Crime & Delinquency 59(3)

Crime & Delinquency, April 2013: Volume 59, Issue 3

Guns and Trafficking in Crack-Cocaine and Other Drug Markets
Richard B. Felson and Luke Bonkiewicz

This article examines the relationship between gun possession and the nature of an offender’s involvement in drug markets. The analyses are based on data obtained from drug offenders who participated in the 1997 Survey of Inmates of State and Federal Correctional Facilities. The authors find that participants in crack-cocaine markets are more likely to possess guns than participants in powdered-cocaine, opiate, and marijuana markets, particularly if they are street-level crack dealers. However, participants in barbiturates and amphetamine markets also have high rates of gun possession. The authors also find relatively high levels of gun possession among traffickers who handle stashes of moderately large market value, who have central roles in the trade, and who are members of drug organizations. Finally, offenders who are young, female, African American, and from lower economic status are more likely to traffic in crack cocaine than in other drugs.

Neighborhood Context and Police Vigor: A Multilevel Analysis
James J. Sobol, Yuning Wu, and Ivan Y. Sun

This study provides a partial test of Klinger’s ecological theory of police behavior using hierarchical linear modeling on 1,677 suspects who had encounters with police within 24 beats. The current study used data from four sources originally collected by the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), including systematic social observation, in-person interviews with officers, census data, and police crime records. It investigates the effects of neighborhood violent crime rates and concentrated disadvantage on officer vigor, controlling for individual-level officer characteristics and situational factors. The analyses reveal that police vigor was significantly shaped by beat-level crime rates, with high–crime rate neighborhoods experiencing higher levels of police vigor in handling suspects. The findings are not consistent with the ecological propositions set forth by Klinger. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research and theoretical development are discussed.

The Impact of Drivers’ Race, Gender, and Age During Traffic Stops: Assessing Interaction Terms and the Social Conditioning Model
Rob Tillyer and Robin S. Engel

Recent research has demonstrated that minority drivers receive disparate traffic stop outcomes compared with similarly situated White drivers. This research, however, is often not grounded within a theoretical framework and fails to examine specific combinations of driver demographics. This study addresses those shortcomings by examining research questions based on the social conditioning model and investigating the relationship between specific combinations of drivers’ race/ethnicity, gender, and age, and traffic stop outcomes. Using alternative measures of stop outcomes and robust official traffic stop data collected from a state law enforcement agency, the results demonstrate that warnings and citations, but not arrests, are differentially issued to young, Black male drivers. The findings also confirm the influence of legal factors on police decision making during traffic stops. Research and policy implications are discussed.

Race, Pre- and Postdetention, and Juvenile Justice Decision Making
Michael J. Leiber

A detailed examination was conducted of the factors associated with pre- and postadjudication secure detention, including secure detention as a dispositional sentence and the effects of secure detention on decision making that further contribute to cumulative disadvantage for African Americans. The research was based on interpretations of the symbolic threat thesis, with emphasis on the stereotyping of African Americans as threatening, delinquent, and/or in need of confinement, to study decision making in one juvenile court jurisdiction. The results reveal that legal factors were most often predictors of each type of secure detention and decision making at other stages, but so too was race individually and in combination with legal and extralegal considerations and indirectly through secure detention. The relationships, however, did not always result in disadvantageous outcomes.

A Comparison of Robbers’ Use of Physical Coercion in Commercial and Street Robberies
John D. McCluskey

The face-to-face confrontation involved in the crime of robbery renders vast amounts of financial, physical, and psychological injury in the United States. This study developed hypotheses from existing literature regarding salient situational factors associated with the prevalence of overt physical coercion during commercial and street robberies. The study examined the effect of situational and personal characteristics on robbers’ use of coercion, with data coded from police reports of 1,281 street and commercial robberies in one precinct of Detroit, Michigan, between 2000 and 2003. The research results are relatively consistent with findings from the literature on robbery in the last 40 years: Street robberies involve a greater prevalence of physical force than do commercial robberies; guns reduce the likelihood of physical force; and victim resistance increases physical force. Additionally, characteristics of victims and offenders play a secondary role in predicting whether physical coercion is brought to bear on the victims of robbery.

A Multivariate Analysis of the Sociodemographic Predictors of Methamphetamine Production and Use
Todd A. Armstrong and Gaylene S. Armstrong

To date, research testing the community characteristics associated with methamphetamine production and use has found that the community-level sociodemographic predictors of methamphetamine production and use vary from those of drug use in general. In this study, the authors furthered the research in this area using data from all 102 counties in Illinois. These data included measures of sociodemographic characteristics taken from the U.S. census, measures of methamphetamine production and use, and a measure of arrests for controlled-substance violations. Negative binomial regression models showed that poverty and the racial and ethnic compositions of communities were the strongest and most consistent predictors of the authors’ methamphetamine measures. The results also showed that the sociodemographic characteristics associated with methamphetamine measures were different in important ways from those associated with arrests for controlled-substance violations.

Testing the Link Between Child Maltreatment and Family Violence Among Police Officers
Egbert Zavala

The purpose of this study is to document the relationship between physical abuse during childhood and family violence among a group of police officers from the Baltimore Police Department in the United States. Analyzing data from the Police and Domestic Violence in Police Families in Baltimore, Maryland, 1997-1999, this study found a positive relationship between physical abuse and family violence toward spouses and children. Specifically, this study found that police officers who indicated that their parents where physical with them were more likely to report being physical with their spouse and children. They were also more likely to report yelling or shouting toward family members. This study shows a positive relationship between physical abuse and involvement in family violence, and increases our knowledge regarding the cycle of violence in police families. This study points to the need for better recognition of physical abuse and the negative consequences children are likely to endure.

Theory and Society 42(2)

Theory and Society, March 2013; Volume 42, Issue 2

From social control to financial economics: the linked ecologies of economics and business in twentieth century America
Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana

This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business schools played an essential—if largely invisible and poorly understood—role in major transformations in the organization and substantive direction of social-scientific knowledge, and specifically economic knowledge, in twentieth century America. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (ca. 1900–1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of “scientific” approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards (and its closely related cousin at the University of Rochester) marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of these institutions in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches—offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm—that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo liberal regime.

Security a la Mexicana: on the particularities of security governance in México’s War on Crime
Keith Guzik

Social scientists from different fields have identified security as a future-oriented mode of governance designed to preserve the social order from diverse types of global risk through international cooperation, militarization and privatization of the state security apparatus, surveillance technologies, community policing, and stigmatization of identities and behaviors deemed dangerous. This literature has largely been limited to English-speaking countries in the Global North, however, that are relatively “secure.”. To understand how security operates in a different context, this article focuses on the current War on Crime in México using newspaper and magazine articles, government documents, and extant academic research. In México, it is argued, the basic elements of security governance (international cooperation, militarized police, surveillance technologies, law, etc.) are present, but in modified form. Rather than focusing on external risks that could develop into future threats, security in México is turned inward against traditional forms of national economic, political, and cultural life thought to produce harm in the present. This, in turn, underscores security’s unique purpose in the country, which is not to preserve the prevailing social order, but to transform an emergent social order that through globalization has come to threaten the state’s legitimacy. These observations suggest an international divide in the operation of security that leaves those most vulnerable in the Global South to bear the greatest costs.

The true citizens of the city of God: the cult of saints, the Catholic social order, and the urban Reformation in Germany
Steven Pfaff

Historical scholarship suggests that a robust cult of the saints may have helped some European regions to resist inroads by Protestantism. Based on a neo-Durkheimian theory of rituals and social order, I propose that locally based cults of the saints that included public veneration lowered the odds that Protestantism would displace Catholicism in sixteenth-century German cities. To evaluate this proposition, I first turn to historical and theoretical reflection on the role of the cult of the saints in late medieval history. I then test the hypothesis with a data set of sixteenth-century German cities. Statistical analysis provides additional support for the ritual and social order thesis because even when several important variables identified by materialist accounts of the Reformation in the social scientific literature the presence of shrines as an indicator for the cult of the saints remains large and significant. Although large-scale social change is usually assumed to have politico-economic sources, this analysis suggests that cultural factors may be of equal or greater importance.

Journal of Marriage and Family 75(2)

Journal of Marriage and Family, April 2013: Volume 75, Issue 2

Brief Reports

Policymakers' Use of Social Science Research: Looking Within and Across Policy Actors
Karen Bogenschneider, Olivia M. Little and Kristen Johnson

Attitudes Toward Divorce, Commitment, and Divorce Proneness in First Marriages and Remarriages
Sarah W. Whitton, Scott M. Stanley, Howard J. Markman and Christine A. Johnson

Effect of Husbands' Employment Status on Their Wives' Subjective Well-being in Korea
Myoung-Hee Kim and Young Kyung Do

Intimate Partner Violence

The Continuation of Intimate Partner Violence From Adolescence to Young Adulthood
Ming Cui, Koji Ueno, Mellissa Gordon and Frank D. Fincham

Why Do We Fail to Ask “Why” About Gender and Intimate Partner Violence?
Kristin L. Anderson

What Comes Before Why: Specifying the Phenomenon of Intimate Partner Violence
Frank D. Fincham, Ming Cui, Mellissa Gordon and Koji Ueno

Genetic Moderation of the Impact of Parenting on Hostility Toward Romantic Partners
Ronald L. Simons, Leslie Gordon Simons, Man-Kit Lei, Steven R. H. Beach, Gene H. Brody, Frederick X. Gibbons and Robert A. Philibert

Marital History, Wealth, and Health

Marriage, Marital History, and Black – White Wealth Differentials Among Older Women
Fenaba R. Addo and Daniel T. Lichter

I've Got You Under My Skin: Marital Biography and Biological Risk
Michael J. McFarland, Mark D. Hayward and Dustin Brown

Grandparent Child Care

Motivations for Providing and Utilizing Child Care by Grandmothers in South Korea
Jaerim Lee and Jean W. Bauer

Child Care and Child Births: The Role of Grandparents in the Netherlands
Fleur Thomese and Aart C. Liefbroer

Of General Interest

Cohabitation in Spain: No Longer a Marginal Path to Family Formation
Marta Dominguez-Folgueras and Teresa Castro-Martin

“Life Still Isn't Fair”: Parental Differential Treatment of Young Adult Siblings
Alexander C. Jensen, Shawn D. Whiteman, Karen L. Fingerman and Kira S. Birditt

Schemas of Marital Change: From Arranged Marriages to Eloping for Love
Keera Allendorf

Can Family Relationships Explain the Race Paradox in Mental Health?
Dawne M. Mouzon

Poverty at a Racial Crossroads: Poverty Among Multiracial Children of Single Mothers
Jenifer L. Bratter and Sarah Damaske

Perceived Economic Uncertainty and Fertility: Evidence From a Labor Market Reform
Barbara Hofmann and Katrin Hohmeyer

Social Psychology Quarterly 76(1)

Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2013: Volume 76, Issue 1

Doing Ideology Amid a Crisis: Collective Actions and Discourses of the Chinese Falun Gong Movement
Cheris Shun-ching Chan

A Refinement of Collaborative Circles Theory: Resource Mobilization and Innovation in an Emerging Sport
Ugo Corte

Modeling Interactions in Small Groups
David R. Heise

Behavioral Consequences of Embeddedness: Effects of the Underlying Forms of Exchange
Linda D. Molm, David Melamed, and Monica M. Whitham

Crime & Delinquency 59(2)

Crime & Delinquency, March 2013: Volume 59, Issue 2

Disaggregating the Relationship Between Schools and Crime: A Spatial Analysis
Rebecca K. Murray and Marc L. Swatt

Although an extensive literature exists on crime in schools, surprisingly few studies have examined crime within the vicinity of schools. Schools, like other urban facilities, can generate crime by providing youth opportunities to congregate with little supervision, particularly before and after school hours. Some noteworthy studies have demonstrated that crime is more likely around schools, but the distinctive patterns based on school, time, and spatial contexts have not been fully addressed. The current study examines the differential crime generating potential of schools by type (public/private) and by level (elementary, middle, and high school), taking into account both spatial and temporal indicators. The authors employ a unique methodology for spatial modeling using the matrix exponential spatial expansion. Results indicate that there are distinct patterns of crime associated with schools, which suggests that disaggregating schools is important for understanding spatial patterns of crime.

Disentangling the Effects of Violent Victimization, Violent Behavior, and Gun Carrying for Minority Inner-City Youth Living in Extreme Poverty
Richard Spano and John Bolland

Two waves of longitudinal data were used to examine the sequencing between violent victimization, violent behavior, and gun carrying in a high-poverty sample of African American youth. Multivariate logistic regression results indicated that violent victimization T1 and violent behavior T1 increased the likelihood of initiation of gun carrying T2 when examined separately (by 132% and 91%, respectively). However, only violent victimization T1 was a significant predictor of initiation of gun carrying T2 after controlling for violent behavior T1. More nuanced analyses uncovered no significant difference in the likelihood of initiating gun carrying when comparing offensive versus defensive gun carriers. The theoretical and policy implications of these findings are also discussed.

Security at the Expense of Liberty: A Test of Predictions Deriving From the Culture of Control Thesis
Justin T. Pickett, Daniel P. Mears, Eric A. Stewart, and Marc Gertz

In The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, David Garland linked contemporary crime control policies and welfare reforms to a cultural formation that he termed the “crime complex of late modernity.” According to Garland, once established, the crime complex exerts a contemporaneous effect on public views about both criminal justice and the welfare state, increasing popular support for security measures as well as more restrictive public assistance policies. Although Garland’s thesis has featured prominently in scholarship on crime and punishment, few empirical studies have tested the specific predictions that underlie his arguments. To address this research gap, this study uses public opinion data to assess the extent to which key dimensions of the crime complex are associated with public views about criminal justice policies and welfare reforms that emphasize security and control. The results support several of the theoretical underpinnings of Garland’s thesis. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for theory, research, and policy.

Joint Utility of Event-Dependent and Environmental Crime Analysis Techniques for Violent Crime Forecasting
Joel M. Caplan, Leslie W. Kennedy, and Eric L. Piza

Violent crime incidents occurring in Irvington, New Jersey, in 2007 and 2008 are used to assess the joint analytical capabilities of point pattern analysis, hotspot mapping, near-repeat analysis, and risk terrain modeling. One approach to crime analysis suggests that the best way to predict future crime occurrence is to use past behavior, such as actual incidents or collections of incidents, as indicators of future behavior. An alternative approach is to consider the environment in which crimes occur and identify features of the landscape that would be conducive to crime. Thanks to advances in geographic information system technology and federally funded (free) software applications such as CrimeStat III or the Near Repeat Calculator, these methods have recently been made more accessible to “average” users. This study explores the information products that each method offers for the purposes of place-based violent crime forecasting and resource allocation. Findings help to answer questions about where, when, and why violent crimes occur in a jurisdiction. Ways in which event-dependent and environmental crime analysis techniques can be utilized as complementary instruments in a crime analyst’s tool kit are discussed in detail.

Guns and Fear: A One-Way Street?
Will Hauser and Gary Kleck

Surveys show that more than one half of gun owners report owning their firearm for self-protection. Although research has examined the effect of fear of crime on gun ownership, the issue of reciprocity and temporal order has been largely ignored. Furthermore, the effect of firearm acquisition and relinquishment on fear has not been evaluated empirically. We hypothesize that the relationship between fear and gun ownership is reciprocal. As James Wright and Peter Rossi noted, it may be that “the initially most fearful may arm themselves and then feel psychologically safer because of it.” Using two-wave panel data, we found, as expected, that higher fear among nonowners encourages them to become gun owners, but lower fear among gun owners does not encourage gun relinquishment. We also found that gun acquisition does not reduce fear, but relinquishment increases fear, suggesting the relationship between guns and fear may be asymmetrical.

Schools, Neighborhood Risk Factors, and Crime
Dale Willits, Lisa Broidy, and Kristine Denman

Prior research has identified a link between schools (particularly high schools) and neighborhood crime rates. However, it remains unclear whether the relationship between schools and crime is a reflection of other criminogenic dynamics at the neighborhood level or whether schools influence neighborhood crime patterns independently of other established structural predictors. We address this question by investigating the relationship between schools and serious crime at the block group level while controlling for the potentially criminogenic effects of neighborhood instability and structural disadvantage. We find that, net of other structural correlates, neighborhoods with high schools and middle schools experience more violent, property, and narcotics crimes than those without middle or high schools. Conversely, neighborhoods with elementary schools exhibit less property crime than those not containing elementary schools. These results, which are consistent with prior research and with explanations derived from the routine activities and social disorganization perspectives, suggest some strategies for police deployment and community involvement to control crime.

Critical Criminology 21(1)

Critical Criminology, March 2013: Volume 21, Issue 1

Are We Human? Edgework in Defiance of the Mundane and Measurable
Deborah Landry

Edgework can be a useful heuristic tool in producing counter-statements about Orthodox Criminology, where the measurable has arguably become more important than the meaningful. This paper focuses on the embodied experiential nexus of culture and crime in which criminology is taught, administered, and investigated. The Burkean framework of Dramatism is used to reveal how collective creative productions by students can provide insight into the political context of the contemporary criminology classroom. Through an analysis of instant ethnographies penned by participants of a flash mob I illustrate how the role of autonomy and responsibility are not resources that students readily draw upon to understand themselves in relation to the production of knowledge and social change. These observations support some of the concerns raised by Cultural Criminologist about the rise of administrative criminology. In the spirit of detournement, I argue that one way to facilitate student engagement with knowledge production differently is to invite them to experience moments of embodied transgressions.

Regulating CCTV?: We Can’t Solve Problems by Using the Same Kind of Thinking We Used When We Created Them
Heather May Morgan

This paper considers the lack of a universal CCTV policy across the United Kingdom and Europe and how this apparent omission is being addressed in the context of increased surveillance, and the omnipresence of CCTV in particular. Special attention is paid to the role of academics within the apparently long, drawn-out process of a current move from fragmented to collective regulation. What it seems exists is individual, independent policy that implicates wider legislation. What it seems is desired is a more comprehensive and codified decree. Starting with the issues that underpin CCTV and surveillance in general, this paper acknowledges the opposing arguments that CCTV can be helpful to policing as those that demonstrate how well it can facilitate a means of social control. The paper moves to consider the possibility of a ‘surveillance policy’ applicable and effective for CCTV’s balanced regulation, and discusses the means by which this might be realised, paying special attention to who is involved and to what extent, especially where this involves academic input. Academic input to date is problematized on one hand on account of its arguably narrow scope (source/personnel) and the trends yet ostensible wavering it entails on the other. Therefore, the author’s reservations around the place of academics in the process, especially because they appear to be key to developments, whilst variously demonstrating both influential flippancy and seriousness, lead to the conclusion that there is difficulty with trying to solve the ‘problem’ with the same thinking that created it.

Bourdieu and Foucault: A Conceptual Integration Toward an Empirical Sociology of Prisons
Jennifer A. Schlosser

Although the similarities between them are under analyzed, Pierre Bourdieu’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of culture and power are interrelated in some compelling ways. Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and Discipline and Punish (1979) are two of the most influential contributions in post-structural and postmodern theory. Yet, far more attention is paid to Foucault’s contributions in criminology than to Bourdieu’s. This essay brings together the work of these influential theorists to argue for a critical examination of the sociology of prisons. Bourdieu’s concepts of: (1) habitus, (2) ethos, (3) doxa, and (4) the theory of practice are related to Foucault’s ideas about (1) discipline, (2) docile bodies, (3) panopticism, and (4) history of the present by comparing specific examples from the original works. Then, the combination of those primary concepts is used to address specific methodological concerns researchers should consider when doing empirical research in prison.

The Race to Punish in American Schools: Class and Race Predictors of Punitive School-Crime Control
Katherine Irwin, Janet Davidson, Amanda Hall-Sanchez

Despite the general agreement that US schools have become increasingly punitive since the 1980s, researchers are uncertain about what types of schools use tough-on-crime measures. Some assert that punitive control is concentrated in poor, predominantly ethnic minority schools. Governing-through-crime scholars argue that US schools with mostly middle-class and white students are also punitive, but in less harsh ways using soft surveillance techniques. Relying on data from large, stratified samples of middle and secondary US public schools, we found that high rates of ethnic minority enrollment predicted heavy reliance on law enforcement and security personnel. As rates of student poverty increased, use of soft surveillance techniques as well as reporting students to the police significantly increased. Implications for governing-through-crime, racial control, and reproduction of inequalities theories are discussed.

Suburbia’s “Crime Experts”: The Neo-Conservatism of Control Theory and the Ethos of Crime
Guido Giacomo Preparata

This essay tackles the relationship between morality and crime by way of the debate surrounding Travis Hirschi’s double contribution to so-called “control theory,” first as “social bonding theory,” and subsequently as a “general theory” of crime. The assessment conducted herein construes the first version of “control” as an expression of patriotism, and its late formulation, on account of its emphasis on varying individual levels of self-mastery, as an implicit reaffirmation of the inevitability of class division. Over the years, the fixation with “self-control” has become a rubric for the suburban anxieties of an upper-middle class surrounded by expanding (ghetto) poverty and plagued by familial dysfunction and the alienation of its own offspring. In the final analysis, these reflections form the basis for a general reformulation, inspired by the sociology of Thorstein Veblen, of the relationship between class and crime and condign punishment by leveraging the notion of ethos (a common mindset peculiar to each class), and proving thereby that crime is systematically determined by this very mindset, which is the spiritual complement to class formation, rather than by the conventionally classless categories of rational self-interest or idiosyncratic proneness to violence.

Giuliani in Izmir: Restructuring of the Izmir Public Order Police and Criminalization of the Urban Poor
Zeynep Gönen

This paper examines the recent restructuring of the Izmir Public Order Police, launched in 2006 to address the rise in urban crime in Izmir, Turkey. Transforming itself into a professionalized and effective organization against ‘criminals’ and claiming to institute a proactive policing strategy, the Izmir police have expanded their control over the urban space, while specifically targeting the poor segments and populations in the city, and carefully distinguishing them from the ‘respectable’ and ‘innocent’ citizens. The paper details the elements of the new policing in Izmir and demonstrates that it has rested on profiling and criminalization of the ethno-racially differentiated urban poor populations, especially Kurdish migrants. The new policing in Izmir, the paper argues, is not an isolated case but an example of the neoliberal transformations around the globe, where regulation and management of urban poor populations are increasingly relegated to the penal rather than the social state.

Young Adult Offending: Intersectionality of Gender and Race
Kerryn E. Bell

It is an accepted criminological fact that gender and race affect involvement in crime. What has been examined less frequently is the effect of intersectionality of gender and race across the early life course. This research uses Delinquency in a Birth Cohort II: Philadelphia, 1958 to examine the longer term effects on crime of intersectionality during the adolescent and young adult portions of the life course. Findings indicate that intersectionality of gender and race is fundamental for young adults. It is argued that multiracial feminism can best explain why intersectionality must be taken into consideration when looking at offending across the early life course.

Progress or More of the Same? Electronic Monitoring and Parole in the Age of Mass Incarceration
James Kilgore

Often billed as an “alternative to incarceration”, electronic monitoring (EM) is widely trumpeted as a key method of reducing incarceration costs while maintaining public safety. However, little research has been done which closely examines EM in the historical context of mass incarceration and the paradigm of punishment. This article focuses on the use of EM in parole in that broader context. Through research into the legal and policy frameworks for EM as well as via personal interviews with people who have been on EM while on parole, the author concludes that the present EM practice reinforces the dominant punishment paradigm and places major obstacles in the way of the successful re-entry for people returning from prison. He concludes with some concrete recommendations about changes in law, policy and implementation guidelines that would allow EM to operate in an environment more conducive to rehabilitation.

Social Forces 91(3)

Social Forces, March 2013: Volume 91, Issue 3

Stratification

The Time Divide in Cross-National Perspective: The Work Week, Education and Institutions That Matter
Peter Frase, Janet C. Gornick

Prior empirical studies have found that American workers report longer hours than do workers in other highly industrialized countries, and that the highly educated report the longest hours relative to other educational levels. This paper analyzes disparities in working hours by education levels in 17 high- and middle-income countries to assess whether this finding holds cross-nationally, for both men and women. In contrast to many prior studies of working time, we use a measure of weekly rather than annual hours worked, which we argue provides a better window on the discretionary time available to individuals and households. We find that the within-country gradient in average hours by education is not uniform: higher income countries are more likely to show the U.S. pattern, and middle-income countries show the reverse pattern, with the less educated reporting longer hours. We conclude by assessing some possible macrolevel explanations for this variation, including per capita gross domestic product, tax rates, unionization, country-level regulations, earnings inequality, and the regulation of weekly work hours.

All Work and No Pay: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City
Annette Bernhardt, Michael W. Spiller, Diana Polson

Despite three decades of scholarship on economic restructuring in the United States, employers’ violations of minimum wage, overtime and other workplace laws remain understudied. This article begins to fill the gap by presenting evidence from a large-scale, original worker survey that draws on recent advances in sampling methodology to reach vulnerable workers. Our findings suggest that in America’s three largest cities, violations of employment and labor laws are pervasive across low-wage industries and occupations, affecting a wide range of workers. But while worker characteristics are correlated with violations, job and employer characteristics play the stronger role, including industry, occupation and measures of informality and nonstandard work. We therefore propose a framework in which employers’ noncompliance with labor regulations is one axis of a competitive strategy based on labor cost reduction, contributing to the reorganization of work and production in the 21st century labor market.

Employment and Earnings in High-Tech Ethnic Niches
Jennifer C. Lee

The increase in high-skilled immigrants to the United States coincided with the expansion of the high-technology sector, and now a large share of Asian immigrants concentrate in high-tech industries. Despite much research on the relationship between ethnic concentration and labor market outcomes, the association between ethnic niche employment and earnings within the high-technology sector of the labor market has yet to be examined. This study compares the relationship between employment in ethnic niches and earnings within high- and low-tech industries among Asian immigrants. In low-technology industries, ethnic niches are generally associated with lower earnings compared with non-niches, but in high-technology industries, employment in an ethnic niche is associated with higher earnings. These patterns vary by gender and ethnic group. This association is partly explained by the industries that comprise ethnic niches, as non-Hispanic white immigrants also experience some of the same advantages and disadvantages.

Economic Sociology

Is Deindustrialization Causing High Unemployment in Affluent Countries?: Evidence from 16 OECD Countries, 1970–2003
Christopher Kollmeyer, Florian Pichler

This study assesses the possibility that deindustrialization has been contributing to the persistently high unemployment rates experienced by most affluent countries since the mid-1970s. Combining insights from Lilien’s (1982) “sectoral shift” thesis and the literature on deindustrialization, the authors assert that the decades-long contraction of the manufacturing sector has been a significant source of high unemployment in affluent countries. This assertion is tested against the literature’s existing explanations for unemployment using data from 16 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries over a recent 34-year period. Two-way, fixed-effects regression models suggest that deindustrialization has not only contributed to unemployment in these countries, but that it has been one of the more important causes of this phenomenon. These findings are robust across various model specifications and estimating strategies. The study concludes by suggesting further ways to investigate this important topic.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman: Gender, Income Share and Household Expenditure in South Africa
Elizabeth Gummerson, Daniel Schneider

This study examines how gendered household bargaining occurs in non-nuclear family households. We employ two South African data sets and use linear regression and household fixed effects to investigate the relationship between women’s income shares and household expenditures. In married couple households, when women garner larger shares of income, spending on food is higher and spending on alcohol is lower. However, the relationship between women’s income shares and expenditures attenuates with additional adults in the household. We find that in households with multiple adults, men and women bargain in gender groups to realize gendered preferences for expenditures. Future work should consider household members outside of the married dyad when modeling bargaining processes.

Political Sociology

Who Gets Designated a Terrorist and Why?
Colin J. Beck, Emily Miner

This study examines formal terrorism designations by governments through the lens of organization studies research on categorization processes. It is argued that designations hinge on markers from the organizational profile of a militant group. Using cross-sectional data on militant organizations and designations by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, multivariate analyses find that listed organizations do not merely have a track record of violence against a government’s citizens, but also tend to target aviation and have an Islamic ideological basis. Mixed support for geopolitical factors is found, but imageries of hegemonic interest are not confirmed. Secondary analyses suggest that newer images of terrorism may replace older ones in classification schemes but further research is needed to know whether this is because of policy adaptation or the effect of spectacular events like September 11th.

Discursive Obstruction and Elite Opposition to Environmental Activism in the Czech Republic
Thomas E. Shriver, Alison E. Adams, Sherry Cable

Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists’ discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite countermovement support for their efforts to obstruct challenges. Using a range of data sources, we delineate the mechanisms used by these elite actors to vilify and stigmatize environmental activists, paving the way for more violent forms of public harassment. The concept we initiate, discursive obstruction, adds the critical dimension of power relations to analyses of both framing processes and discursive opportunity structures. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for social movement research.

Civic and Political Participation

Union Membership and Political Participation in the United States
Jasmine Kerrissey, Evan Schofer

This article examines the effect of union membership on civic and political participation in the late 20th century in the United States. We discuss why and how unions seek to mobilize their members and where mobilization is channeled. We argue that union membership affects electoral and collective action outcomes and will be larger for low socioeconomic status individuals. Statistical analyses find that union membership is associated with many forms of political activity, including voting, protesting, association membership, and others. Union effects are larger for less educated individuals, a group that otherwise exhibits low levels of participation. Union membership is not associated with outcomes distant from union political agendas, such as general volunteering and charitable giving, suggesting that unions generate political capital rather than generalized social capital.

Are Homeowners Better Citizens?: Homeownership and Community Participation in the United States
Brian J. McCabe

Proponents of homeownership policies often argue that homeowners participate more actively in community life and civic affairs than renters. Although research suggests higher rates of participation among homeowners, the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship are unclear. On one hand, the locally dependent financial investments homeowners make in their communities could lead them to participate as a means of protecting their principal investment. On the other hand, home-ownership could stimulate participation by increasing residential stability, enabling households to overcome the institutional barriers and to develop the social networks that drive community participation. The failure to differentiate between these pathways muddies our understanding of how homeownership matters for community life. Drawing on the November supplement of the Current Population Survey, this article investigates whether homeowners are more likely to vote in local elections, participate in neighborhood groups and join civic associations. A falsification strategy compares these outcomes to a set of placebo measures to address concerns that the findings are driven by selection. The research identifies an independent role for residential stability and locally dependent financial investments in explaining why homeowners participate in their communities.

Race

W. E. B. Du Bois: Reform, Will, and the Veil
Lynn England, W. Keith Warner

While W. E. B. Du Bois is widely recognized for his contributions to the sociology of race, his contributions to the foundations of sociology are largely ignored. His sociology is based on African American reformism, a version of pragmatism, and a contingent historicism. The basic view of sociology is one that emphasizes the role of chance and will as opposed to law and certainty. He called sociology “the science of free will.” His view of society is one that focuses on the historical contingency of the structure of society, the malleability of society, and the fundamental feature of American society: a society built around the “color line” or “veil.” This view of society is not merely an interesting historical anomaly, but has significant implications for the understanding of and development of contemporary sociology.

Public Sector Transformation, Racial Inequality and Downward Occupational Mobility
George Wilson, Vincent J. Roscigno, Matt L. Huffman

“New governance” reforms entailing shifts toward privatization have permeated the public sector over the last decade, possibly affecting workplace-based attainments. We examine the consequences of this reform for African American men, who during the civil rights era reached relative parity with whites. We analyze race-based inequities on one socioeconomic outcome–downward occupational mobility–among professionals, managers and executives. Results from a Panel Study of Income Dynamics sample indicate that the “new government business model,” characterized by increased employer discretion has disproportionately disadvantaged African Americans. Narrower racial gaps in the incidence, determinants and timing of downward mobility found in the public sector, relative to the private sector, during the pre-reform period (1985–90) eroded during the reform period (2002–07) because of widening racial gaps in the public sector.

Health

Childhood (Mis)fortune, Educational Attainment, and Adult Health: Contingent Benefits of a College Degree?
Markus H. Schafer, Lindsay R. Wilkinson, Kenneth F. Ferraro

College-educated adults are healthier than other people in the United States, but selection bias complicates our understanding of how education influences health. This article focuses on the possibility that the health benefits of college may vary according to childhood (mis)fortune and people’s propensity to attain a college degree in the first place. Several perspectives from life course sociology offer competing hypotheses as to whether the most or the least advantaged see the greatest return of a college education. The authors use a national survey of middle-age American adults to assess risk of two cardiovascular health problems and mortality. Results from propensity score and hierarchical regression analysis indicate that the protective effect of college attainment is indeed heterogeneous. Further, the greatest returns are among those least likely to experience this life course transition (i.e., compensatory leveling). Explanations for this selection effect are offered, along with several directions for future research on the health benefits of completing college.

The Social Consequences of Postcommunist Structural Change: An Analysis of Suicide Trends in Eastern Europe
Yuka Minagawa

Guided by Durkheim’s classic theory of suicide, this article examines suicide trends and determinants in Eastern European countries for the period of 1989–2006, with particular attention given to the association between postcommunist social change and suicide mortality. I find that countries characterized by more drastic structural change experienced increased suicide rates during the period immediately after the fall of communism. Yet continued reforms were associated with reductions in suicide in more recent years. Further, I observe large gender differences in suicide patterns. Male suicide rates are consistently and strongly related to structural change, while female rates remain almost unaffected. By directly and statistically substantiating the relationship between postcommunist transition and suicide death rates, this study provides a more thorough and textured account of the social consequences of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

Experimental Research

Do Descriptive Norms Solve Social Dilemmas?: Conformity and Contributions in Collective Action Groups
Kyle Irwin, Brent Simpson

Collective action researchers have focused on injunctive norms that specify approved behavior as a panacea for collective action problems. We investigate whether descriptive norms (similar behavior) can also solve these problems. We argue that descriptive norms generate social identification, which then sustains conformity to expectations. Consequently, descriptive norms can characterize both cooperation and noncooperation, such that cooperative norms sustain successful collective action while noncooperative norms result in collective action failure. Results from two laboratory experiments supported the hypothesis that descriptive norms can sustain collective action success and failure. Further, while normative non-cooperation eroded cooperation for high contributors, normative cooperation had little affect on low contributors. This asymmetry points to a paradox: because they promote group identification, noncooperative descriptive norms can be self-sustaining, with deleterious outcomes.

Status, Numbers and Influence
David Melamed, Scott V. Savage

We develop a theoretical model of social influence in n-person groups. We argue that disagreement between group members introduces uncertainty into the social situation, and this uncertainty motivates people to use status characteristics to evaluate the merits of a particular opinion. Our model takes the numerical distribution of opinions and the relative status of the opinion holders as factors that contribute to social influence, such that the effect of status becomes stronger as uncertainty about a particular position rises due to the distribution of opinions in the group. Our theoretical model implies three hypotheses, which we empirically evaluate with data from a controlled laboratory experiment. The results support the theoretical model. We conclude with limitations, implications and several directions for future research.

Criminology 51(1)

Criminology, February 2013: Volume 51, Issue 1

The Place Of Context: A Theory And Strategy For Criminology's Hard Problems
Robert J. Sampson

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

Shaping Citizen Perceptions of Police Legitimacy: A Randomized Field Trial of Procedural Justice
Lorraine Mazerolle, Emma Antrobus, Sarah Bennett and Tom R. Tyler

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

Foot Patrol in Violent Crime Hot Spots: The Longitudinal Impact of Deterrence and Posttreatment Effects of Displacement
Evan T. Sorg, Cory P. Haberman, Jerry H. Ratcliffe and Elizabeth R. Groff

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

Viewing Things Differently: The Dimensions of Public Perceptions of Police Legitimacy
Justice Tankebe

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

Does Imprisonment Alter The Life Course? Evidence On Crime And Employment From A Natural Experiment
Charles E. Loeffler

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

The Elusive Relationship Between Community Organizations And Crime: An Assessment Across Disadvantaged Areas Of The South Bronx
Lee Ann Slocum, Andres F. Rengifo, Tiffany Choi And Christopher R. Herrmann

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

Law & Society Review 47(1)

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

Real Interrogation: What Actually Happens When Cops Question Kids
Barry C. Feld

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

Symbol and Substance: Effects of California's Three Strikes Law on Felony Sentencing
John R. Sutton

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

Facing Your Criminal Record: Expungement and the Collateral Problem of Wrongfully Represented Self
Amy Myrick

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

Judicial Independence across Democratic Regimes: Understanding the Varying Impact of Political Competition
Aylin Aydin

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

Liberalism and Its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law
Uday Chandra

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

The Indirect Influence of Politics on Tort Liability of Public Authorities in English Law
Dan Priel

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

An Analysis of Policy-Based Congressional Responses to the U.S. Supreme Court's Constitutional Decisions
Bethany Blackstone

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

Journal of Criminal Justice 41(2)

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

Introduction to the special issue: Psychology of crime  
Glenn D. Walters

Psychology misrepresented in many criminology and criminal justice textbooks. Need for a more accurate portrayal of psychology's contributions to crime. Variety of different clinical psychological models and perspectives examined

Community-based alternatives for justice-involved individuals with severe mental illness: Diversion, problem-solving courts, and reentry
David DeMatteo, Casey LaDuke, Benjamin R. Locklair, Kirk Heilbrun

Adults with severe mental illness are overrepresented in criminal justice system. Criminal justice system has made noteworthy advances for handling these offenders. Community-based alternatives have varying degrees of empirical support

Individual-level interventions for alcohol-related violen Expanding targets for inclusion in treatment programs
Mary McMurran

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

An exploration of the association between criminal thinking and community program attrition
Damon Mitchell, Raymond Chip Tafrate, Tom Hogan, Mark E. Olver

Analyzed criminal thinking and program attrition in two community programs. Overall levels of criminal thinking higher in non-completers. Disregard for others was strongest pattern in day reporting center non-completers. Demand for excitement was strongest pattern in sober house non-completers. Pattern of results suggest criminal thinking may be related to program responsivity

Is a separate diagnostic category defensible for paraphilic coercion?
Raymond A. Knight, Judith Sims-Knight, Jean-Pierre Guay

MIDSA self-report responses were gathered from 529 sex offenders in MA and MN. EFA, IRT, and taxometrics explored the structure of an Agonistic Continuum. This Continuum is distributed as a dimension, ranging from noncoercion through sadism. No data in the review or analyses supported PCD and sadism as separate disorders. Implications discussed for DSM-5, legal decisions, research, and clinical utility

Disentangling the relationship between delinquency and hyperactivity, low achievement, depression, and low socioeconomic status: Analysis of repeated longitudinal data
Ivy N. Defoe, David P. Farrington, Rolf Loeber

Analyses of longitudinal Pittsburgh Youth Study. Repeated measures from age 11 to age 15. Low academic achievement has the most important influence on delinquency. Hyperactivity and low SES have indirect influences on delinquency via low achievement. Delinquency influences depression rather than the reverse

Evaluating the positive and negative benefits of crime: Development and validation of the Decisional Balance Scale for Adolescent Offenders (DBS-AO)
Mandy J. Jordan, Richard Rogers, Craig S. Neumann, Bradley Norlander

Data from 238 adolescent offenders from a maximum-security institution. Development of the Decisional Balance Scale for Adolescent Offenders (DBS-AO). The DBS-AO resulted in a good fit for a three factor model. The DBS-AO exhibited good construct validity with the Stages of Change Scale.

Dynamic risk assessment: A validation study
Robert D. Morgan, Daryl G. Kroner, Jeremy F. Mills, Catherine Serna, Brendan McDonald

Re-Entry: Dynamic Risk Assessment study examined dynamic predictors of outcomes. Sample consisted of 133 released offenders. 7-wave data collection procedure was used with measures of static and dynamic risk. Obtained adequate reliability but convergent validity of measures were unstable. Dynamic risk factors did not contribute to the predictive power of static variables

Using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory to identify subtypes of antisocial personality disorder
Jennifer Cox, John F. Edens, Melissa S. Magyar, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Kevin S. Douglas, Norman G. Poythress

Study 1 assessed the replicability of previously derived ASPD subtypes. ASPD subtypes differed on theoretical variables and behavioral outcomes. Study 2 evaluated utility of classification system in independent dataset. Groups differed in useful ways including recidivism type and institutional misconduct. Evidence for personality and behavioral differences in ASPD offenders

Antisocial cognition and crime continuity: Cognitive mediation of the past crime-future crime relationship
Glenn D. Walters, Matt DeLisi

Data from 812 members of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Criminality and antisocial cognition measured with self-report items. Antisocial cognition capable of mediating the past crime-future crime relationship. Mediational effect robust to pre-treatment effects of four criminological theories

Theory and Society 42(1)

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

Associating, mobilizing, politicizing: local developmental agency from without
László Bruszt and Balázs Vedres

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

For a postcolonial sociology
Julian Go

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

The political economy of memory: the challenges of representing national conflict at ‘identity-driven’ museums
Robyn Autry

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

Ideas in action: the politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839
Elisabeth Anderson

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

Journal of Criminal Justice 41(1)

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

Fear of crime, incivilities, and collective efficacy in four Miami neighborhoods
Marc L. Swatt, Sean P. Varano, Craig D. Uchida, Shellie E. Solomon

Coefficients of social process variables are compared across four neighborhoods. Coefficients for perceptions of collective efficacy on fear of crime vary. Coefficients for perceptions of incivilities on fear of crime do not vary. Heterogeneity was also observed for other important theoretical relationships.

Early starters: Which type of criminal onset matters most for delinquent careers?
Matt DeLisi, Tricia K. Neppl, Brenda J. Lohman, Michael G. Vaughn, Jeffrey J. Shook

Arrest onset was most consistently related to antisocial outcomes. Antisocial behavioral onset was associated with psychopathic personality. Juvenile court referral onset was not associated with delinquent careers. Youths with ADHD or CD diagnoses experienced earlier onset than their peers.

Discouraging window breakers: The lagged effects of police activity on crime
Jonathan W. Caudill, Ryan Getty, Rick Smith, Ryan Patten, Chad R. Trulson

This study provided mixed support for Broken Windows-based order maintenance policing. Order-maintenance policing failed to reduce significantly violent crime over a 26-month period. One measure of order-maintenance policing – non-traffic citations – significantly reduced reported property crimes.

Maternal versus adolescent reports of self-control: Implications for testing the general theory of crime
Ryan C. Meldrum, Jacob T.N. Young, Callie Harbin Burt, Alex R. Piquero

The strength of the association between self-control and delinquency varies by informant type. The strength of the association between parenting and self-control varies by informant type. Self-reported and other-reported measures of self-control cannot be used interchangeably.

Attempting to reduce firearms violence through a Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative (CAGI): An evaluation of process and impact
Edmund F. McGarrell, Nicholas Corsaro, Chris Melde, Natalie K. Hipple, Timothy Bynum, Jennifer Cobbina

CAGI cities experienced a lagged decline in gun homicide. There was evidence of a contemporaneous enforcement effect on gun homicide. The impact on gun homicide was modest and did not appear to be sustained. Most CAGI jurisdictions could not provide reliable estimates of gang crime. Most sites had difficulty implementing a coordinated, comprehensive program.

Childhood broken homes and adult violen An analysis of moderators and mediators
Delphine Theobald, David P. Farrington, Alex R. Piquero

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

Bullying victimization and adolescent mental health: General and typological effects across sex
Michael G. Turner, M. Lyn Exum, Robert Brame, Thomas J. Holt

Reported bullying victimization rates varied across verbal (50.0%), physical, (29.0%), and cyber (13.0%) bullying measures. Females and males who were verbally bullied experienced higher rates of depression than those who were not bullied. No significant gender differences in suicide ideation emerged across females and males who experienced any type of bullying.

Theoretical Criminology 17(1)

Theoretical Criminology, February 2013: Volume 17, Issue 1

Nordic Exceptionalism revisited: Explaining the paradox of a Janus-faced penal regime
Vanessa Barker

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

Irregular border-crossing deaths and gender: Where, how and why women die crossing borders
Sharon Pickering and Brandy Cochrane

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

With God on my side: The paradoxical relationship between religious belief and criminality among hardcore street offenders
Volkan Topalli, Timothy Brezina, and Mindy Bernhardt

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

‘A lockdown facility … with the feel of a small, private college’: Liberal politics, jail expansion, and the carceral habitus
Judah Schept

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

Discourse, practice and the production of the polysemy of security
Prashan Ranasinghe

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

From intuition to database: Translating justice
Neil Hutton

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

Journal of Quantitative Criminology 29(1)

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

Special Issue: Deterrence and Capital Punishment

What Do Panel Studies Tell Us About a Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment? A Critique of the Literature
Aaron Chalfin, Amelia M. Haviland & Steven Raphael

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

Pitfalls in the Use of Time Series Methods to Study Deterrence and Capital Punishment
Kerwin Kofi Charles & Steven N. Durlauf

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

Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence
Robert Apel

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

Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Understanding Disparate Results
Steven N. Durlauf, Chao Fu & Salvador Navarro

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

Deterrence and the Death Penalty: Partial Identification Analysis Using Repeated Cross Sections
Charles F. Manski & John V. Pepper

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