers and social scientists, assisted housing policy was overhauled. New assisted housing programs introduced since 1970 have dramatically reduced the geographic concentration of assisted housing units, changing the residential location of many low-income residents. Was this intervention in the housing market enough to reduce poverty concentration? Using national longitudinal data, I find that the deconcentration of assisted housing from 1977 to 2008 only modestly reduced poverty concentration in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. The results are driven by the deconcentration of assisted housing after 2000, when policies had a greater focus on dispersal of assisted housing to low-poverty neighborhoods. My results suggest that even a substantial shift in housing policy cannot make great strides in deconcentrating poverty given the existing landscape of durable urban inequality. Assisted housing policy exists alongside many other structural forces that cluster poor residents in neighborhoods, and these factors may limit its ability to reduce poverty concentration. Moreover, new housing programs rely on the private market to determine the location of assisted units, and the enduring place hierarchy among neighborhoods may influence both where assisted housing is located and its effect on the residential choices of non-assisted residents in ways that undermine poverty deconcentration.

Unions

What Do Unions Do?: A Cross-National Reexamination of the Relationship between Unionization and Job Satisfaction
Lena Hipp, Rebecca Kolins Givan
What is the relationship between unionization and job satisfaction? Despite a great deal of research over several decades, the answer to this question is still uncertain. In contrast to earlier work, which analyzed mostly data from individual companies or countries, we examine the association between union membership and job satisfaction in a cross-national perspective. We therefore combine large-scale survey data with country-level information about union and labor-market characteristics. Our multilevel approach allows us to examine whether and why the unionization–job satisfaction relationship varies across countries. The main finding of our analyses is that the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction varies across countries and that unions matter only for certain aspects of job satisfaction—those that can more readily be changed by unions. This effect, moreover, is contingent on countries’ industrial relations systems, in particular union density, bargaining coverage, and the centralization of bargaining agreements. Taken together, our results show that in order to understand how unionization influences job satisfaction, it is important to distinguish between the various aspects of job satisfaction and to consider the larger context in which unions operate.

Sexualities

Time Period, Generational, and Age Differences in Tolerance for Controversial Beliefs and Lifestyles in the United States, 1972–2012
Jean M. Twenge, Nathan T. Carter, W. Keith Campbell
Americans have become increasingly tolerant of controversial outgroups in results from the nationally representative General Social Survey (1972–2012, N = 35,048). Specifically, adults in the 2010s (versus the 1970s and 1980s) were more likely to agree that Communists, homosexuals, the anti-religious, militarists, and those believing Blacks are genetically inferior should be allowed to give a public speech, teach at a college, or have a book in a local library. Cross-classification hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses separating the effects of time period, cohort/generation, and age show that these trends were driven by both a linear time period effect and a curvilinear cohort effect, with those born in the late 1940s (Boomers) the most tolerant when age and time period were controlled. Tolerance of homosexuals increased the most, and tolerance of racists the least. The increase in tolerance is positively correlated with higher levels of education and individualistic attitudes, including rejecting traditional social rules, but is negatively correlated with changes in empathy.

The Power of Love: The Role of Emotional Attributions and Standards in Heterosexuals' Attitudes toward Lesbian and Gay Couples
Long Doan, Lisa R. Miller, Annalise Loehr
Do people attribute emotions differently to members of various social groups? If so, do these differences have any bearing on formal and informal forms of social recognition? Using data from a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine whether American heterosexuals differentially attribute love to lesbian, gay, and heterosexual couples. We also examine the relationship between how in love lesbian, gay, and heterosexual couples are perceived to be and attitudes toward (1) granting them partnership benefits (formal rights); (2) the acceptability of their public displays of affection (informal privileges); and (3) marriage. Three main findings suggest that heterosexuals differentially attribute love to different types of romantic couples and that these differences are related to willingness to grant social recognition. First, gay couples are viewed as less loving than both heterosexual and lesbian couples; lesbian couples are seen as equally loving as heterosexual couples. Second, perceptions of love are related to willingness to grant social recognition. Third, perceptions of love matter more for gay and, to a lesser extent, lesbian couples than for heterosexual couples regarding informal privileges and marriage. In contrast, love matters equally for same-sex and heterosexual couples regarding formal rights. The results show that gay couples are penalized most in terms of perceptions of love and social recognition, whereas lesbians occupy a liminal space between heterosexual and gay couples. Collectively, these findings suggest that sexual identity and gender shape emotional attributions, which in turn play a key role in explaining inequalities that same-sex couples face.

Social Networks

“Network Intervention:.”: Assessing the Effects of Formal Mentoring on Workplace Networks
Sameer B. Srivastava
This article assesses the effects of formal mentoring on workplace networks. It also provides conceptual clarity and empirical evidence on expected gender differences in the effects of such programs. Qualitative interviews with 40 past participants in a formal mentoring program at a software laboratory in Beijing, China, provide insight into the core mechanisms by which such programs produce network change: access to organizational elites, participation in semiformal foci, enhanced social skills, and legitimacy-enhancing signals. These mechanisms are theorized to lead to an expansion in proteges' networks, relative to those of non-participants in formal mentoring. Legitimacy-enhancing signals are theorized to enable female proteges to derive greater network benefit from formal mentoring than their male counterparts. Empirical support for these propositions comes from a longitudinal quasi-experiment involving 75 employees who experienced the treatment of formal mentoring and 64 employees in a matched control group. A second empirical strategy, which exploits exogenous variation in the timing of treatment and enables a comparison of the post-program networks of one treated group to the pre-program networks of another treated group, provides corroborating support. These findings contribute to research on the efficacy of formal mentoring, gender and workplace networks, and the cumulative advantage or disadvantage that can arise from network change.

Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study
Christoph Stadtfeld, Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ties drive clustering in friendship networks: individuals who are in a partnership tend to have common friends and befriend other couples. Second, partnership ties influence the level of homophily in these emerging friendship clusters. Partners tend to be similar in a number of attributes (homogamy). If one partner selects friends based on preferences for homophily, then the other partner may befriend the same person regardless of whether they also have homophilic preferences. Thus, two homophilic ties emerge based on a single partner's preferences. This amplification of homophily can be observed in many attributes (e.g., ethnicity, religion, age). Gender homophily, however, may be de-amplified, as the gender of partners differs in hetero-sexual partnerships. In our study, we follow dynamic friendship formation among 126 individuals and their cohabiting partners in a university-related graduate housing community over a period of nine months (N = 2,250 self-reported friendship relations). We find that partnership ties strongly shape the dynamic process of friendship formation. They are a main driver of local network clustering and explain a striking amount of homophily.

Social Psychology Quarterly 78(3)

Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2015: Volume 78, Issue 3

The Transition to Adulthood: Life Course Structures and Subjective Perceptions
Scott R. Eliason, Jeylan T. Mortimer, and Mike Vuolo

Working the Boardwalk: Trust in a Public Marketplace
Laura A. Orrico

Threat, Opportunity, and Network Interaction in Organizations
Sameer B. Srivastava

Poverty Attributions and the Perceived Justice of Income Inequality: A Comparison of East and West Germany
Simone M. Schneider and Juan C. Castillo

Criminology & Public Policy 14(2)

Criminology & Public Policy, May 2015: Volume 14, Issue 2

DISADVANTAGE AND SENTENCING OF BLACK DEFENDANTS

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Examining the “Life Course” of Criminal Cases
Brian D. Johnson

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Is the Impact of Cumulative Disadvantage on Sentencing Greater for Black Defendants?
John Wooldredge, James Frank, Natalie Goulette and Lawrence Travis III
Research Summary: We examined race-group differences in the effects of how felony defendants are treated at earlier decision points in case processing on case outcomes. Multilevel analyses of 3,459 defendants nested within 123 prosecutors and 34 judges in a large, northern U.S. jurisdiction revealed significant main and interaction effects of a defendant's race on bond amounts, pretrial detention, and nonsuspended prison sentences, but no significant effects on charge reductions and prison sentence length. Evidence of greater “cumulative disadvantages” for Black defendants in general and young Black men in particular was revealed by significant indirect race effects on the odds of pretrial detention via type of attorney, prior imprisonment, and bond amounts, as well as by indirect race effects on prison sentences via pretrial detention and prior imprisonment.
Policy Implications: The consideration of cumulative disadvantage is important for a more complete understanding of the overincarceration of Blacks in the United States. Toward the end of reducing racial disparities in the distribution of prison sentences, courts might (a) reduce reliance on money bail, (b) consider bail amounts for indigent defendants more carefully, and (c) increase the structure of pretrial decision making to reduce the stronger effects of imprisonment history and type of attorney on the odds of pretrial detention for Black suspects.

POLICY ESSAYS

Evolution of Sentencing Research
Cassia Spohn

Attenuating Disparities Through Four Areas of Change
Traci Schlesinger

POLICE ENCOUNTERS WITH PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Police Encounters with People with Mental Illness
Robin S. Engel

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Is Dangerousness a Myth? Injuries and Police Encounters with People with Mental Illnesses
Melissa Schaefer Morabito and Kelly M. Socia
Research Summary: This study examined all “use-of-force” reports collected by the Portland Police Bureau in Portland, Oregon, between 2008 and 2011, to determine whether their encounters with people with mental illnesses are more likely to result in injury to officers or subjects when force is used. Although several factors significantly predicted the likelihood of injury to either subjects or officers, mental illness was not one of them.
Policy Implications: Police consider interactions with people with mental illnesses to be extremely dangerous (Margarita, 1980). Our results question the accuracy of this belief. As such, this “dangerousness” assertion may result in unnecessary stigmatization that may prevent people with mental illnesses from accessing needed services (cf. Corrigan et al., 2005) as witnesses or victims of crime. Policies that reduce stigma may help increase police effectiveness. Furthermore, efforts should be made to increase the availability and accuracy of data on this issue.

POLICY ESSAYS

Police Use of Force and the Suspect with Mental Illness
Geoffrey P. Alpert

Building on the Evidence
Allison G. Robertson

OUTCOME EVALUATION PROGRAM FOR FEMALE OFFENDERS

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Implementation and Outcomes in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Among Female Prisoners
Gary Zajac

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Importance of Program Integrity
Grant Duwe and Valerie Clark
Research Summary: We used a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of Moving On, a gender-responsive, cognitive-behavioral program designed for female offenders. Between 2001 and 2013, there were two distinct periods in which Moving On was administered with, and without, fidelity among female Minnesota prisoners. To determine whether program integrity matters, we examined the performance of Moving On across these two periods. By using multiple comparison groups, we found that Moving On significantly reduced two of the four measures of recidivism when it was implemented with fidelity. The program did not have a significant impact on any of the four recidivism measures, however, when it operated without fidelity.
Policy Implication: The growth of the “what works” literature and the emphasis on evidence-based practices have helped foster the notion that correctional systems can improve public safety by reducing recidivism. Given that Moving On's success hinged on whether it was delivered with integrity, our results show that correctional practitioners can take an effective intervention and make it ineffective. Providing offenders with evidence-based interventions that lack therapeutic integrity not only promotes a false sense of effectiveness, but also it squanders the limited supply of programming resources available to correctional agencies. The findings suggest that ensuring program integrity is critical to the efficient use of successful interventions that deliver on the promise of reduced recidivism.

POLICY ESSAYS

Program Integrity and the Principles of Gender-Responsive Interventions
Emily J. Salisbury

Rethinking Program Fidelity for Criminal Justice
J. Mitchell Miller and Holly Ventura Miller

FORGOTTEN PRISONERS

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Changing the Knowledge Base and Public Perception of Long-Term Prisoners
Marc Mauer

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Imperative for Inclusion of Long Termers and Lifers in Research and Policy
Lila Kazemian and Jeremy Travis
Research Summary: Although numerous studies have highlighted the negative consequences of mass incarceration, life-course and criminal career research has largely failed to document psychological, social, and behavioral changes that occur during periods of incarceration. This oversight is particularly noteworthy in the case of individuals serving long sentences, as they spend a significant portion of the life course behind bars. The policies and programs targeting prisoners are seldom tailored to long termers and lifers, and we know little about effective interventions, or even how to measure effectiveness, for this population. By drawing on the relevant empirical research, this article underlines the importance of reorienting some research efforts and policy priorities toward individuals serving life or otherwise long prison sentences.
Policy Implications: During the last 20 years, the prevalence of life sentences has increased substantially in the United States. We argue that there are various benefits to developing policies that consider the challenges and issues affecting long termers and lifers. In addition to the ethical and human rights concerns associated with the treatment of this population, there are several pragmatic justifications for this argument. Long termers and lifers spend a substantial number of years in prison, but most are eventually released. These individuals can play a key role in shaping the prison community and potentially could contribute to the development of a healthier prison climate. Investment in the well-being of individuals serving long sentences may also have diffused benefits that can extend to their families and communities. It would be advantageous for correctional authorities and policy makers to consider the potentially pivotal role of long termers and lifers in efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of incarceration.

POLICY ESSAYS

Reducing Severe Sentences
Jessica S. Henry

Effects of Life Imprisonment and the Crisis of Prisoner Health
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner

TERRORISM TARGET SUITABILITY

SPECIAL ESSAY
Target Suitability and Terrorism Events at Places
Nancy A. Morris

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Criminology 53(3)

Criminology, August 2015, Volume 53, Issue 3

Biting Once, Twice: The Influence Of Prior On Subsequent Crime Location Choice
Marre Lammers, Barbara Menting, Stijn Ruiter And Wim Bernasco
Properties, victims, and locations previously targeted by offenders have an increased risk of being targeted again within a short time period. It has been suggested that often the same offenders are involved in these repeated events and, thus, that offenders’ prior crime location choices influence their subsequent crime location choices. This article examines repeated crime location choices, testing the hypothesis that offenders are more likely to commit a crime in an area they previously targeted than in areas they did not target before. Unique data from four different data sources are used to study the crime location choices of 3,666 offenders who committed 12,639 offenses. The results indicate that prior crime locations strongly influence subsequent crime location choices. The effects of prior crime locations are larger if the crimes are frequent, if they are recent, if they are nearby, and if they are the same type of crime.

Intimate Partner Violence In Young Adulthood: Narratives Of Persistence And Desistance
Peggy C. Giordano, Wendi L. Johnson, Wendy D. Manning, Monica A. Longmore And Mallory D. Minter
Prior research on patterns of intimate partner violence (IPV) has documented changes over time, but few studies have focused directly on IPV desistance processes. This analysis identifies unique features of IPV, providing a rationale for the focus on this form of behavior cessation. We develop a life-course perspective on social learning as a conceptual framework and draw on qualitative interviews (n = 89) elicited from a sample of young adults who participated in a larger longitudinal study (Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study). The respondents’ backgrounds reflected a range of persistence and desistance from IPV perpetration. Our analyses revealed that relationship-based motivations and changes were central features of the narratives of successful desisters, whether articulated as a stand-alone theme or in tandem with other potential “hooks” for change. The analysis provides a counterpoint to individualistic views of desistance processes, highlighting ways in which social experiences foster attitude shifts and associated behavioral changes that respondents tied to this type of behavior change. The analyses of persisters and those for whom change seemed to be a work in progress provide points of contrast and highlight barriers that limit a respondent's desistance potential. We describe implications for theories of desistance as well as for IPV prevention and intervention efforts.

Delinquency And Gender Moderation In The Moving To Opportunity Intervention: The Role Of Extended Neighborhoods
Corina Graif
A long history of research has indicated that neighborhood poverty increases youth's risk taking and delinquency. This literature predominantly has treated neighborhoods as independent of their surroundings despite rapidly growing ecological evidence on the geographic clustering of crime that suggests otherwise. This study proposes that to understand neighborhood effects, investigating youth's wider surroundings holds theoretical and empirical value. By revisiting longitudinal data on more than 1500 low-income youth who participated in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized intervention, this article explores the importance of extended neighborhoods (neighborhoods and surroundings) and different concentrated disadvantage configurations in shaping gender differences in risk taking and delinquency. The results from two-stage, least-squares analyses suggest that the extended neighborhoods matter and they matter differently by gender. Among girls, extended neighborhoods without concentrated disadvantage were associated with lower risk-taking prevalence than extended neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage. In contrast, among boys, localized concentration of disadvantage was associated with the highest prevalence of risk taking and delinquency. Interactions between the immediate and surrounding neighborhoods were similarly associated with differential opportunity and social disorganization mediators. Among the more critical potential mediators of the link between localized disadvantage and boys’ risk taking were delinquent network ties, strain, and perceived absence of legitimate opportunities for success.

Close-Ups And The Scale Of Ecology: Land Uses And The Geography Of Social Context And Crime
Adam Boessen And John R. Hipp
Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso-area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land-use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.

Intimate Partner Violence Risk Among Victims Of Youth Violence: Are Early Unions Bad, Beneficial, Or Benign?
Danielle C. Kuhl, David F. Warner And Tara D. Warner
Youth violent victimization (YVV) is a risk factor for precocious exits from adolescence via early coresidential union formation. It remains unclear, however, whether these early unions 1) are associated with intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization, 2) interrupt victim continuity or victim–offender overlap through protective and prosocial bonds, or 3) are inconsequential. By using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 11,928; 18–34 years of age), we examine competing hypotheses for the effect of early union timing among victims of youth violence (n = 2,479)—differentiating across victimization only, perpetration only, and mutually combative relationships and considering variation by gender. The results from multinomial logistic regression models indicate that YVV increases the risk of IPV victimization in first unions, regardless of union timing; the null effect of timing indicates that delaying union formation would not reduce youth victims’ increased risk of continued victimization. Gender-stratified analyses reveal that earlier unions can protect women against IPV perpetration, but this is partly the result of an increased risk of IPV victimization. The findings suggest that YVV has significant transformative consequences, leading to subsequent victimization by coresidential partners, and this association might be exacerbated among female victims who form early unions. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.

Testing For Temporally Differentiated Relationships Among Potentially Criminogenic Places And Census Block Street Robbery Counts
Cory P. Haberman And Jerry H. Ratcliffe
This study examined street robbery patterns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from the years 2009 to 2011 to determine whether the effects of potentially criminogenic places are different across different periods of the day. Census block (N = 13,164) street robbery counts across four periods (6:45 a.m. to 9:59 a.m., 10:00 a.m. to 4:29 p.m., 4:30 p.m. to 9:14 p.m., and 9:15 p.m. to 6:44 a.m.) were modeled with 12 different potentially criminogenic places, 3 measures of illicit markets, 4 compositional control variables, and spatially lagged versions of the 12 potentially criminogenic places and population using simultaneously estimated negative binomial regression models. Differences in the magnitudes of the parameter estimates across the time periods were assessed with Wald tests. Overall, the patterns across the four models were mostly consistent with the effects hypothesized based on the study's crime pattern theory and time-geography theoretical frame; yet differences in the magnitudes of the coefficients were less pronounced than hypothesized. Overall, the results provide moderate support for the crime pattern theory and time-geography explanation of spatial-temporal robbery patterns; however, numerous points are raised for future crime and place research.

A Threshold Model Of Collective Crime
Jean Marie Mcgloin And Zachary R. Rowan
The group nature of offending has been recognized as an inherent characteristic of criminal behavior, yet our insight on the decision to engage in group crime is limited. This article argues that a threshold model offers broad appeal to understand this decision. After discussing the basis of this model and its applicability to collective crime, we offer one example of the kind of research that could stem from this model. Specifically, by using survey data from 583 university students, this study asked respondents to self-report thresholds for group theft and destruction of property. By experimentally manipulating characteristics of the hypothetical scenario used to measure thresholds, we investigated both the individual- and situational-level correlates of these self-reported thresholds. The discussion considers the results that emerge from a Tobit regression model and offers suggestions for future research that would provide further refinement of the threshold model.

American Journal of Sociology 121(1)

Tools from the study of neighborhood effects, place distinction, and regional identity are employed in an ethnography of four small cities with growing populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified (LBQ) women to explain why orientations to sexual identity are relatively constant within each site, despite informants’ within-city demographic heterogeneity, but vary substantially across the sites, despite common place-based attributes. The author introduces the concept of “sexual identity cultures”—and reveals the defining role of cities in shaping their contours. She finds that LBQ numbers and acceptance, place narratives, and newcomers’ encounters with local social attributes serve as touchstones. The article looks beyond major categorical differences (e.g., urban/rural) to understand how and why identities evolve and vary and to reveal the fundamental interplay of demographic, cultural, and other city features previously thought isolatable. The findings challenge notions of identity as fixed and emphasize the degree to which self-understanding and group understanding remain collective accomplishments.

Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a distinctive class of processes. References to chance happenings offer no clue to analyze endogenous disruptions. Focusing on breaks in patterns of social relations and the role played by individual agency, the author distinguishes four types of impact—pyramidal, pivotal, sequential, and epistemic—and investigates how these relate to the possibility of indeterminacy through an Event Structure Analysis of the night of August 4, 1789, in Versailles. This empirical foray underscores the significance of junctures that are indeterminate with respect to their collective outcomes. The article grounds analytically this class of conjunctures with the concept of mutual uncertainty, gauges the phenomenal scope of this contingency in terms of action domains and group types, contrasts it with the notion of chance events, and draws its implications for the study of social and historical change.

The shift away from school desegregation policies toward market-based reforms necessitates a deeper understanding of the social and institutional forces driving contemporary school segregation. The author conceptualizes school segregation as a mode of monopolistic closure amid status competition, where racial/ethnic groups compete for school-based status and resources. He tests the theory by analyzing primary and secondary school segregation throughout the United States from 1993 to 2010. Findings support the hypotheses that segregation increases with the salience of race/ethnicity and the decentralization of school systems, which fuels differentiation and provides incentives and opportunities to monopolize schools. Parallel findings for black-white, Hispanic-white, and black-Hispanic segregation suggest that a core set of processes drives school segregation as a general phenomenon.

How do gender relations regulate the American state? To answer this question the author examines archival material on the formation and operation of the Selective Service System during World War I, the understudied federal American draft system. She shows how the federal government vested local draft board members with the authority to determine on a subjective, case-by-case basis whether potential draftees were genuine breadwinners in determining whom to draft and who would receive dependency-based deferments. Informal rules of thumb about the gender-ordered family structured the First World War draft. By analyzing the Selective Service System and by placing feminist political sociology, scholarship in the American political development tradition, and Weberian scholarship on the modern state in critical dialogue with one another, the author identifies how the American state’s locally applied substantive rationality relied on the family’s gender hierarchy in ordering its rational informality. Gender relations thereby rationalized the state’s local informality.

Based on focus groups and interviews with student renters in an Israeli slum, the article explores the contributions of differences in sonic styles and sensibilities to boundary work, social categorization, and evaluation. Alongside visual cues such as broken windows, bad neighborhoods are characterized by sonic cues, such as shouts from windows. Students understand “being ghetto” as being loud in a particular way and use loudness as a central resource in their boundary work. Loudness is read as a performative index of class and ethnicity, and the performance of middle-class studentship entails being appalled by stigmatized sonic practices and participating in their exoticization. However, the sonic is not merely yet another resource of boundary work. Paying sociological attention to senses other than vision reveals complex interactions between structures anchored in the body, structures anchored in language, and actors’ identification strategies, which may refine theorizations of the body and the senses in social theory.

Caste and Choice: The Influence of Developmental Idealism on Marriage Behavior
Keera Allendorf and Arland Thornton
Is the marriage behavior of young people determined by their socioeconomic characteristics or their endorsement of developmental idealism? This article addresses this question using a unique longitudinal data set from Nepal and provides the first individual-level test of developmental idealism theory. The authors find that unmarried individuals with greater endorsement of developmental idealism in 2008 were more likely by 2012 to choose their own spouse, including a spouse of a different caste, rather than have an arranged marriage. Those with salaried work experience were also less likely to have arranged marriages, but urban proximity and education were not significant. The authors conclude that both developmental idealism and socioeconomic characteristics influence marriage and that their influences are largely independent.

Annual Review of Sociology 41

Annual Review of Sociology, 2015: Volume 41

Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas
Patricia Hill Collins

What Sociologists Should Know About Complexity
Scott E. Page

Beyond Altruism: Sociological Foundations of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior
Brent Simpson and Robb Willer

The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk
Miguel A. Centeno, Manish Nag, Thayer S. Patterson, Andrew Shaver, and A. Jason Windawi

The Stigma Complex
Bernice A. Pescosolido and Jack K. Martin

The Sociology of Consumption: Its Recent Development
Alan Warde

Punishment Regimes and the Multilevel Effects of Parental Incarceration: Intergenerational, Intersectional, and Interinstitutional Models of Social Inequality and Systemic Exclusion
Holly Foster and John Hagan

Sociology and School Choice: What We Know After Two Decades of Charter Schools
Mark Berends

Effects of the Great Recession: Health and Well-Being
Sarah A. Burgard and Lucie Kalousova

Financialization of the Economy
Gerald F. Davis and Suntae Kim

Human Trafficking and Contemporary Slavery
Ronald Weitzer

New Directions for the Sociology of Development
Jocelyn Viterna and Cassandra Robertson

Empire, Health, and Health Care: Perspectives at the End of Empire as We Have Known It
Howard Waitzkin and Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar

Incarceration and Health
Michael Massoglia and William Alex Pridemore

Is Racism a Fundamental Cause of Inequalities in Health?
Jo C. Phelan and Bruce G. Link

STEM Education
Yu Xie, Michael Fang, and Kimberlee Shauman

The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment
Jennie E. Brand

Environmental Dimensions of Migration
Lori M. Hunter, Jessie K. Luna, and Rachel M. Norton

Intraregional Migration in South America: Trends and a Research Agenda
Marcela Cerrutti and Emilio Parrado

Reproduction
Rene Almeling

Does Schooling Increase or Reduce Social Inequality?
Stephen W. Raudenbush and Robert D. Eschmann

Marriage and Family in East Asia: Continuity and Change
James M. Raymo, Hyunjoon Park, Yu Xie, and Wei-jun Jean Yeung

Crime & Delinquency 61(7)

Crime & Delinquency, September 2015: Volume 61, Issue 7

The Victim-Offender Overlap, Intimate Partner Violence, and Sex: Assessing Differences Among Victims, Offenders, and Victim-Offenders
Lisa R. Muftić, Mary A. Finn, and Erin A. Marsh
This study examines the overlap between victimization and offending within officially recorded incidents of intimate partner violence (IPV). Using official police data, 1,256 individuals are initially differentiated by their role as the victim or the offender in an IPV incident and then categorized into four distinct groups (e.g., as victims, persistent offenders, desistent offenders, or victim-offenders) based on their role in further officially recorded IPV incidents during an 18-to 30-month follow-up period. Of particular interest is the victim-offender category, which involves individuals who switched roles from the original IPV incident (e.g., IPV victims who later became IPV offenders or IPV offenders who later became IPV victims). Results suggest that important distinctions exist across categories related to sex and crime exposure. Compared with victims who were predominately female and offenders who were predominately male, victim-offenders were the most gender symmetric and exhibited greater contacts with the justice process prior to and after the original IPV incident. Implications from these findings, as well as limitations and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Trajectories of Crime and Familial Characteristics: A Longitudinal National Population-Based Study
Shachar Yonai, Stephen Z. Levine, and Joseph Glicksohn
The present study primarily aims to empirically identify offender trajectory groups and their associated first-, second-, and third-degree familial characteristics. Data were extracted on all first and subsequent juvenile offenders (n = 18,915) with criminal convictions (n = 90,393) from 1996 to 2008 recorded in the National Crime Registry of the State of Israel. Semiparametric group-based modeling identified low-rate (76.88%), late-peak adolescence (3.85%), middle-peak adolescence (10.22%), early-peak adolescence (3.22%), and chronic (5.83%) offender trajectories. Compared with low-rate offenders, chronic offenders had significantly more nonviolent offenses and first-degree imprisoned relatives who were imprisoned during childhood and adolescence. In conclusion, parental imprisonment appears to act as a parent–child separation mechanism that modestly increases the likelihood of chronic offending.

Crime and the Transition to Adulthood: A Person-Centered Approach
Stacey J. Bosick
Recent studies of the transition to adulthood advocate taking a person-centered approach and modeling key transitional events simultaneously. This article advances this literature by focusing on precarious transitioning among at-risk youth and relating their transition experiences to criminal offending. I find evidence for three distinct “pathways” to adulthood. Those with juvenile convictions are equally likely to take one of two “precarious” routes to adulthood—an early family starter pathway or a stalled pathway. Importantly, early family starters are much less likely than stalled transitioners to offend as adults. The findings suggest the transition to adulthood represents a fork in the road for juvenile delinquents in which early family starting serves as an avenue out of continued offending.

The Relationship Between Childhood Maltreatment and Adolescent Violent Victimization
Marie Skubak Tillyer
Research has identified numerous negative consequences of childhood maltreatment, including poor academic performance, psychological distress, and delinquency. To date, studies examining childhood maltreatment and subsequent victimization have largely focused on the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and intimate partner abuse in adulthood. It is unclear, however, if maltreatment during childhood is related to subsequent violent victimization during adolescence. Theories of victimization, in combination with the existing literature on the causes and consequences of childhood maltreatment, suggest that these experiences would be correlated. This study used longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents to examine whether childhood maltreatment is empirically related to subsequent adolescent violent victimization, and if so, whether this relationship can be explained by existing victimization theories. Findings indicate that a significant relationship exists between childhood maltreatment and adolescent violent victimization, and that a risky lifestyle appears to mediate the relationship.

Whites’ Perceptions About Black Criminality: A Closer Look at the Contact Hypothesis
Christina Mancini, Daniel P. Mears, Eric A. Stewart, Kevin M. Beaver, and Justin T. Pickett
Scholars have documented how media accounts and policy discourse have presented Blacks and criminality as virtually synonymous, a phenomenon termed the racialization of crime. However, despite extant research on the contact hypothesis—which holds that relationships with members of other groups should reduce stereotypes—no studies have examined whether different indicators of interracial contact (IC) affect Whites’ perceptions of Black criminality; by extension, no research speaks to whether IC effects are contingent on types of racialized views, or whether the amount of IC impacts perceptions. To advance scholarship, this study uses survey data to analyze the extent to which each type of IC is associated with Whites’ views of Black criminality. It then examines whether IC differentially predicts beliefs in crime versus non-crime-related stereotypes. Finally, it assesses whether the amount of IC influences stereotype endorsement. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, results indicate a generalized stereotype-reducing impact of IC, with some caveats.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 661

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2015; Volume 661

Introduction

Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism: The Ideological Double Helix of Racial Inequality
W. Carson Byrd and Matthew W. Hughey

Race and Biological Determinism: Then and Now

Great Is Their Sin: Biological Determinism in the Age of Genomics
Joseph L. Graves, Jr.

Back to the Future? The Emergence of a Geneticized Conceptualization of Race in Sociology
Reanne Frank

How Troubling Is Our Inheritance? A Review of Genetics and Race in the Social Sciences
Philip N. Cohen

Racializing Genes and Biological Determinism in Health and Science

Science and Struggle: Emerging Forms of Race and Activism in the Genomic Era
Catherine Bliss

Race, Methodology, and Social Construction in the Genomic Era
Tukufu Zuberi, Evelyn J. Patterson, and Quincy Thomas Stewart

Biological Determinism and Social Policy

The Emperor’s New Genes: Science, Public Policy, and the Allure of Objectivity
Ruha Benjamin

The Biobank as Political Artifact: The Struggle over Race in Categorizing Genetic Difference
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee

Genetic Determinism, Technology Optimism, and Race: Views of the American Public
Jennifer Hochschild and Maya Sen

Biological Determinism in Everyday Life

A Level Playing Field? Media Constructions of Athletics, Genetics, and Race
Matthew W. Hughey and Devon R. Goss

Ultimate Attribution in the Genetic Era: White Support for Genetic Explanations of Racial Difference and Policies
W. Carson Byrd and Victor E. Ray

Conclusion

Beautiful Melodies Telling Me Terrible Things: The Future of Race and Genetics for Scholars and Policy-Makers
Matthew W. Hughey and W. Carson Byrd

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Critical Criminology 23(3)

Critical Criminology, September 2015: Volume 23, Issue 3

Death Matters: Victimization by Particle Matter from Coal Fired Power Plants in the US, a Green Criminological View
Michael J. Lynch & Kimberly L. Barrett
The present study examines deaths and diseases associated with pollution from coal fired power plants (CFPPs) and compares the volume of those deaths and diseases to deaths and injuries associated with street crimes. This comparison illustrates that the single form of pollution studied here—CFPP small particle pollution—causes more deaths in the US than homicides and deserves additional criminological attention. We frame our examination of CFPP deaths and injuries in the corporate crime and green criminological literatures, and explore CFPP pollution as an example of corporate environmental violence. The widespread nature of CFPP violence justifies focusing greater criminological attention on this issue, including the development of policies for remedying pollution, which is now a ubiquitous problem with severe health consequences.

The Anarchy Police: Militant Anti-Fascism as Alternative Policing Practice
Stanislav Vysotsky
Anarchist criminology has produced a strong critique of the system of criminal law, but has only recently started to theorize practical alternatives. The alternatives that it offers have been largely rooted in pacifism through the practice of restorative justice and deescalation of conflict. These models are generally effective so long as the individuals involved are committed to the process being applied. Ethnographic study of the anti-fascist movement in the United States demonstrates a potential model of anarchist response to threats of community and public safety in prefigurative subcultural spaces. The confrontational and violent tactics employed by militant anti-fascists serve as a form of policing based on anarchist principles of spontaneity, direct democracy, and direct action; and can serve as a starting point for theorizing proactive anarchist actions against individuals who threaten public safety and order.

War, Crime and Military Victimhood
Ross McGarry
Within this article the lived realities of violent crimes relating to the British military are explored taking influence from left realist criminology to develop Bryant’s (Khaki-collar crime: deviant behavior in the military context. The Free Press, New York, 1979) notion of Khaki-Collar Crime. Situated within the context of victimology, our attention is drawn to the ways in which two British military personnel have been perceived as victims and offenders of violent crime within public and legal domains. Using these events as a touchstone for critical analysis it is suggested that several key concerns relating to the ‘unification’ of war and criminal justice are illuminated by employing the concept of ‘military victimhood’: it enhances the perception of soldiers’ vulnerabilities; provides sympathetic conditions to understand military offending; subjugates the position of ‘Others’ within the justice system; and has been appropriated to further domestic counter-terrorism policy in the UK. In making this argument a platform is presented to reengage with khaki-collar crime and help rethink criminological left realism.

Moving Full-Speed Ahead in the Wrong Direction? A Critical Examination of US Sex-Offender Policy from a Positive Sexuality Model
D. J. Williams, Jeremy N. Thomas & Emily E. Prior
Despite an extensive research literature on sexual offending, much of current sexual offender policy within the United States runs counter to such literature, and instead, is based on common, pervasive myths about sexual offenders. Not surprisingly, recent studies on sex offender policy effectiveness suggest that current approaches are both costly and largely ineffective. In this paper, we suggest that a longstanding socio-cultural climate of sex-negativity fuels common fears and misconceptions about sexual offending and about policy related to treatment and supervision. We present a positive sexuality model and consider how the effectiveness of dealing with sexual offending issues could be improved through using a positive sexuality approach to guide policy.

Defining Post-release ‘Success’: Using Assemblage and Phenomenography to Reveal Difference and Complexity in Post-prison Conceptions
Diana F. Johns
The complexity of men’s experience of prison release is frequently reduced to singular narratives about reoffending risks or reintegration challenges. This paper seeks to enlarge this conventional view by highlighting the heterogeneous ways in which prison release may be experienced and understood. Analysis of men’s experience of release from prison in Victoria, Australia, shows how the concept of assemblage and a phenomenographic methodology can work together to capture and convey this heterogeneity. By assembling the ways ex-prisoners understand and experience release together with the conceptions of post-release support workers this approach highlights conflict and convergence between different ways of experiencing the post-release terrain, specifically around conflicting notions of post-release ‘success’. The innovative combination of assemblage and phenomenography thus contributes a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the challenges of release from prison and of supporting ex-prisoners’ so-called ‘reintegration’.

Asbestos: Not Just an Exhibit at the Smithsonian
Patrick M. Gerkin & Jacquelynn Doyon-Martin
The Smithsonian Institution operates the largest museum and research complex in the world. In the past 25 years, the Smithsonian Institution has both acted and failed to act in a way that demonstrates a disregard for worker safety in their many facilities. This research examines actions and inactions of the Smithsonian Institution regarding workplace exposure to asbestos. Through a secondary analysis of congressional testimony, citations issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, private reports, and various media accounts of the events, this research seeks to examine the perpetrators’ actions as a crime of omission and offer a theoretical explanation. The explanation attempts to situate the individuals within the micro-, meso-, and macro-level forces that shape motivations and create opportunities for individuals to disregard worker safety and jeopardize human life.

Criminalizing the Political in a Digital Age
Judith Bessant
There is an emergent interest by criminologists in theorising problems that arise when states breach conventional legal norms. This article considers the criminalisation of ‘whistleblowing’ by Manning, Assange and Snowden that revealed illegal actions by the state and major breaches of US and western security intelligence operations. The article asks what such developments mean for the conceptual and normative status of politics and crime constituted in the western liberal frame? It is about criminologists who rely on that paradigm and the need to counter neo-conservative agendas. The article analyzes liberal constitutional democracies with an emphasis on the US. It draws on the work of German theorists Schmitt and Benjamin who stand outside the liberal tradition to highlight how modern states frequently suspends the rule of law and relies on their own sovereign power to declare ‘states of emergency’ to render their own criminal conduct lawful.

Evaluating U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: Failure, Fraud, or Fruitful Spectacle?
Willem de Lint & Wondwossen Kassa
Counterterrorism plays a pivotal role in the projection of U.S. government interests and objectives nationally and globally. A large segment of the strategies, programs and operations of U.S. government agencies and their authorized private counterparts under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security form a counterterrorism policy (CTP) that may be evaluated as more or less meeting those interests and objectives. Building on the work of Mueller and Stewart, Van Dongen, and McConnell, we evaluate U.S. CTP against both an objective and explicit deterrence agenda (reducing terrorism) and a constructivist and implicit objective (consolidating support for governments and their unifying ideologies). The paper supports the conclusion that CTP is a failure if the criterion is restricted to an evaluation of its efficiency in reducing terrorist events. However, CTP is also evaluated against its utility in pushing forward harmonized “ordering” across national and international boundaries and its ability to garner widespread public support of governments in security policy, and here it may be viewed as a success. Against deterrence measures, such success may be a kind of fraud. Against the political imperative, it is a fruitful spectacle. The paper argues that the blurring or blending of these two sets of criteria may not be a deliberate fraud, but enables the maintenance and growth of CTP and the national security infrastructure.

British Journal of Criminology 55(5)

British Journal of Criminology, September 2015: Volume 55, Issue 5

Featured: Greening Justice: Examining the Interfaces of Criminal, Social and Ecological Justice
Rob White and Hannah Graham
This article examines the growth of ecological awareness, alongside the emergence of environmental sustainability initiatives, within criminal justice institutions around the world. To date, such developments have received little empirical analysis from criminology scholars. Internationally, this article is among the first to critically analyse the ‘greening’ of policing, courts, prisons, offender supervision and community reintegration. Available literature and examples are reviewed, alongside original research findings. The motivations and ideologies underpinning this nascent green evolution raise deeper questions of ‘why?’ and ‘for whom?’ Innovative examples of sustainable justice architecture and catalysts for penal reform are differentiated from those which claim humanistic intentions and green credentials but, arguably, are based on instrumental fiscal motives that do little to challenge repressive carceral regimes.

Urban Policy, City Control and Social Catharsis: The Attack on Social Frailty as Therapy
Rowland Atkinson
Urban policies have increasingly been ‘criminalised’ as regeneration, public housing management and homelessness programmes have been aligned with the aims of criminal justice and anti-social behaviour measures. In this article, policies that tackle problem places, people and behaviours are interpreted as expressions of social anger and fear that are made tangible via periodic attacks on social marginality. Case examples are offered in which urban policies appear as a kind of social catharsis or exorcizing of fear/anxiety. Such urban policies appear to construct social vulnerability as a threat that thereby helps to trigger interventions that might help realize goals of urban renewal and release from worries about criminality and urban social decline. This model of control and policymaking is developed by drawing on the emotional energies at the heart of cultural criminology and critical perspectives taken from contemporary urban studies.

William R. Wood
Restorative justice goals are frequently articulated on micro, meso and macro levels. One macro-level goal frequently made by advocates is that restorative justice may serve as a viable means of reducing incarceration. Focusing on Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, this article argues that while these countries have seen some of the largest increases in incarceration within western industrialized countries, as well as the most widespread use of restorative justice, there is little evidence that restorative justice has reduced prison populations. It also argues that as currently practiced there is little reason to assume that restorative justice will have a significant impact on incarceration in the near future. Attention is given to the problem of the ‘transformation assumption’ inherent in restorative justice that micro-level changes in offender behaviours or restorative outcomes can significantly affect the larger social structures of punishment and incarceration.

A Case Study Approach to Procedural Justice: Parents’ Views in Two Juvenile Delinquency Courts in the United States
Liana Pennington
The juvenile delinquency court aims to modify children’s behaviour, but little is known about how parents’ experiences in juvenile delinquency courts may be affecting the court’s efforts. Whether parents believe the court system is fair and effective could have important implications for the juvenile justice system. This research uses two case studies of parents in two different courts in the Northeast United States to examine how parents’ views are created and reinforced through experiences in the juvenile court process. Integrating concepts from the sociolegal framework of legal consciousness, this research challenges some of the core concepts of procedural justice and brings to the surface new ideas about negative views of the law and disengagement from the justice system.

Street Codes, Routine Activities, Neighbourhood Context and Victimization
Susan McNeeley and Pamela Wilcox
This study seeks to address the inconsistency in the literature regarding the relationship between the code of the street and victimization by drawing upon overlooked ideas embedded in Anderson’s work that are consistent with lifestyle-routine activities theory. Using Poisson-based multilevel regression models, we found that the effect of the street code on victimization was moderated by public activities: code-related values only contributed to greater risk of victimization for those with more public lifestyles. This interaction between the street code and routine activities was more influential in culturally disorganized neighbourhoods.

The Risks and Rewards of Organized Crime Investments in Real Estate
Marco Dugato, Serena Favarin, and Luca Giommoni
Despite growing interest in organized crime’s infiltration of the legal economy, research to date has paid little attention to the investments of criminal organizations in real estate. Using data on confiscated assets in 8,092 Italian municipalities between 2000 and 2012, this paper aims to remedy this lack of knowledge. Applying a risk–reward approach, based on the rational choice perspective, the analysis highlights what drives Italian mafia groups’ investments in the real estate sector. The results obtained support the validity of the rational choice perspective by showing how criminal organizations weigh risks and rewards in their decisions to invest in real estate.

Taking the Conservative Protestant Thesis Across the Atlantic. A Comparative Analysis of the Relationships Between Violence, Religion and Stimulants Use in Rural Netherlands
Don Weenink
Building upon the Southern culture of violence research tradition, this article inquires the association between rural violence and Conservative Protestantism in the Dutch context. Based on data of 8,106 individuals, it was found that young rural Conservative Protestants living in villages were more likely to report that they had committed violence, as compared to their fellow believers living in urbanized areas. Furthermore, it turned out that the association between alcohol consumption and violence is stronger among this category of religious rural youth. Finally, this study demonstrates that, contrary to the prevailing notion of the idyllic rural, the violence rates between young Dutch rural dwellers and their peers living in the rest of the country are virtually similar.

Shopping for Free? Looting, Consumerism and the 2011 Riots
Tim Newburn, Kerris Cooper, Rachel Deacon, and Rebekah Diski
A number of commentators have suggested that the riots in England in August 2011 were distinctive because of the character and extent of the looting that took place. In doing so, they have argued that the nature of modern consumer capitalism should be placed front and centre of any explanation of the disorder. While concurring with elements of such arguments, we depart from such analyses in three ways. First, we argue that it is important not to overstate the extent to which the 2011 riots were a departure from previous outbreaks of civil disorder—violent consumerism having a quite lengthy history. Second, using testimony from those involved, we argue that a focus on looting risks ignoring both the political character and the violence involved in the riots. Finally, and relatedly, we suggest that the focus on consumption potentially simplifies the nature of the looting itself by underestimating its political and expressive characteristics.

Collating Longitudinal Data on Crime, Victimization and Social Attitudes in England and Wales: A New Resource for Exploring Long-term Trends in Crime
Will Jennings, Emily Gray, Colin Hay, and Stephen Farrall
Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socio-economic indicators in England and Wales. The data operate at both an aggregate and individual level and will be available for public use (and modification) from autumn 2015. Here, we outline the contours and contents of the data set and highlight the importance of using longitudinal data in exploring theoretical and empirical questions about crime, victimization and social attitudes.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Journal of Criminal Justice 43(4)

Journal of Criminal Justice, July 2015: Volume 43, Issue 4

Can the causal mechanisms underlying chronic, serious, and violent offending trajectories be elucidated using the psychopathy construct?
Raymond R. Corrado, Matt DeLisi, Stephen D. Hart, Evan C. McCuish

Capturing clinical complexity: Towards a personality-oriented measure of psychopathy
David J. Cooke, Caroline Logan

Bringing psychopathy into developmental and life-course criminology theories and research
Bryanna H. Fox, Wesley G. Jennings, David P. Farrington

Ingredients for Criminality Require Genes, Temperament, and Psychopathic Personality
Matt DeLisi, Michael G. Vaughn

Brain imaging research on psychopathy: Implications for punishment, prediction, and treatment in youth and adults
Rebecca Umbach, Colleen M. Berryessa, Adrian Raine

Childhood and Adolescent Characteristics of Women with High versus Low Psychopathy Scores: Examining Developmental Precursors to the Malignant Personality Disorder
Elham Forouzan, Tonia L. Nicholls

Psychopathy and violent misconduct in a sample of violent young offenders
Catherine Shaffer, Evan McCuish, Raymond R. Corrado, Monic P. Behnken, Matt DeLisi

American Sociological Review 80(4)

American Sociological Review, August 2015; Vol. 80, No. 4

The (Re)genesis of Values: Examining the Importance of Values for Action
Andrew Miles
Dual-process models of culture and action posit that fast, automatic cognitive processes largely drive human action, with conscious processes playing a much smaller role than was previously supposed. These models have done much to advance our understanding of behavior, but they focus on generic processes rather than specific cultural content. As useful as this has been, it tells us little about which forms of culture matter for action. Drawing on a cross-disciplinary set of theory and evidence, I argue that values are tied to many forms of behavior, across both contexts and cultures, and they operate in ways consistent with dual-process models. I illustrate the plausibility of these claims using data from the second wave of the European Social Survey, as well as real-time decision data from a large, online survey. I show that values predict self-reported behaviors in a variety of substantive domains and across 25 nations, and they operate using automatic cognitive processes. These findings suggest that values merit renewed theoretical and empirical attention.

Lifetime Socioeconomic Status, Historical Context, and Genetic Inheritance in Shaping Body Mass in Middle and Late Adulthood
Hexuan Liu and Guang Guo
This study demonstrates that body mass in middle and late adulthood is a consequence of the complex interplay among individuals’ genes, lifetime socioeconomic experiences, and the historical context in which they live. Drawing on approximately 9,000 genetic samples from the Health and Retirement Study, we first investigate how socioeconomic status (SES) over the life course moderates the impact of 32 established obesity-related genetic variants on body mass index (BMI) in middle and late adulthood. We then consider differences across birth cohorts in the genetic influence on BMI, and cohort variations in the moderating effects of life-course SES on the genetic influence. Our analyses suggest that persistently low SES over the life course or downward mobility (e.g., high SES in childhood but low SES in adulthood) amplify the genetic influence on BMI, and persistently high SES or upward mobility (e.g., low SES in childhood but high SES in adulthood) compensate for such influence. For more recent birth cohorts, the genetic influence on BMI becomes stronger, but the moderating effects of lifetime SES on the genetic influence are weaker compared to earlier cohorts. We discuss these findings in light of social changes during the obesity epidemic in the United States.

Family Structure Transitions and Child Development: Instability, Selection, and Population Heterogeneity
Dohoon Lee and Sara McLanahan
A growing literature documents the importance of family instability for child wellbeing. In this article, we use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the impacts of family instability on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development in early and middle childhood. We extend existing research in several ways: (1) by distinguishing between the number and types of family structure changes; (2) by accounting for time-varying as well as time-constant confounding; and (3) by assessing racial/ethnic and gender differences in family instability effects. Our results indicate that family instability has a causal effect on children’s development, but the effect depends on the type of change, the outcome assessed, and the population examined. Generally speaking, transitions out of a two-parent family are more negative for children’s development than transitions into a two-parent family. The effect of family instability is more pronounced for children’s socioemotional development than for their cognitive achievement. For socioemotional development, transitions out of a two-parent family are more negative for white children, whereas transitions into a two-parent family are more negative for Hispanic children. These findings suggest that future research should pay more attention to the type of family structure transition and to population heterogeneity.

Positioning Multiraciality in Cyberspace: Treatment of Multiracial Daters in an Online Dating Website
Celeste Vaughan Curington, Ken-Hou Lin, and Jennifer Hickes Lundquist
The U.S. multiracial population has grown substantially in the past decades, yet little is known about how these individuals are positioned in the racial hierarchies of the dating market. Using data from one of the largest dating websites in the United States, we examine how monoracial daters respond to initial messages sent by multiracial daters with various White/non-White racial and ethnic makeups. We test four different theories: hypodescent, multiracial in-betweenness, White equivalence, and what we call a multiracial dividend effect. We find no evidence for the operation of hypodescent. Asian-White daters, in particular, are afforded a heightened status, and Black-White multiracials are treated as an in-between group. For a few specific multiracial gender groups, we find evidence for a dividend effect, where multiracial men and women are preferred above all other groups, including Whites.

Us and Them: Black-White Relations in the Wake of Hispanic Population Growth
Maria Abascal
How will Hispanic population growth affect black-white relations in the United States? Research on intergroup relations operates within a two-group paradigm, furnishing few insights into multi-group contexts. This study is based on an original experiment that combines behavioral game and survey methods to evaluate the impact of perceived Hispanic growth on attitudes and behavior. Results reveal opposite reactions among blacks and whites. Whites in the baseline condition contribute comparable amounts to black and white recipients in a dictator game, whereas whites who first read about Hispanic growth contribute more to white recipients than to black ones. By contrast, blacks in the baseline condition contribute more to black recipients than to white ones, whereas blacks who first read about Hispanic growth contribute comparable amounts to black and white recipients. Patterns of identification mirror patterns of contributions: whites exposed to Hispanic growth identify relatively more strongly with their racial group than with their national group, whereas blacks exposed to Hispanic growth identify relatively more strongly with their national group than with their racial group. Together, these results suggest that people respond to the growth of a third group by prioritizing the most privileged identity to which they can plausibly lay claim and which also excludes the growing group.

The Historical Demography of Racial Segregation
Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef
Standard measures of residential segregation tend to equate spatial with social proximity. This assumption has been increasingly subject to critique among demographers and ethnographers and becomes especially problematic in historical settings. In the late nineteenth-century United States, standard measures suggest a counterintuitive pattern: southern cities, with their long history of racial inequality, had less residential segregation than urban areas considered to be more racially tolerant. By using census enumeration procedures, we develop a sequence measure that captures a more subtle “backyard” pattern of segregation, where white families dominated front streets and blacks were relegated to alleys. Our analysis of complete household data from the 1880 Census documents how segregation took various forms across the postbellum United States. Whereas northern cities developed segregation via racialized neighborhoods, substituting residential inequality for the status inequality of slavery, southern cities embraced street-front segregation that reproduced the racial inequality that existed under slavery.

This article documents a new macro-segregation, where the locus of racial differentiation resides increasingly in socio-spatial processes at the community or place level. The goal is to broaden the spatial lens for studying segregation, using decennial Census data on 222 metropolitan areas. Unlike previous neighborhood studies of racial change, we decompose metropolitan segregation into its within- and between-place components from 1990 to 2010. This is accomplished with the Theil index (H). Our decomposition of H reveals large post-1990 declines in metropolitan segregation. But, significantly, macro-segregation—the between-place component—has increased since 1990, offsetting declines in the within-place component. The macro component of segregation is also most pronounced and increasing most rapidly among blacks, accounting for roughly one-half of all metro segregation in the most segregated metropolitan areas of the United States. Macro-segregation is least evident among Asians, which suggests other members of these communities (i.e., middle-class or affluent ethnoburbs) have less resistance to Asians relocating there. These results on emerging patterns of macro-segregation are confirmed in fixed-effects models that control for unobserved heterogeneity across metropolitan areas. Unlike most previous studies focused on the uneven distribution of racial and ethnic groups across metropolitan neighborhoods, we show that racial residential segregation is increasingly shaped by the cities and suburban communities in which neighborhoods are embedded.