Redemption scholars estimate that after an average of 7-10 years pass without a new arrest or conviction, a person’s criminal record essentially loses its predictive value. This article provides the first labor market and recidivism estimates of implementing a criminal background check decision guideline based on this redemption research.
The sample consists of provisionally hired job applicants in New York State’s healthcare industry with at least one prior conviction. A "10 years since last conviction" guideline situated within a highly formalized criminal background check process plausibly creates conditional random variation in clearance decisions, which allows for a regression model to estimate causal effects.
Individuals cleared to work because of the 10-year guideline experience meaningful improvements in employment and earnings, but not recidivism on average. However, men do experience reductions in subsequent arrests, which appears to be driven by more complex factors beyond simply time since last arrest.
For some individuals, receiving clearance to work even a decade after their last conviction can have not only labor market benefits, but also important recidivism implications. Future research should explore the employment opportunity/recidivism trade-off in adjusting guideline threshold values and consider alternative redemption strategies.
This article examines the hypothesis that in street robbery location choices, the importance of location attributes is conditional on the time of day and on the day of the week.
The hypothesis is assessed by estimating and comparing separate discrete location choice models for each two-hour time block of the day and for each day of the week. The spatial units of analysis are census blocks. Their relevant attributes include presence of various legal and illegal cash economies, presence of high schools, measures of accessibility, and distance from the offender’s home.
The hypothesis is strongly rejected because for almost all census block attributes, their importance hardly depends on time of day or day of week. Only the effect of high schools in census blocks follows expectations, as its effect is only demonstrated at the times and on the days that schools are open.
The results suggest that street robbers’ location choices are not as strongly driven by spatial variations in immediate opportunities as has been suggested in previous studies. Rather, street robbers seem to perpetrate in the environs of cash economies and transit hubs most of the time irrespective of how many potential victims are around.
This study extends theoretical arguments from situational action theory (SAT) by focusing on the enduring effects of neighborhood context on individual criminal involvement and presents the first direct multilevel assessment of SAT in non-Western contexts using neighborhood data.
Survey data from a random sample of 1,435 adults in 41 neighborhoods in Russia and Ukraine are used to assess the interplay between individual criminal propensity and moral and deterrent qualities of neighborhood environments in their effects on individual offending.
The results demonstrate that variations in neighborhood moral rules directly influence criminal involvement, confirming SAT’s extended argument that this type of neighborhood-level predictor of offending matters and has an enduring effect on misconduct. Furthermore, consistent with SAT’s propositions, principal individual-level predictors such as personal criminal propensity and individual perceptions of neighborhood informal sanctioning exert expected significant effects on criminal involvement. Results for cross-level interaction effects are inconclusive.
SAT, a multilevel theory of crime, shows promise in various sociocultural contexts such as Eastern European countries of Russia and Ukraine.
To estimate the effects of three types of responses to intimate partner violence: (1) reporting of crime to the police, (2) arresting the suspect, and (3) receiving services from agencies other than the police that assist victims of crime.
We obtained a nationally representative sample of 2,221 victims, using longitudinal records from the area-identified National Crime Victimization Survey from 1996 through 2012. To reduce the threat of nonrandom selection into treatment, we estimated effects using propensity score matched and weighted survival analysis.
Victims’ probability of repeat victimization is not related to arrest (hazard ratio, 0.87; 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.55 to 1.40; p = .57). In contrast, the reporting of crime to the police is associated with a 34 percent reduction in the risk of repeat victimization (hazard ratio, 0.66; 95 percent CI, 0.53 to 0.82; p < .001), and the use of victim services is associated with a 40 percent reduction in the risk of repeat victimization (hazard ratio, 0.60; 95 percent CI, 0.44 to 0.83; p < .01).
The results support a model in which the deterrent effect of arrest is not substantively important, but police notification and victim-centered services produce important reductions in repeat victimization.
The current research proposes that beliefs about the legitimacy of law enforcement authorities also derive from core normative values (i.e., notions of the good and virtuous life) that stem from deeply embedded cultural orientations through which individuals operate in and interpret the world.
We developed a typology of four sets of core normative value systems using multiple correspondence analysis. Data are from the European Social Survey, including 52,253 respondents from 27 countries.
Three of the four sets of core normative values show an association with levels of legitimacy.
The findings provide preliminary support for our model and indicate that legitimacy perceptions are associated with core normative values, which may extend beyond individuals’ perceptions of enforcement institutions. This means that even optimal procedural conduct or efficiency may not affect the attitudes of some populations, particularly in diverse, multicultural societies. Taking into consideration, the effects of internalized core values can help inform community interventions by the police and other institutions.
There is a growing interest in the relationship between greenspace and crime, yet how particular greenspace types encourage or inhibit the timing and types of greenspace crime remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon recent advances in environmental criminology, we introduce an integrated suite of methods to examine the spatial, temporal, and neighborhood dynamics of greenspace crime.
We collate administrative, census, and crime incident data and employ cluster analysis, circular statistics, and negative binomial regression to examine violent, public nuisance, property, and drug crimes within 4,265 greenspaces across Brisbane, Australia.
We find that greenspace amenities, neighborhood social composition, and the presence of proximate crime generators influence the frequency and timing of greenspace crime.
Our analyses reveal that particular types of greenspaces are more crime prone than others. We argue that this is largely due to the presence of amenities within greenspaces allied with the sociodemographic context of surrounding neighborhoods. We conclude that understanding how these factors influence the behaviors of potential offenders, victims, and guardians is necessary to better understand the spatial distribution of greenspace crime and provide an evidence base for crime prevention initiatives.
Drawing on labeling and routine activities perspectives, this study investigates whether within-individual change in the school dropout status is associated with the risk of subsequent offending and arrest among serious adolescent offenders.
Longitudinal panel data and a modified version of conventional random-effects models are used as a potential outcome model of causality to directly compare the outcomes before and after the change in the school dropout status.
School dropout significantly increases the likelihood of rearrest, but there is no statistically discernable impact of dropping out of school on self-reported reoffending.
The current study adds insights into the school dropout literature by exploring the role of school dropout as one of the contingencies of "differential social reaction" or "secondary sanctioning" processes in which arrest leads to a greater risk of subsequent arrest.
Sanction risk perceptions are a central element of deterrence theory, but the process by which an offender’s direct and indirect criminal experiences contribute to future risk perceptions has been understudied. This note seeks to address this domain through an extension of updating model of Anwar and Loughran to account for two distinct information signals obtained by an offender through (1) their personal criminal experiences and (2) the criminal experiences of their family members. Further, this model is extended to assess for any differential updating according to the presence of low impulse control.
Data for this analysis were obtained from the Pathways to Desistance study. Random effects models were employed to model the updating process directly.
Having criminal family members who did not get arrested during the current period had the most criminogenic effect upon one’s personal perception of sanction risk, but simply having family members commit crime, regardless of sanction status, appears to be criminogenic. Those with low impulse control place greater weight upon their personal information than vicarious information obtained from their family members.
These findings offer some insight into a mechanism that may underlay the delinquent peer effect and warrants future inquiry.
We examined the extent to which different aspects of parenting are able to moderate the association between spending time unstructured socializing (US) in urban areas with high disorder and adolescent delinquency.
We used detailed data on time use, disorder in neighborhoods, parenting, and delinquency among 603 adolescents (aged 11–17 at T1) from the study of peers, activities, and neighborhoods, a two-wave longitudinal study with an interval of two years between measurements. Longitudinal multilevel analyses were used to examine interactions effects between parenting aspects and mean differences as well as individual changes in time spent unstructured socializing in areas with high disorder.
We did not find between-person level interaction effects between parenting and time spent in criminogenic settings. Our cross-level analyses, however, indicated that levels of parental monitoring as well as the quality of the parent–adolescent relationship mitigated the effects of changes in time spent in criminogenic settings.
Whether increases in time spent in criminogenic settings are related to increases in delinquency seems to be conditional on the level of parental monitoring and the quality of the parent–adolescent relationship. If these aspects of parenting are sufficient, changes in time spent in criminogenic settings are not necessarily detrimental.
This article explores the potential of virtual reality (VR) to study burglary by measuring user responses on the subjective, physiological, and behavioral levels. Furthermore, it examines the influence of individual dispositions, such as sensation seeking and self-control, on behavior during a virtual burglary event.
Participants, male university undergraduates (N = 77), could freely move around a virtual neighborhood wearing a VR headset and using a game controller and were instructed to burgle one of the houses in the neighborhood. Participant movement, items stolen from the house, and heart rate (HR) were recorded throughout the burglary event. Individual dispositions were measured before, and subjective user responses were measured after, the event. Additionally, we experimentally varied whether there was an alarm sounding and participants’ beliefs about the chance of getting caught (deterrence).
Participants reacted subjectively to the burglary event by reporting high levels of presence in the virtual environment (VE) and physiologically by showing increased HRs. In terms of behavior, high deterrence resulted in fewer items being stolen and a shorter burglary. Furthermore, sensation seekers stole more valuable items, while participants high in conscientiousness stole fewer items.
The results suggest that VEs have substantial potential for studying criminal behavior.
To better understand theft of portable electronic goods, this study examined the type of goods stolen during theft and robbery in England and Wales over almost two decades.
Using all sweeps of the Crime Survey for England and Wales between 1994 and 2011, the proportion of incidents where a particular item was stolen was calculated and then compared over time.
A small range of items accounted for the bulk of what was taken, namely, cash, purses/wallets, credit/debit cards, and mobile phones.
Considerable changes to the stolen goods landscape were found, with a shift from more traditional items such as cash and purses/wallets to portable electronic items such as mobile phones. Recommendations are made for preventing the loss of the items most frequently stolen during offenses of theft and robbery.
This study assessed to what extent differences in the subjectively experienced severity of imprisonment (SESI) affect postrelease offending behavior.
Interview and questionnaire data from the Prison Project, a sample of 1,344 Dutch inmates who were incarcerated for up to two years.
Bivariate analyses indicate that inmates who experience their imprisonment as more aversive are less likely to be reconvicted following release. While this relation persists after accounting for the duration of confinement, it disappears once potential confounders are accounted for.
Even when accounting for the SESI, more severe prison sentences do not deter offenders from subsequent involvement in crime. Hence, while a growing number of scholars argued that accounting for the SESI would result in a different conclusion about the specific deterrent effect of imprisonment than previously assumed, this body of skepticism is not grounded in empirical evidence.
Terrorism is becoming a priority among police agencies in many Western democracies. Scholars argue that increasing homeland security responsibilities can erode police–community relations, in that people perceive the police as neglecting local crime problems for homeland security concerns.
Using Israel as a case study, we evaluate, through path analyses, whether Israeli Jews who perceive that the Israeli National Police (INP) values homeland security more than its crime responsibilities have lower evaluations of police legitimacy and, in turn, are less willing to cooperate with the police.
The findings demonstrate that those who believe the INP neglects its crime responsibilities for homeland security view the police as less legitimate, and lower evaluations of police legitimacy decrease willingness to cooperate. The overall indirect effect of perceived neglect on cooperation is not significant.
Based on the findings, it is clear that perceptions of what the police ought to be doing influence legitimacy evaluations, even when controlling for key antecedents of legitimacy. The implications of these findings for policing terrorism and legitimacy studies are discussed.
Existing theory and policy regarding domestic violence (DV) often assume a highly specialized offender. Specialization literature in general, however, holds that specialization is not very common—even in DV. The current study builds on previous work by using multiple analytic methods to assess specialization/versatility among DV offenders, with a focus on gender differences.
The sample includes 730 individuals processed through a misdemeanor DV docket. Demographic measures were available, and complete criminal histories were compiled for each defendant. Analyses include the diversity index and offense specialization coefficient, multivariate models predicting those measures, multilevel item response theory analysis, and latent class analysis (LCA).
Results are generally consistent in finding an effect of gender on DV specialization as well as relationships between the age of onset and the overall offending frequency. Female offenders demonstrate a greater degree of DV specialization than male offenders did. However, gender did not distinguish between the DV specialist group and two more versatile groups derived from the LCA.
Findings of the overall generality of offending among DV offenders, as well as a greater degree of specialization among female offenders, suggest the need to reevaluate current specialized theory, policy, and practice.
Research on the relationship between religion and criminal recidivism has produced encouraging but ultimately inconclusive findings. This study offers a new direction for studying the role of religious support in reentry, providing a longitudinal analysis of the effect of change in religious support on both crime and noncrime outcomes postrelease.
Employing mixed-effects longitudinal analyses, this study uses data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative to examine the impact of religious support on postrelease substance use, criminal recidivism, and employment.
Religious support had strong and robust prosocial effects on both postrelease employment and substance use. The relationship between religious support and recidivism, however, did not reach statistical significance when we added social support to the research model.
Religious support and meaning making seems to help people address their criminogenic needs and also seems to be an important responsivity factor that is often overlooked in criminological theory and practice. Religious support must therefore be recognized as an important theoretical and practical variable in current efforts to develop successful reentry pathways.
Neighborhood characteristics predict burglary targets, but target attractiveness may be colored by the conditions in which a potential offender resides. We test whether relative differences in concentrated disadvantage, racial/ethnic composition, and ethnic heterogeneity influence where burglars offend, controlling for distance. From a relative deprivation perspective, economically advantaged areas make more attractive targets to burglars residing in disadvantage neighborhoods, but a social disorganization perspective predicts areas lower in social cohesion are most attractive, which may be neighborhoods with greater disadvantage.
Drawing upon a unique sample of cleared burglaries in the City of Tampa, Florida from 2000 to 2012, we utilize discrete choice modeling to predict burglar offense destination.
Offenders target neighborhoods that are geographically proximate or ecologically similar to their own. When accounting for relative differences, burglars from all neighborhood types are more likely to target highly disadvantaged or heterogeneous neighborhoods.
Burglars generally select targets that are similar to their residence. However, when suspects do discriminate, there is evidence that they target neighborhoods that are worse off relative to their own on characteristics such as residential instability, disadvantage, racial composition, and racial/ethnic diversity. These neighborhoods are associated with lower social control and lower risk of detection.
Examine how neighborhoods vary in the degree to which they experience repeat/near repeat crime patterns and whether theoretical constructs representing neighborhood-level context, including social ecology and structural attributes, can explain variation in single incidents and those linked in space and time.
Examine social, structural, and environmental design covariates from the American Community Survey to assess the context of near repeat burglary at the block group level. Spatially lagged negative binomial regression models were estimated to assess the relative contribution of these covariates on single and repeat/near repeat burglary counts.
Positive and consistent association between concentrated disadvantage and racial heterogeneity and all types of burglaries was evident, although the effects for other indicators, including residential instability, family disruption, and population density, varied across classifications of single and repeat/near repeat burglaries.
Repeat/near repeat burglary patterns are conditional on the overall level and specific dimensions of disorganization, holding implications for offender-focused as well as community-focused explanations. This study contributes greater integration between the study of empirically observed patterns of repeats and community-based theories of crime, including collective efficacy.
This study looks at whether social opportunity structures are associated with transitions into more serious drug market offending. Our focus is on the speed at which transitions occurred, and whether variations in criminal embeddedness play a role in explaining this.
A survey of 520 North American cannabis cultivators allowed us to assess one dimension of the criminal career—escalation—looking at the speed of transitions from cannabis user to grower. Our main predictor, criminal embeddedness, was measured through the presence of a cultivation mentor involved in cannabis cultivation.
Cox proportional hazard regression analysis demonstrated late cannabis use onset and an indicator of the number of drugs used beyond cannabis were found to accelerate transitions. In addition, within-person changes in mentorship were found to influence the timing of escalation, with meeting a mentor associated with quicker transitions into cannabis cultivation.
Findings emphasize the role of mentors as gateways into new milieus. Results support increased attention to the immediate social networks and broader social opportunity structures in which offenders and would-be offenders are embedded as major factors driving the timing of onset into more serious criminal pathways.
This article examines the relationship between intergenerational educational pathways and change in crime. Moreover, it examines the potential mediating roles of family and employment transitions, economic stressors, and social psychological factors.
Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 14,742) and negative binomial models are used to assess associations between educational pathways (i.e., upward, downward, and stable) and change in crime between adolescence and early adulthood. Selection effects are assessed with lagged dependent variables and controls for self-control, grades, and the Add Health Picture Vocabulary Test.
Intergenerational educational pathways are significantly associated with changes in crime. Downward educational pathways were predictive of increases in crime, whereas upward pathways were associated with decreases in crime. These associations were partly mediated by family transitions, and more strongly by economic stressors. These results were robust to controls for selection related variables.
This study is among the first to examine the relationship between intergenerational educational pathways and crime in the United States. Both upward and downward changes in educational attainments were found to be significant for crime. These findings are notable given the continuing expansion of higher education as well as concerns regarding increasing stratification and downward mobility in the United States.
To consider, at a conceptual level, the factors that inform perceptions of peer deviance and subsequently, at an empirical level, the extent to which survey information from high school students confirms whether these elements shape perceptions of friends’ drinking. This study also offers an alternative way to document projection bias.
249 public high school students completed a survey about what factors inform their perceptions of friends’ drinking behavior. Subjects also responded to several vignettes in order to assess their general tendency to engage in projection.
Subjects rely on both observed behavior and various forms of communication when forming perceptions of friends’ drinking, though there is notable variation across these elements. When using hypothetical vignettes, results suggest projection bias is significantly diminished as subjects are provided with more information about a hypothetical peer.
Adolescents appear to rely on a wide range of information when forming perceptions about friends’ drinking behavior. Although we did document a tendency to engage in projection when subjects had minimal information about a peer, the fragility of this tendency questions whether perceptual measures are inherently contaminated.
There were two aims to this study: firstly, to identify family subtypes of Singaporean youth offenders based on eight family variables. Secondly, the associations of these family subtypes with youth offending outcomes were tested.
With a sample of 3,744 youth, a latent class analysis was first conducted based on eight family variables. Multivariate analyses and a Cox regression were subsequently performed to analyze the associations of the family classes with age at first arrest, age at first charge, and recidivism.
A three-class solution was found to have the best fit to the data: (1) intact functioning families had little family risk; (2) families with criminality had higher probabilities of family criminality, of drug/alcohol abuse, and of being nonintact; and (3) poorly managed families received the poorest parenting and were more likely to be nonintact. Youth offenders from the latter two classes were arrested and charged at younger ages. Additionally, they reoffended at a quicker rate.
Family backgrounds matter for youth offending outcomes. Interventions have to be multifaceted and targeted at the family in order to mitigate the risk of young offenders from developing into pathological adult criminals.
To examine how school discipline may serve as a negative turning point for youth and contribute to increased odds of arrest over time and to assess whether suspensions received across multiple years may present a "cumulative" increase in odds of arrest.
Using four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we use a longitudinal hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM) to explore how school suspensions contribute to odds of arrest across time while controlling for a number of theoretically important dimensions such as race, age, delinquency, and gender among others.
Results show that youth who are suspended are at an increased risk of experiencing an arrest across time relative to youth who are not suspended and that this effect increases across time. Further, with each subsequent year the youth is suspended, there is a significant increase in odds of arrest.
Supporting prior work, we find that youth who receive a suspension are at an increased odds of contact with the criminal justice system, and increases in the number of suspensions received contribute to significant increases in odds of arrest. Findings demonstrate that suspensions present a form of cumulative effect over time.
This article examines the decision-making of consumers of illegal goods and services, using the illegal cigarette market in the South Bronx as a case study.
Sixty-seven adult smokers residing in the South Bronx (New York City) were purposively recruited and placed into 13 focus groups stratified by gender and age to discuss their purchasing patterns of cigarettes.
Our participants routinely buy and consume illicit cigarettes. They prefer to purchase these illicit cigarettes in legitimate stores rather than from street vendors. In their decision-making, our participants are guided by various concerns, including reliable access to illicit cigarettes, minimal exposure to the police, the ability to purchase cigarettes on credit, reduced risk of being sold low-quality cigarettes (i.e., stale, counterfeit), and the chance to successfully complain in case of poor product quality.
Consumers make rational decisions to purchase illicit cigarettes within the constraints they face as a result of their socioeconomic position. They base their decisions on a set of factors of which the lowest retail price is not a primary concern.
This study tests theorized mechanisms of desistance, and whether the process of desistance is conditioned by social structural position.
We investigate how marriage promotes desistance from crime among urban African American males raised in the Woodlawn community, a disadvantaged neighborhood in Chicago. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we test the resiliency of the marriage effect by observing offending trajectories following marital dissolution; is the marriage effect conditional upon staying married, indicating situational effects? or does the effect persist when marriage is taken away, indicating enduring effects? Further, we test if the process of desistance is conditional upon contextual disadvantage.
While initial findings show an increase in violent and property offending upon divorce, further analysis shows evidence that this effect differs by neighborhood structural context; the increase in offending upon divorce is apparent only for African American men who experience continued disadvantage across the life course. Those who moved to relatively more advantaged areas by adulthood show no increase in offending upon marital dissolution.
How marriage matters for desistance is partially influenced by social structural position; context matters. These findings invigorate criminological research on the mechanisms driving the marriage effect and provide insight into the interactive nature of person and context.
We examine three reasons why suspects resist arrest: (1) defiance of police authority by suspects from lower-status groups, (2) risky decisions resulting from aversion to sure losses, and (3) impairment due to mental illness and substance use.
We use nationally representative survey data from about 17,000 state and federal inmates who were asked whether they resisted arrest when they committed the crime that led to their incarceration.
Suspects’ resistance is unrelated to their race/ethnicity, education, or unemployment. On the other hand, suspects are more resistant when they are carrying contraband (e.g., illegal weapons, drugs, stolen property) or are under community supervision (i.e., parolees, probationers, or escapees). Resistance is also positively related to mental illness, illicit drug use, and alcohol intoxication.
Our results do not support the idea that resistance is an expression of defiance from lower-status suspects. They are consistent with prospect theory, which argues that decision makers become risk-seeking, when the alternative is to accept a sure loss. Our results suggest that resistant suspects are best understood as either desperate or disoriented decision makers.
Test whether Moffitt’s theory of adolescence-limited offenders, which contends that as young people enter adult roles they exit the "maturity gap" of adolescence and desist from crime, still applies given the changed nature of the early adult years. Examine whether spending time in adult roles remains a driver of desistance, and whether today’s emerging adults are at risk of experiencing a maturity gap between how adult they feel and the reality of their social situation.
Using longitudinal data from a Dutch general population sample aged 18 to 24 years, fixed-effects models were run examining the effect of within-person changes in time spent in adult roles on self-reported delinquency and moderation of this effect by feelings of adultness.
The more time spent in adult roles, the less delinquency respondents consequently reported. This effect was moderated: When spending more time in adult roles and feeling more adult, higher delinquency was reported than when spending more time in adult roles and feeling less adult.
Today’s emerging adults desist from delinquency in response to taking on adult roles. Possible interpretations for the unexpected qualification of this conclusion are discussed, as well as limitations such as the simplicity of our feeling adult measure.
We examined how nonideological factors such as childhood risk factors and adolescent conduct problems precede participation in violent extremism (VE).
We conducted in-depth life-history interviews with former members of violent White supremacist groups (N = 44) to examine their childhood and adolescent experiences, and how they explain the factors that led to the onset of VE.
Based on self-reports, we found substantial presence of childhood risk factors and adolescent conduct problems as precursors to participation in violent extremist groups.
Our findings suggest that pathways to VE are more complex than previously identified in the literature and that violent extremists are a heterogeneous population of offenders whose life histories resemble members of conventional street gangs and generic criminal offenders. We conclude our article with implications related to criminological theory, directions for future research, and limitations.
Test the effect of deviant peer modeling on theft as conditioned by verbal support for theft and number of deviant models.
Two related randomized experiments in which participants were given a chance to steal a gift card (ostensibly worth CAN$15) from the table in front of them. Each experiment had a control group, a verbal prompting group in which confederate(s) endorsed stealing, a behavioral modeling group in which confederate(s) committed theft, and a verbal prompting plus behavioral modeling group in which confederate(s) did both. The first experiment used one confederate; the second experiment used two. The pooled sample consisted of 335 undergraduate students.
Participants in the verbal prompting plus behavioral modeling group were most likely to steal followed by the behavioral modeling group. Interestingly, behavioral modeling was only influential when two confederates were present. There were no thefts in either the control or verbal prompting groups regardless of the number of confederates.
Behavioral modeling appears to be the key mechanism, though verbal support can strengthen the effect of behavioral modeling.
This study evaluates the malleability of judgments of procedural justice. Drawing upon various literatures, five factors are hypothesized to be related to changes in procedural justice: (1) prior judgments of procedural justice, (2) direct experiences of arrest, (3) vicarious experiences of arrest, (4) individual arrest history, and (5) age.
Using 11 waves of data from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 1,354), multilevel models relate within-person covariates including individual, family, and peer arrests, and age to changes in procedural justice, controlling for stable, individual characteristics.
Judgments of procedural justice are anchored in prior perceptions. They are also a function of direct and vicarious experiences of arrests with the effect of individual arrests varying across individual arrest history. Evidence also suggests a developmental component. Age has a direct effect on judgments of procedural justice and conditions the effect of individual arrests on changes in procedural justice.
Judgments of procedural justice are not static. Given these results, future research should continue to investigate the varying effects of other interactions with legal authorities on changes in judgments of procedural justice in order to form stronger policies aimed at increasing citizen cooperation.
The mechanisms underlying selection into street gangs remain elusive in the current inventory of theory and research on gangs, raising continued questions about not who or why, but how youth enter gangs and the attendant criminological implications. This study provides a suggestive analysis of an alternative framing of the selection process, one that is rooted in signaling theory.
A signaling scale was constructed using a mixed graded response model and national longitudinal data to explore the thesis that (1) gang prospects select into gangs using hard-to-fake signals of quality and gangs, in turn, receive and interpret these signals to select high-quality over low-quality prospects and (2) the selection process in a signaling framework conditions the well-established relationship between gang membership and criminal offending.
Respondents scoring higher on a signaling scale were more likely to select into gangs prospectively and see greater, although nonlinear, increases in criminal offending upon entering gangs, net of adjusting for alternative explanations for these relationships.
By further extending and analyzing signaling theory within the study of gang selection and criminal offending, the results of this study reveal that signaling theory has much to offer the study of gangs particularly and criminology generally.
This article examines a core hypothesis of Unnever and Gabbidon’s theory that racial discrimination should diminish the ability of African American youths to build strong bonds with their school, which in turn should increase their likelihood of engaging in problematic behaviors over time. Their thesis further argues that these relationships should persist after controlling for affectional ties with parents and other covariates.
This hypothesis is assessed using data from two cohorts included within the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, Longitudinal Cohort Study.
The results show that racial discrimination predicts changes in problematic behaviors from wave 1 to wave 3 and weakens the attachment that African American youths have with their teachers and their commitment to their education while controlling for affectional ties to parents and other covariates.
The results lend support to Unnever and Gabbidon’s thesis that a holistic understanding of African Americans’ offending must be grounded in their everyday experiences with what it means to be Black in a racialized society.
This essay traces the origins of group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) from its inception as a statistical tool for analyzing issues central to the criminal careers debate of the 1990s to its widespread application outside of criminology especially in psychological and medical research to study the developmental course of disease and physiological processes. Also, discussed are common misconceptions about the interpretation of GBTM.
Almost 30 years ago, the National Research Council published Criminal Careers and "Career Criminals." This report reviewed research on the initiation, continuation, and termination of individual offending patterns over a lifetime, otherwise known as criminal careers. The landmark report set in motion a research agenda focused on how antisocial behavior rises and falls during a lifetime and the antecedents to those patterns. But what about the report’s policy implications for the criminal justice system? Did the report have any impact on criminal justice operations? This article argues that it is difficult to ascertain the report’s direct impact, in part, because of the crime and criminal justice climate that was pervasive at the time of the report’s release. Indirect impacts of the report, however, are plausible. And although unintended, the report may have accentuated short-term attention to individual explanations of criminal behavior and individual-focused crime control policies, to the exclusion of social explanations and community-focused crime control policies.
This study examined how frequently online sexual solicitation of adolescents and children by adults occurs and what characteristics the perpetrators have using a novel methodological approach.
In an online survey, we investigated the frequency of online sexual solicitation exhibited by adult Internet users (N = 2,828), including a subgroup recruited on pedophilia-related websites. Perpetrators soliciting adolescents were compared to those soliciting children concerning solicitation outcomes (e.g., cybersex) and demography.
In total, 4.5 percent reported soliciting adolescents and 1.0 percent reported soliciting children. Most solicitors of adolescents and children were from pedophilia-related websites (49.1 and 79.2 percent). Solicitation frequently involved sexual outcomes (47.5 percent), which also followed nonsexual interaction. The minors’ age did not affect the odds of sexual outcomes. A substantial proportion of perpetrators were female.
This study offers unprecedented data on the number of adults soliciting minors. Although adolescents were more often target of solicitation, the risk of sexual outcomes was equally high in solicitation of children, suggesting younger children to be considered in prevention efforts as well. Nonsexual interactions resulting in sexual outcomes need to be more closely examined to inform appropriate prevention efforts. Moreover, awareness should be raised about females as perpetrators.
To examine whether victim, offender, and relationship characteristics increase the risk and frequency of intimate partner violence (IPV). The effect of separation length on the risk of IPV is also evaluated.
Using abuse incident data (N = 4,960) from IPV victims (n = 497), who accessed a health-care facility over a one-year period, between-individual differences in the frequency and timing of abuse were assessed. Dependence of event times within respondents was accounted for with conditional risk set "gap time" models, which stratified participants across event number and failure order.
Employment of both partners and only the victim decreased the risk and frequency. Employment of only the abuser and length of separation decreased frequency but was not significantly associated with timing of abuse. Separated and non-separated respondents were not significantly different in frequency (incident risk ratio = 1.06, p > .05) and timing of abuse, (exp (b) = 0.95, p > .05).
By capturing the timing between abuse incidents, insight into the long-term risk of abuse is provided and accounts for selection effects. Findings call for an improvement in measuring relationship status indicators, including relationship length and time since separation. Future research should examine within-individual changes in separation and IPV risk.
This article examines the impact of distal prison placements on inmate social ties. Specifically, we test whether distance adversely affects inmates by reducing their access to family and friends and then test whether the effects are amplified for minorities and inmates who come from socially disadvantaged areas.
These questions are assessed using a sample of inmates that includes all convicted felony offenders admitted to a single state’s prison system over a three-year period.
We find that inmates vary greatly in the distance from which they are placed from home and that Latinos are placed more distally than Blacks and Whites. We also find that distance and community disadvantage adversely affect the likelihood of inmate visitation. Although the adverse effect of distance appears to be similar across racial and ethnic groups, a difference exists among Blacks—for this group, high levels of community disadvantage amplify the adverse effects of distance.
This study identifies an important dimension along which incarceration may adversely impact inmates, their families, and the communities from which they come, and how these effects may be patterned in ways that disproportionately affect minorities and prisoners from disadvantaged areas.
To examine whether the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) observed in studies of aggregate crime rates poses a threat to studies examining the moderating effect of neighborhood processes on the association between individual risk factors and self-reported violence.
A series of negative binomial regression models were estimated on a sample of 11,288 youth participating in the Add Health study to assess the moderating influence of neighborhood disadvantage on the association between impulsivity and violence aggregated to the census block group and the census tract.
One-unit increases in neighborhood disadvantage and impulsivity were associated with 5.1 percent and 4.9 percent increases in the expected count of self-reported violent behaviors, respectively. Neighborhood disadvantage exacerbated the association between impulsivity and self-reported violence when measured at the tract level but had no moderating effect when measured at the block group.
The findings reported here suggest that the MAUP poses a unique concern for person–context research. The geographic aggregation of neighborhood effects warrants careful consideration in theoretical and empirical models linking individual behavior with broader social ecologies.
This note examines the relationship between maternal incarceration and adverse outcomes for offspring in early adulthood.
Utilizing data derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, a series of multivariate models are conducted to examine the impact maternal incarceration has on criminal justice involvement among young adults. To control for selection effects that may be associated with maternal imprisonment, propensity score matching is utilized.
Respondents whose mothers had served time in prison were significantly more likely to have an adult arrest, conviction, and incarceration, even after controlling for important demographic factors and correlates of criminal behavior. This effect persisted following matching.
Maternal incarceration had a substantial effect on the offspring’s adult involvement in the criminal justice system. These findings bolster contentions regarding the unintended consequences of maternal incarceration that include long-term collateral damage to their children.
The transition to adulthood can be challenging, especially for children of incarcerated parents. Drawing on reentry and life-course scholarship, we argue that parental incarceration may adversely affect multiple life outcomes for children as they progress from adolescence into adulthood and that such effects may persist from early young adulthood into late young adulthood.
The study uses propensity score matching analyses of National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data (N = 12,844).
Analyses identified harmful effects of parental incarceration on many life domains, including criminal behavior, mental health, illegal drug use, education, earnings, and intimate relationships. These effects typically surfaced by early young adulthood and continued into late young adulthood.
The results suggest that parental incarceration constitutes a significant turning point in the lives of young people and underscore the importance of life-course perspectives for understanding incarceration effects. They also illustrate that formal punishment policies may create harms that potentially offset intended benefits.
The current study contributes to the literature through a systematic social observation of the defensive actions of drug sellers within open-air retail markets. The study expands upon previous literature by incorporating a novel data collection and coding method.
Video footage of narcotics transactions was extracted from the closed-circuit television (CCTV) system of the Newark, NJ Police Department. Researchers transcribed and coded the footage to measure the frequency of defensive actions incorporated by drug sellers. Fisher’s exact tests measured whether the frequency of each defensive action significantly differed across geographic setting or time of day.
The frequency of many defensive actions was significantly related to geographic setting and time of day. The strongest relationship was observed between the use of stash spots and setting. Overall, the findings suggest that drug sellers adopt tenets of Opportunity Theory to protect themselves from law enforcement, specifically by acting as guardians and place managers on their own behalf.
This study extends prior techniques and provides an additional case study on the use of CCTV footage in the study of street-level crime. This methodology can be used in concert with more traditional ethnographic techniques in the study of the drug trade and in crime-and-place research in general.
Examine whether young men who chronically use marijuana are at risk for engaging in drug-related and non-drug-related criminal offending and exhibiting psychopathic personality features in their mid-30s.
Patterns of marijuana use were delineated in a sample of predominately Black and White young men from adolescence to the mid-20s using latent class growth curve analysis. Self-report and official records of criminal offending and psychopathic personality features were assessed in the mid-30s. Analyses controlled for multiple factors indicative of a preexisting antisocial lifestyle and co-occurring use of other substances and tested for moderation by race.
Four latent marijuana trajectory groups were identified: chronic high, adolescence-limited, late increasing, and low/nonusers. Relative to low/nonusers, chronic high and late increasing marijuana users exhibited more adult psychopathic features and were more likely to engage in drug-related offending during their mid-30s. Adolescence-limited users were similar to low/nonusers in terms of psychopathic features but were more likely to be arrested for drug-related crimes. No trajectory group differences were found for violence or theft, and the group differences were not moderated by race.
Young men who engage in chronic marijuana use from adolescence into their 20s are at increased risk for exhibiting psychopathic features, dealing drugs, and enduring drug-related legal problems in their mid-30s relative to men who remain abstinent or use infrequently.
To investigate the characteristics of spatial and temporal patterning of arson incidents in a large urban county.
Using multiyear geocoded crime data from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office (2005 to 2012), arson incidents are analyzed for significant space–time interaction using the Monte Carlo simulation-based Knox method, originally developed for epidemiology research. Several additional contrasts are presented according to situational and routine activities factors that may be implicated in target selection and guardianship efficacy.
Evidence illustrates that arson generally exhibits enhanced likelihood of near repeat follow-up incidents in close spatial and temporal proximity to an initiating event. Also, spatiotemporal patterns for arson exhibit systematic differences when contrasting subtypes including residential versus non-residential, daytime versus nighttime, and weekday versus weekend arsons.
Comparatively little empirical research has been published in criminology journals concerning this "invisible" Uniform Crime Report index crime. This study provides a theoretically informed, aggregate-level examination of trends and patterns for arson in an urban environment. Results may aid in inductive theory building as well as efforts to investigate and prevent arson.
Test whether the presence of a surveillance message on an attacked computer system influences system trespassers’ active engagement with the compromised system (i.e., entering computer commands). The hypothesized restrictive deterrent effect is tested both in the context of a first system trespassing incident and in the progression of repeated trespassing incidents in an attacked computer system.
We designed a randomized controlled trial and deployed a series of virtual target computers with known vulnerabilities into the computer network of a large public university in the United States. The target computers were set to either display or not display a surveillance banner once system trespassers infiltrated them.
We find that the presence of a surveillance banner in the attacked computer systems reduced the probability of commands being typed in the system during longer first system trespassing incidents. Further, we find that the probability of commands being typed during subsequent system trespassing incidents (on the same target computer) is conditioned by the presence of a surveillance banner and by whether commands have been entered during previous trespassing incidents.
These findings offer modest support for the application of restrictive deterrence in the study of system trespassing.
Test whether processing non-transfer-eligible juvenile arrestees as adults has any effect on their likelihood of criminal recidivism.
A regression discontinuity design is used to analyze the effect of processing juveniles as adults on a four-year felony rearrest measure using a sample of 78,142 felony drug arrests.
For the felony drug offenders in this sample, processing juveniles as adults reduced the probability of recidivism by 3 to 5 percent. Based on the rapid onset and limited change in size of these effects over the duration of a four-year follow-up as well as the concentration of the effect within a subpopulation having the least risk of incarceration, we attribute this finding to a combination of enhanced deterrence and incapacitation in the adult system.
Our results suggest that processing juveniles in the adult system may not uniformly increase offending and may reduce offending in some circumstances. Our findings also highlight the utility of quasi-experimental research designs for estimating the life-course effects of contact with the criminal justice system.
"Broken windows" theory is an influential model of neighborhood change, but there is disagreement over whether public disorder leads to more serious crime. This article distinguishes between public and private disorder, arguing that large-scale administrative data provide new opportunities to examine broken windows theory and alternative models of neighborhood change.
We apply an ecometric methodology to two databases from Boston: 1,000,000+ 911 dispatches and indicators of physical disorder from 200,000+ requests for nonemergency services. Both distinguish between disorder in public and private spaces. A cross-lag longitudinal analysis was conducted using two full years of data (2011–2012).
The two databases provided six dimensions of physical and social disorder and crime. The cross-lag model revealed eight pathways by which one form of disorder or crime in 2011 predicted a significant increase in another in 2012. Although traditional interpretations of broken windows emphasize the role of public disorder, private conflict most strongly predicted future crime.
Our results describe a social escalation model where future disorder and crime emerge not from public cues but from private disorder within the community, demonstrating how "big data" from administrative records, when properly measured and interpreted, represent a growing resource for studying neighborhood change.
One explanation for the increase in delinquency in adolescence is that young people are trapped in the so-called maturity gap: the discrepancy between biological and social maturation, which motivates them to engage in delinquency as a temporary means to bridge this gap by emphasizing their maturity. In the current study, we investigated to what extent the discrepancy between pubertal status (i.e., biological maturation) and autonomy in decision making (i.e., social maturation) is related to conflict with parents, which in turn predicts increasing levels of delinquency as well as substance use.
Hypotheses were tested by means of path models in a longitudinal sample of adolescent boys and girls (N = 1,844; M age 13.02) from the Social Network Analyses of Risk behaviors in Early adolescence (SNARE) study using a one-year time interval.
Results indicate that biological maturation in interaction with social maturation predict conflict with parents, which in turn was related to higher levels of delinquency and substance use over time. No gender differences were found.
These findings reveal that conflict with parents is an important mechanism, linking the interplay of biological and social maturation with delinquency and substance use in early adolescence for boys and girls.
Wilson and Kelling (1982) introduced Zimbardo’s "broken windows" into the lexicon a little over 30 years ago. This article explores broken windows from a legal policy perspective, with the aim of putting forth a framework for integrating what we know (or think we know) about the potential effects of broken windows policing into our goals for improving high-crime neighborhoods.
A narrative review was carried out of key social science research on the broken windows perspective.
The first part of the article explains the appeal of broken windows to legal theorists interested in challenging criminal law policy based on a law and economics approach. The second part reviews maturing broken windows research and evaluations of broken windows policing. The third part explains the contours of an analysis that addresses the value of broken windows policing from a legal policy perspective.
While I remain a tentative fan of broken windows policing, I argue that the modest outcomes of broken windows policing do not justify the problems these policies create from a procedural justice context. The policy literature ignores this trade-off, and a curriculum framework that emphasizes how the criminal justice system educates citizens may offer a promising alternative.
Recidivism reduction is the primary goal of many correctional programs, and "recidivism" is the most prevalent outcome measure in related program evaluation research. Many different operationalizations of recidivism are used without a clear delineation of how these variations may impact conclusions. This study explores how the definitions of recidivism may impact research findings and resultant policy recommendations regarding the efficacy of parole.
Data from prisoners released in 2008 (n = 12,132) to parole or unconditional release are analyzed according to 10 different operationalizations of recidivism. We compare recidivism rates, time to failure, and hazard rates between groups through the presentation of descriptive statistics and the use of multivariate Cox proportional hazards survival models.
Our findings indicate that parole supervision could be deemed either effective or ineffective depending on which definition of recidivism is employed. These findings are largely driven by whether technical parole violations are included into more traditional criminal outcome measures, such as rearrests, reconvictions, or reincarcerations for new crimes, and if court processing times are factored into measures of time to failure.
Our results raise questions about the consistency of findings within the corrections literature. These conclusions, given the role that technical violations and court processing times can play, suggest a need for increased specificity when using recidivism as an outcome measure.
In small-scale, intra-urban communities, do fundamental demographic correlates of crime, proven important in community criminology, link to next year’s crime levels, even after controlling for this year’s crime levels? If they do, it would imply that shifting ecologies of crime apparent after a year are driven in part by dynamics emerging from structural differentials. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this question has not yet been addressed.
For Philadelphia (PA) census block groups, 2005 to 2009 data from the American Community Survey and 2009 crime counts were used to predict spatially smoothed 2010 crime counts in three different models: crime only, demographics only, and crime plus demographics. Models are tested for major personal (murder, rape-aggravated assault, and robbery) and property (burglary and motor vehicle theft) crimes.
For all crime types investigated except rape and homicide, crime plus demographics resulted in the best combination of prediction/simplicity based on the Bayesian Information Criterion. Socioeconomic status (SES) and racial composition linked as expected theoretically to crime changes.
Intercommunity structural differences in power relationships, as reflected in SES and racial composition, link to later crime shifts at the same time that ongoing crime continuities link current and future crime levels. The main practical implication is that crime analysts tasked with long-term, one-year-look-ahead forecasting may benefit by considering demographic structure as well as current crime.
This study examines the use of credit, or "fronting," in the illegal drug economy. We study how fronting affects transaction costs and insulates against law enforcement in drug distribution networks and what role fronting plays in the management of interpersonal network ties. The emphasis is on the cooperative dimension of credits.
Qualitative interviews were conducted with 68 incarcerated drug dealers in Norwegian prisons. Most were mid-level dealers (66 percent), dealing with many different drugs, but amphetamines were the main drugs distributed (38 percent). Using qualitative content analysis, we explore their perspective on the fronting of illegal drugs and associated practices in the illegal drug economy.
We find that dealers are generally skeptical toward fronting drugs, and accepting fronted drugs, but that this practice still is common. The main reason is that the practice secures a faster turnaround. Credits are embedded in social relationships both economically and socially. Previous social relationships are often a prerequisite, but fronting is also used to build trust.
Although transaction cost economics captures the economic dimension of credit, insights from economic sociology and in particular the social embeddedness approach are necessary to understand the interplay between economic and social factors when drugs are fronted in the illegal economy.
This study aims to assess three related aspects of co-offending networks: (1) the characteristics of co-offending groups and the duration of group offending careers, (2) the impact of membership in co-offending groups on total offending and the length of individual offending careers, and (3) the impact of offender arrest (or changes in co-offending group structure) on the offending patterns of connected co-offenders.
Data on sentenced burglary offenders (N = 270) in one county in Pennsylvania from 2001 to 2010 are used to examine the impact of co-offending group membership, as well as the relationship between the changing network structure and the offending patterns of connected co-offenders, within a two-level modeling framework.
Larger groups with more dispersed offending structures offend over the longest span. Additionally, membership in co-offending groups is associated with more total offending and a longer individual offending career. Finally, the arrest of structurally important offenders, compared to more peripheral offenders, is significantly associated with the decreased offending of connected co-offenders.
The removal of a highly central "instigator" or "recruiter" is associated with desistance among connected co-offenders. Future research should examine the mechanisms behind these effects, and why the arrest of co-offending partners is associated with desistance.
Self-efficacy, the subjective belief that one can successfully perform a behavior, has been shown to be an important predictor of various conventional behaviors. This study applies self-efficacy theory to offending experiences and aims at examining the factors that influence criminal self-efficacy.
The study is based on a survey questionnaire that was administered to 212 inmates. The sources of information identified by self-efficacy theory—individual and contextual characteristics, physiological states, social persuasion, vicarious learning, and personal performance accomplishments—were operationalized with the data to evaluate their impact on criminal self-efficacy.
Results from ordered logistic regressions demonstrate that age, education, legitimate earnings, relative criminal earnings, qualifications, authority, and criminal earnings are the most potent factors influencing the development of criminal self-efficacy.
This study’s findings are consistent with research on noncriminal contexts in that one’s self-efficacy in a given domain is primarily the result of personal and vicarious experiences as well as contextual features surrounding these activities. While this study could not evaluate the temporal horizons extending from criminal self-efficacy, we believe that these subjective outlooks bare great theoretical relevance for life course criminology and might prove informative in understanding criminal persistence and desistance.
The main objectives of the study are to estimate the impact of mortgage foreclosures on the location of criminal activity within a blockface. Drawing on routine activity theory, disorder theory, and social disorganization theory, the study explores potential mechanisms that link foreclosures to crime.
To estimate the relationship between foreclosures and localized crime, we use detailed foreclosure and crime data at the blockface level in Chicago and a difference-in-difference estimation strategy.
Overall, mortgage foreclosures increase crime on blockfaces. Foreclosures have a larger impact on crime that occurs inside residences than on crime in the street. The impact of foreclosures on crime location varies by crime type (violent, property, and public order crime).
The evidence supports the three main theoretical mechanisms that link foreclosure activity to local crime. The investigation of the relationship by crime location suggests that foreclosures change the relative attractiveness of indoor and outdoor locations for crime commission on the blockface.
This study seeks to contribute to research on the patterning and stability of code of the street beliefs. We describe trajectories of street code beliefs from late childhood to emerging adulthood and investigate social factors that influence membership in and distinguish between trajectories.
Using six waves of panel data from the Family and Community Health Study, group-based trajectory models were estimated to describe developmental patterns of street code beliefs from age 10 to 26. Correlates of street code beliefs, including racial discrimination, parenting practices, and neighborhood crime, were used to predict trajectory membership.
Analyses identified five distinct trajectories of street code beliefs. Four trajectories were largely stable across the study period; however, one group, comprised of 12 percent of the sample, dramatically declined in beliefs. Being male and experiencing racial discrimination significantly distinguish between all of the trajectories. Parental monitoring and perceptions of neighborhood crime differentiate between the declining trajectory and the stable trajectories.
Findings provide insights into the developmental patterns and correlates, of street code beliefs. Results suggest beliefs are malleable but remain largely stable and underscore the need for more nuanced, longitudinal approaches to the code of the street.
Tests the hypothesis that the social adversity-antisocial behavior relationship is partly mediated by a biological mechanism, low heart rate.
18 indicators of social adversity and heart rate measured at rest and in anticipation of a speech stressor were assessed alongside nine measures of antisocial behavior including delinquency (Youth Self-Report [YSR] and Child Behavior Checklist [CBCL]), conduct disorder (Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder Questionnaire), and child psychopathy (Antisocial Process Screening Device [APSD]) in a community sample of 388 children aged 11 to 12 years. PROCESS was used to test mediation models.
Low heart rate was a partial mediator of the adversity-antisocial behavior relationship, explaining 20.35 percent and 15.40 percent of the effect of social adversity on delinquency and overall antisocial behavior, respectively.
Findings are, to the authors’ knowledge, one of the first to establish any biological risk factor as a mediator of the social adversity-antisocial behavior relationship and suggest that social processes alter autonomic functioning in a way to predispose to antisocial behavior. While not definitive, results give rise to a social neurocriminology theory that argues that the social environment influences biological risk factors in a way to predispose to antisocial and criminal behavior.
The utility of configural behavior settings is explored as an alternative unit of analysis for place-based criminological research. Four research questions are addressed: (1) How do robberies cluster within certain behavior settings? (2) How are conclusions about robbery’s behavior settings influenced by the distance interval used to measure the proximate environment? (3) Are dominant behavior settings homogeneous across patrol districts? and (4) Is there temporal variability among dominant behavior settings?
Conjunctive analysis of case configurations is used to construct configural behavior settings around 453 robbery locations in Henderson, Nevada, between 2007 and 2009.
The major findings of this study are that (1) the majority of personal robberies occur within a small number of dominant configural behavior settings and (2) the composition of behavior settings and the proportion of incidents for which they account varies by the distance interval used to measure the proximate environment, patrol district, and time of day.
Configural behavior settings provide an alternative unit of analysis that can be used in future place-based research to improve our understanding of criminogenic microenvironments. Replication of this study in other cities that vary in urban design would further demonstrate the merits of this approach.
Drawing on focal concerns theory, as well as scholarship on the juvenile court’s mandate to consider youth culpability and amenability to treatment, we develop hypotheses that seek to examine whether the court will (1) punish Whites less severely and (2) be more likely to intervene with Whites through rehabilitative intervention and, simultaneously, be more punitive and less rehabilitative with minorities, and, in particular, Black males.
Florida juvenile court referral data and multinomial logistic regression analyses are used to examine multicategory disposition and "subdisposition" measures.
Findings suggest that minority youth, especially Black males, are not only more likely to receive punitive sanctions, they also are less likely than White youth to receive rehabilitative interventions and instead experience significantly higher rates of dismissals. The analyses indicate that similar racial and ethnic disparities emerge when "subdispositions"—specifically, placement options within diversion and probation—are examined.
The results underscore the salience of race, ethnicity, and gender in juvenile court decisions about punitive sanctioning and rehabilitative intervention, as well as the importance of employing multicategory disposition measures that better reflect the range of sanctioning and intervention options available to the court.
Social disorganization theory implies that neighborhood disadvantage influences delinquency in part through the weakening of neighborhood-level social ties and residents’ commitment to social norms. We test these associations by focusing on social ties among neighborhood parents and adolescent commitment to social norms.
We use a population survey of adolescents and combine it with administrative (population) data on school neighborhood characteristics in Iceland. We use multilevel data on 83 school communities and 5,865 adolescents in Iceland to analyze our hypotheses.
We find partial support for our hypotheses. Thus, adolescents living in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage are more delinquent, net of individual-level (household) characteristics. Moreover, neighborhood-level parental networks and adolescent commitment to social norms mediate a part of this contextual effect.
By supporting community theories in a different societal context (i.e., in a small homogeneous society) than most prior work, our study strengthens the external validity of the existing research. As we use cross-sectional data, the study faces the limitation of not being able to separate the constructs temporally.
This research examines the association between paternal incarceration and children’s delinquency. Prior research suggests an association, although omitted variable bias is an enduring issue.
To help address issues related to unobserved heterogeneity, we employ a method uncommonly used in criminological research. Rather than comparing the children of incarcerated fathers to respondents who have never had a father incarcerated, we exploit the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to generate a strategic comparison group: respondents who will have a father incarcerated in the future. We also examine two types of delinquency, expressive and instrumental, to infer plausible mechanisms linking paternal incarceration and delinquency.
When using "futures" as comparison cases, results differ from much prior work and suggest a spurious association between paternal incarceration and instrumental delinquency (e.g., theft). Paternal incarceration retains a significant effect on expressive delinquency, which is partly mediated by reduced attachment to fathers.
The association between paternal incarceration and expressive (but not instrumental) crime supports Agnew’s strain theory and elements of control theory. Our comparison group also offers important advantages in terms of addressing unobserved heterogeneity, and we think this approach would prove useful for other topics in criminology.
This study explores the social and developmental antecedents of legal cynicism. This study comprises a range of indicators organized into four domains—bonds to institutions, predispositions, experiences, and delinquent involvement—that bear on theoretically plausible mechanisms involved in the development of legal cynicism.
This study examines four pathways to legal cynicism using data from two waves of the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (N = 1,226). Ordinary least squares (OLS) procedures are used to regress legal cynicism at t 2 (age 15) on social and psychological characteristics measured at t 1 (age 13), and retrospective variables measured at t 2. Baseline legal cynicism was included as a covariate in all models.
The results show that self-reported delinquency is the strongest predictor of legal cynicism. There is also evidence that alienation from society, negative experiences with police, and association with deviant peers can foster legal cynicism.
This study shows that legal cynicism is to a small extent the result of alienation from social institutions and negative experiences with the police. To a much larger degree, legal cynicism seems to represent a cognitive neutralization technique used to justify one’s previous self-reported delinquency.
The objective of this analysis is to address the data and conclusions of Lisa Stolzenberg and Stewart D’Alessio in their article "Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve," published in The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency in 2008. The authors analyze National Incident–based Reporting System (NIBRS) 2002 arrests from seven states and conclude that most arrests at all ages involve only one offender, and therefore group offending is of little etiological significance.
To test their claims, we conduct offense-specific analyses of single and multiple arrests using the full 2002 NIBRS arrest data set.
After disaggregating the data by type of offense, we find group involvement among young offenders dominates the arrest statistics for all serious crimes other than rape and aggravated assault. Conclusions: Contrary to the conclusions of Stolzenberg and D’Alessio, co-offending does appear to have a substantial impact on young offenders. The extent of adolescent crime as group behavior may be a cliché in criminological circles, but this is because the empirical evidence for it is substantial.
This study aimed to test situational theories of victimization by answering three research questions, namely to what extent victims are actually victimized while being exposed to risky situations, whether the relation between victimization and situational elements is causal, and which elements of a situation are risky. We distinguished the type of activity, the company that individuals keep, the place of the activity, and the time of the activity.
Data were collected among adolescents in The Hague, the Netherlands, using space–time budgets. These provided detailed information on situational elements for each hour across a period of four days. Multivariate fixed effects logit analyses were used to ensure that the results were not due to stable differences between individuals.
A total of 55 individuals reported 63 incidents of victimization. Results confirmed most hypotheses. Especially, the relation between delinquency and victimization was extraordinarily strong. Alcohol consumption, presence of peers, absence of authority figures, and being in a public place also increased the risk of victimization.
Confirming major victimization theories, victimization was shown to occur during and because of exposure to risky situations. The hypothesized elements of risky situations were shown to have independent effects on victimization.
Some everyday products, particularly over-the-counter drugs, which are sold in supermarkets and other stores can produce a "high" or serve other roles in illicit drug use. Informed by CRAVED, a model of theft choices derived from crime opportunity theory, this study explores whether products with known roles in drug use are shoplifted at higher rates than other products.
Products that serve a variety of roles in illicit drug use were identified through a review of the medical literature and web sources. Data from 204 supermarkets yielded theft rates for 551 of these products, which were compared with theft rates for 7,887 products sold by the same stores without known roles in drug abuse.
Theft rates of products with roles in drug use were significantly higher than theft rates of other products.
Knowing which products are shoplifted can provide only limited information about the shoplifter’s "craft." In this case, more information was needed about the security given to products by the stores, which has broader implications for CRAVED. Despite this, the findings about the higher theft rates of products with known drug roles could assist retailers, manufacturers, and responsible government agencies to secure these products from theft.
The racial threat perspective argues that racial minorities are subjected to greater punishment in places with large or growing minority populations. However, prior research has focused largely on Black populations while devoting limited attention to potential "Latino threat" or "immigrant threat" effects. To address these gaps, this study explores the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on sentence disposition (jail, prison, or community corrections) and sentence length.
Using 2000 through 2006 data from the Florida Department of Corrections Guideline database, we use multilevel modeling techniques to explore the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on state criminal sentencing.
The results provide support for racial/ethnic threat theory among Black but not Latino defendants. Black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison and are given longer sentences in counties with growing Black populations. In contrast, Latino sentences are not significantly influenced by Latino population growth. Results provide no support for immigrant threat positions.
Overall, our findings offer a complex picture for racial/ethnic and immigrant threat. However, one pattern remains clear. Within Florida courts, Black defendants continue to be the prime targets for effects of racial threat and resulting disadvantages in criminal sentencing.
Drawing on the rational choice perspective, this study aims at explaining why some robberies take place with physical force while others occur only with threat. The focus is how expected and observed victim resistance impact physical force by robbers.
We draw on quantitative and qualitative data obtained from 104 robbers who described 143 robbery events. Based on the coding of behavioral sequences between offenders and victims, we distinguish between the use of physical force at the onset from the use of physical force during the progression of the event.
At the onset of robberies, physical force of offenders is influenced by whether they judge the victim to be street credible. During the progression of robberies, offenders are more likely to use physical force against a resistant than against a compliant victim.
At the onset of the robbery, offender violence is related to expected victim resistance; during the progression, it is related to observed victim resistance. Future research should focus on behavioral sequences within robbery events including the meaning of victim characteristics and victim behavior in different phases of the event.
To determine whether the relationship between marriage and crime extends beyond the individual level of analysis by examining the relationship between marriage rates and crime rates at the county level.
Linear regression analyses of marriage rates on various types of crime, including violent, property, drug, and juvenile crime arrest rates.
The analyses suggest that marriage rates are inversely related to rates of violent crime, property crime, drug use, and juvenile violence.
This research note suggests that the relationship between marriage and crime is more far reaching than previous studies have indicated. Final remarks address the implications of the findings for theoretical work on crime causation and for public policy.
Agnew has proposed an integrative theoretical construct composed of the most influential predictors of crime concentrated within multiple life domains, including the self, family, school, peer, and work. Limited research has explored the impact of life domains on offending. This study presents a partial test of the theory using an international sample.
Nationally representative self-reported data are derived from 1,756 juveniles residing in Bosnia and Herzegovina who participated in wave 2 of the International Self Report Delinquency Study. A series of multivariate models were run to examine the impact life domains have on crime directly and indirectly, as well as looking at interaction effects among the life domains.
Data showcased varying levels of support for the life domains. Across bivariate and multivariate models, the most significant positive relationships between offending and the life domains were evident in the self and peer domains, with the school and family domains exhibiting a negative impact on offending. Furthermore, significant interactive and indirect effects were discovered, primarily for the self and peer domains.
This research discovered a moderate level of support for life domains contained within Agnew’s integrated theory for offending within an international context.
This study builds on research undertaken by Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta and explores the generalizability of a theoretically derived offender target selection model in three cross-national study regions.
Taking a discrete spatial choice approach, we estimate the impact of both environment- and offender-level factors on residential burglary placement in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Combining cleared burglary data from all study regions in a single statistical model, we make statistical comparisons between environments.
In all three study regions, the likelihood an offender selects an area for burglary is positively influenced by proximity to their home, the proportion of easily accessible targets, and the total number of targets available. Furthermore, in two of the three study regions, juvenile offenders under the legal driving age are significantly more influenced by target proximity than adult offenders. Post hoc tests indicate the magnitudes of these impacts vary significantly between study regions.
While burglary target selection strategies are consistent with opportunity-based explanations of offending, the impact of environmental context is significant. As such, the approach undertaken in combining observations from multiple study regions may aid criminology scholars in assessing the generalizability of observed findings across multiple environments.
This study investigates whether gender responsive programming is effective at reducing recidivism relative to traditional, reinforcement-based programming for both girls and boys in secure detention.
Event-history analysis is used to examine recidivism outcomes for two propensity score matched samples of girls (n = 148) and boys (n = 140) released from gender responsive versus traditional detention facilities in Connecticut. The contingent effects of trauma, depression/anxiety, alcohol/drug abuse, anger/irritability, and somatic complaints are also examined.
Compared to traditional programming, gender responsive programming for youth in secure detention is associated with a lower risk of recidivism for girls with gender-sensitive risk factors but a higher risk of recidivism among girls who do not display these risk factors. Gender responsive programs are no more or less effective at reducing recidivism for boys, regardless of whether they display risk factors commonly associated with girls’ delinquency and confinement.
The results suggest that girls in secure detention require different approaches depending on their histories of trauma and associated mental and physical health issues. While girls who follow gendered pathways into detention benefit from the relational approach employed in gender responsive programs, girls without such issues benefit more from traditional reinforcement programming.
The purpose of this study is to examine the correlates of juvenile attitudes toward the police in the Chinese setting. It borrows from the prevailing criminological wisdom developed in the West and Confucian philosophical doctrines to shed light on how attachment to social institutions helps explain variation in juvenile sentiments of the police.
The data were collected from a sample of 2,679 high school students in a southwestern Chinese city. A second-order latent variable labeled social attachment is constructed and comprised of three lower order factors representing family attachment, neighborhood attachment, and school attachment. Traditional demographic background, victimization, and contact with the police variables commonly used in U.S. studies are included in the analysis. Structural equation modeling is employed to test hypothesized relationships among explanatory variables and juvenile attitudes toward the police.
The findings suggest that the higher order factor social attachment is the most robust predictor of juvenile evaluations of the police in China. Other commonly used demographic, socioeconomic, and police contact factors show limited utility.
The findings lend support to propositions derived from the Western criminological theories and the eastern philosophical doctrine to a major extent. Both confirmations of expected findings and noteworthy surprises are discussed.
The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (JRCD) has published important contributions to both criminological theory and associated empirical tests. In this article, we consider some of the challenges associated with traditional approaches to social science research, and discuss a complementary approach that is gaining popularity—agent-based computational modeling—that may offer new opportunities to strengthen theories of crime and develop insights into phenomena of interest.
Two literature reviews are completed. The aim of the first is to identify those articles published in JRCD that have been the most influential and to classify the theoretical perspectives taken. The second is intended to identify those studies that have used an agent-based model (ABM) to examine criminological theories and to identify which theories have been explored.
Ecological theories of crime pattern formation have received the most attention from researchers using ABMs, but many other criminological theories are amenable to testing using such methods.
Traditional methods of theory development and testing suffer from a number of potential issues that a more systematic use of ABMs—not without its own issues—may help to overcome. ABMs should become another method in the criminologists toolbox to aid theory testing and falsification.
Despite growing empirical and theoretical interest in the role of the family in immigrant offending, gender remains a traditionally overlooked dimension in the study of generational differences in crime. The present study examines the uniquely gendered pathways linking generational status, family functioning, and violence.
Using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression and overdispersed Poisson regression, the authors examine predictors of family functioning and violence using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods study.
Generational status influences family dynamics for both males and females, although the strength and significance of the effects vary by gender. For boys, generational status is a significant predictor of conflict and harsh parenting, net of other factors; for girls, it is associated with religiosity and conflict. Further, family processes attenuate the relationship between generational status and violence for girls only, implying alternative mechanisms for boys.
The associations among immigrant generational status, family functioning, and violence differ for males and females, which has implications for intervention strategies aimed at promoting the well-being of immigrant youth. A noted limitation of this work is the inability to consider how gender interacts with ethnicity to impact these patterns.
This article analyzes the criminal development and sociodemographic and criminal profile of a sample of prosecuted white-collar offenders. It identifies trajectory groups and describes their profiles based on crime, sociodemographic, and selection offence characteristics.
The criminal development of 644 prosecuted white-collar offenders in the Netherlands was examined using all registered offences from age 12 onward. In addition, sociodemographic background information was gathered from the Netherlands Internal Revenue Service and Municipal Personal Records Office. Trajectory analysis was conducted to approximate the underlying continuous distribution in criminal development by a discrete number of groups.
The criminal career characteristics and sociodemographic profile show a heterogeneous sample of white-collar offenders. Trajectory analysis distinguished four trajectory groups. Two low-frequency offender groups, totaling 78 percent, are characterized by their adult onset. The two high-frequency offender groups, totaling 22 percent, are characterized by their adolescent onset. Distinct and internally consistent offender profiles emerged for the four trajectory groups on the basis of crime, sociodemographic, and selection offence characteristics.
The diversity in offence patterns and offender profiles points to different (developmental) causes for white-collar crime and underlines the importance of further longitudinal research on white-collar offending from an integrated white-collar and life-course perspective.
Informed by intergroup contact theory, this study explores the relationships between intergroup contact, perceived out-group threat, and support for conciliatory solutions to the violent conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Regression and structural equation models analyze public opinion data collected in Israel in 2011 and 2012. The analyses assess whether quantity and quality of Israeli Jews’ contact with Israeli Arabs in day-to-day encounters are associated with their support for conciliatory policies.
The quality, but not the quantity, of contact is associated with lower levels of perceived Palestinian threat and, in turn, with increased support for compromise.
The current study provides initial evidence that everyday interactions with Israeli Arabs, when they occur under optimal conditions, may have the potential to reduce Israeli Jews’ perceptions of Palestinian threat and, in turn, increase their support for compromise.
This study examines the effects of young adult transitions into marriage and cohabitation on criminal offending and substance use, and whether those effects changed since the 1970s, as marriage rates declined and cohabitation rates rose dramatically. It also examines whether any beneficial effects of cohabitation depend on marriage intentions.
Using multi-cohort national panel data from the Monitoring the Future (N = 15,875) study, the authors estimated fixed effects models relating within-person changes in marriage and cohabitation to changes in criminal offending and substance use.
Marriage predicts lower levels of criminal offending and substance use, but the effects of cohabitation are limited to substance use outcomes and to engaged cohabiters. There are no cohort differences in the associations of marriage and cohabitation with criminal offending, and no consistent cohort differences in their associations with substance use. There is little evidence of differences in effects by gender or parenthood.
Young adults are increasingly likely to enter romantic partnership statuses that do not appear as effective in reducing antisocial behavior. Although cohabitation itself does not reduce antisocial behavior, engagement might. Future research should examine the mechanisms behind these effects, and why nonmarital partnerships reduce substance use and not crime.
From its first publication in 1964–2014, 890 articles have been published by The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (JRCD). During that period, the criminal justice field has experienced major transformations in its policies, theories, and practices. This article identifies major periods in the development of criminal justice policy; which are Prepolitical Era (1964–1972), Tough on Crime Era (1972–1980), National Consensus on Crime Policy Era (1980–1996), and Retrenchment Era (1996–2012). It then traces changes in the subject matter of JRCD over those periods. The articles published by the JRCD over the past half century reflect the changes in eras.
Test hypotheses drawn from Smith and Alpert’s social conditioning theory that explains biased policing as the result of implicit racial stereotypes. Distinguishing between frisks and searches, we hypothesize that (1) Black drivers are more likely than White drivers to be frisked and searched; (2) racial disparity is greater in frisks than searches; (3) racial disparity in frisks, but not searches, is conditional upon the racial composition of the community; and (4) that drivers’ race is not related to the productivity of searches.
Data are all traffic stops made by the Rhode Island State Police in 2006, exclusive of those in which a search was mandatory. Multinomial and binary logistic regressions are employed to estimate models of frisks, searches, search productivity, and to test the conditional effect of community context.
Each of the four hypotheses is supported.
Biased policing is largely the product of implicit stereotypes that are activated in contexts in which Black drivers appear out of place and in police actions that require quick decisions providing little time to monitor cognitions. This insight has important implications for police training. Because of limitations in this study, additional research that distinguishes frisks and searches is needed.
To test the commonly espoused but little examined hypothesis that fluctuations in the price of metal are associated with changes in the volume of metal theft. Specifically, we analyze the relationship between the price of copper and the number of police recorded "live" copper cable thefts from the British railway network (2006 to 2012).
Time-series analysis was performed using 76 months of data to determine the association between mean copper price and police recorded "live" copper cable theft. Two rival hypotheses, that changes in the theft of copper cabling reflect changes in the theft of railway property more generally (or the reporting thereof) or variations in the rate of unemployment, were also tested.
We find support for the price–theft hypothesis: Changes in the price of copper were positively associated with variations in the volume of "live" copper cable theft. A downward trend in copper cable theft in recent years is also observed, although the mechanism/mechanisms underpinning this pattern is unclear.
The theft of "live" copper cable is associated with fluctuations in copper price. As such, it differs substantially from the "crime drop" typically noted for most types of crime providing further support for the price–theft hypothesis.
Objectives: Through a mood induction procedure, we prime positive, negative, or a neutral affective state and examine its effect on intentions to cheat on an exam and drinking and driving.Method: University students served as subjects for the study. They were provided with a questionnaire that randomized a mood induction procedure. Respondents were asked to recall (1) a recent positive event or experience, (2) a recent negative event or experience, or (3) their favorite books. They then completed a questionnaire that asked about their current mood state and got their responses to two hypothetical crime scenarios—cheating on an exam and drinking and driving. They were also asked questions pertaining to perceived risk, their decision-making style, impulsivity, and confidence.Results: We found that those experiencing an intense positive mood state were generally less likely to report that they would cheat or drive drunk relative to the negative and neutral state. However, we found little support for the suggested mediating causal mechanisms.Conclusions: Affective states milder than emotions are related to intentions to commit acts that are in the long-term harmful and go against self-interest. The relationship between affect states and criminal decision making can benefit from additional research.
Objectives: To examine police charging practices in case of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Canada. Methods: In this national level study, we explore police charging in cases of IPV using data from the 2008 Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey. Using logistic regression, we examine the impact of several key legal and extralegal factors on the police charging decisions. Results: Analysis shows that, while the majority of cases were cleared by charge, the proportion of cases in which police recommended a charge varied across the country. Further, the majority of legal and extralegal variables examined were significantly associated with the police decision to lay a charge across the jurisdictions examined, including the presence of victim injury, multiple victims, offence type as well as gender of the victim and the victim–accused relationship. Conclusion: Study findings indicate that future research on police charging in cases of IPV require more precise examinations of the role played by gender and the type of relationship as well as an investigation of the community context in which police decisions are made.
Objectives: This note explores complications with standard methods to evaluate place-based policing interventions. It identifies and explains issues of boundary misspecification during evaluation as a result of boundary adjustment by police during an intervention.Method: Using geographic data gathered during post-experiment focus groups with officers involved in the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment, we highlight the practice of boundary adjustment on the part of officers and we explain why such adjustments occurred.Results: Officers involved in the focus groups who identified the active boundaries of their hot spot assignments (n = 124) all reported policing outside of their delineated beats. On average, their active beats were 0.13 square miles larger than the originally delineated treatment beats. Some active beats overlapped catchment and control locations.Conclusion: Boundary misspecification could cause researchers to (1) incorrectly label a direct benefit of receiving treatment as a diffusion of crime control benefits; (2) underestimate immediate spatial crime displacement; and (3) underestimate treatment effects. Future place-based experiments should take into account the various pressures on officers to adjust the boundaries of their assignments by incorporating measures that track boundary adherence over time (and reporting them) in order to optimize assessments of net effects, diffusion and displacement.
The concept of adolescent development has become a relevant consideration for researchers interested in juvenile delinquency. However, the integration of constructs from developmental psychology into delinquency research is still in its early stages. This article argues that it is time to move beyond description of adolescent antisocial activities and to integrate developmental activities into delinquency research as mediators or moderators. Relevant examples of such an approach are presented.
Objectives: Researchers have used both self-reports and official records to measure the prevalence and frequency of crime and delinquency. Few studies have compared longitudinally the validity of these two measures across gender and race/ethnicity in order to assess concordance.Methods: Using data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of 1,354 serious youthful offenders, we compare official records of arrest and self-reports of arrest over seven years.Results: Findings show moderate agreement between self-reports and official arrests, which is fairly stable over time and quite similar across both gender and race/ethnicity. We do not find any race differences in the prevalence of official arrests, but do observe a gender difference in official arrests that is not accounted for by self-reported arrests.Conclusions: Further work on issues on the validity and reliability of different forms of offending data across demographic groups is needed.
When Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency was first published, criminology was in the midst of an important research stream on the measurement of offending. This never solidified into a strong subdiscipline akin to psychometrics, however. After briefly discussing the goals of measurement and how they correspond to the explanation of criminal events and behavior, the authors consider how the prevailing methodological paradigm, which relies heavily on analysis of a limited number of data sets via variable-based regression techniques, may constrain measurement progress on the whole. In doing so, they highlight the imbalance between the growing sophistication of analytic models and the relative stagnation of the employed data sets and measures. The article then provides some examples of exceptions to this broad trend—both in terms of data collection and measurement techniques. Finally, the authors consider basic lessons drawn from these innovative approaches to measurement.
Forty years ago, Michael J. Hindelang delineated some ways in which public opinion surveys have explored issues related to crime and criminal justice, and pointed out how trends over time could be of interest, and differences in responses among demographic subgroups could be revealing. In this article, we update some of the trends Hindelang alluded to, and revisit some of the response differences he enumerated. In particular, we add support to Hindelang’s hypothesis that the opinions of non-White respondents can reflect consistent awareness of bias in the operation of the system (such as in the application of the death penalty and with respect to interceptions of citizens by police). Age differences in opinions concerning deviant behavior also show attitudinal consistency, particularly in the permissive stance of the youngest age group and the relatively extreme conservatism of "50+" respondents. Finally, with respect to the prospect of victimization, there is a consistent and substantial disparity in the perspectives of men and women. Demographic differences of this kind retain their salience where overall public opinion evolves (as it does with respect to the legalization of marijuana) and where there is negligible change over time (as there is with regard to the death penalty). However, new differences can emerge along the way, as they have in recent polarization along political and ideological lines.
The empirical observation that a small number of micro places generate the bulk of urban crime problems has become a criminological axiom. Explanations for the persistence of high-crime places have traditionally drawn upon opportunity theories of crime. In a new book, Weisburd, Groff, and Yang suggest that social disorganization could also be a powerful explanation for the uneven distribution of crime within neighborhoods. In this article, we explain briefly why their empirical work considerably sharpens knowledge about crime concentrations in the city. We then offer a critique of their conclusions concerning the relative contributions of social and situational variables in explaining crime hot spots and the preventive implications they draw from these findings. Finally, we suggest new research that could invigorate the debate on the formation and persistence of high-crime places and could support interventions that seek to change the situational precipitators and facilitators of crime.
Objectives: Test whether the exposure of street segments to five different potentially criminogenic facilities is positively related to violent, property, or disorder crime counts controlling for sociodemographic context. The geographic extent of the relationship is also explored.Method: Facility exposure is operationalized as total inverse distance from each street segment in Philadelphia, PA, to surrounding facilities within three threshold distances of 400, 800, and 1,200 feet. All distances are measured using shortest path street distance. Census block group data representing ethnic heterogeneity, concentrated disadvantage, and stability are proportionally allocated to each street block. Negative binomial regression is used to model the relationships.Results: Exposure to bars and subway stations was positively associated with violent, property, and disorder crime at all distance thresholds from street segments. Schools were associated with disorder offenses at all distance thresholds. The effects of exposure to halfway houses and drug treatment centers varied by distance and by crime type.Conclusions: Facilities have a significant effect on crime at nearby places even controlling for sociodemographic variables. The geographic extent of a facility’s criminogenic influence varies by type of facility and type of crime. Future research should examine additional types of facilities and include information about place management.
Objective: Although a vast literature has investigated the consequences of gang membership for offending and victimization, little is known about the contribution of gang membership to the victim–offender overlap. We advance a group process theoretical model and provide an empirical extension of the victim–offender overlap to gang membership. Method: Using data gathered from 621 respondents in five cities, the contribution of gang membership to the victim–offender overlap is determined by examining (1) a typology of four victim–offender arrangements using multinomial logistic regression modeling and (2) the latent propensity for violent offending and victimization using multilevel item response theory modeling. Results: Gang members were over twice as likely as nongang members to be both victims and offenders, even after adjusting for low self-control, adherence to street codes, and routine activities. Neither contemporary theoretical perspectives on the overlap nor the reciprocal relationship between violent outcomes eliminated the association of gang membership with violent victimization and violent offending. Conclusion: By theoretically and empirically integrating gang membership into current knowledge on the victim–offender overlap, the results suggest that there is much to be gained for research and practice by unpacking the features of criminal and deviant networks.
Objectives: Explore the relative impact of transitions into and out of gangs on adolescent involvement in delinquency and determine the mechanisms associated with these changes in deviant behavior. Method: Hierarchical discontinuous regression models are utilized to examine changes in elevation and slope in outcomes associated with gang membership status transitions using six waves of panel data from a school-based sample of 512 gang-involved youth. Result: Results reveal the potential for gang membership to have an enduring impact on involvement in delinquent activity, but also on attitudes, emotions, and unstructured activities associated with a higher risk of offending. Heightened elevation in proximate postgang membership observations of offending was mediated by the mechanisms associated with a turning point. Conclusions: Gang membership, however brief, can have an impact on adolescent development after self-reported membership ends. While desistance from gang membership is a good first step in promoting better outcomes, youth remain more at risk of antisocial behavior after leaving the gang than they were prior to joining such groups. Research on the enduring impact of gang membership is needed, as well as programs and policies that might lessen the severity of the impact of gang membership on later life outcomes.
Objectives: Compare the spatial offending patterns of arrested offenders to that of non-arrested offenders, in order to assess selection bias in arrest data.Method: Data used for this study are from the Dutch DNA database for criminal cases. DNA allows reliable linkage of serial crimes committed by the same offender, whether or not the offender has ever been arrested. Spatial offending patterns of arrested and non-arrested offenders are measured by calculating the mean intercrime distance (MICD) of the offense locations. Survival analysis is performed to study whether the MICD has an influence on the duration until arrest.Results: No large differences are found between the MICD of arrested offenders and the MICD of non-arrested offenders. The MICD does not affect the duration until arrest.Conclusions: Because no differences in the MICDs are found between the arrested and non-arrested offenders, arrest data are probably less selective than has been suspected in the past, and results based on these data are unlikely to be strongly biased.
Objectives: Drawing on theories that emphasize the salience of social ties, this study examines the different kinds of experiences prisoners have with visitation and the implications of those experiences for behavior after release.Method: This study uses data from a release cohort of prisoners to (1) explore how visitation experiences unfold for different cohorts of individuals serving different amounts of time in prison and to (2) test the effects of longitudinal visitation patterns on recidivism.Results:Findings suggest that individuals who maintain connections with their social networks outside of prison have lower rates of reoffending and that the timing and consistency with which visitation occurs also affect criminal behavior. Specifically, prisoners who are visited early and who experience a sustained pattern of visitation are less likely to recidivate.Conclusion: These findings underscore the importance of social ties for understanding the prisoner experience and its implications for offending. More research is needed that seeks to explain the effects identified here and that explores, using nuanced approaches, other prison experiences, and the implications of those experiences.
Objectives: This study aims to establish whether empirical evidence exists to support the anecdotal view that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association world cup football (soccer) tournament can be associated with a rise in reported domestic abuse incidents, when viewed remotely via television. Method: A quantitative analysis, using Poisson and negative binomial regression models looked at monthly and daily domestic abuse incidents reported to a police force in the North West of England across three separate tournaments (2002, 2006, and 2010). Results: The study found two statistically significant trends. First, a match day trend showed the risk of domestic abuse rose by 26 percent when the English national team won or drew, and a 38 percent increase when the national team lost. Second, a tournament trend was apparent, as reported domestic abuse incidents increased in frequency with each new tournament. Conclusion: Although this is a relatively small study, it has significant ramifications due to the global nature of televised football (soccer) tournaments. If replicated, it presents significant opportunities to identify and reduce incidents of domestic abuse associated with televised soccer games.
Objectives: This article aims to apply a "turning points" framework for understanding the developmental impacts of gang membership in a British sample of young people. The study explores the proximal impact of gang membership on offending, victimization, and a number of attitudinal and experiential outcomes that have been theorized to mediate the relationship between gang membership and offending. Method: The authors used data from the Offending Crime and Justice Survey, a rotating panel representative of young people in England and Wales that measured gang membership using the Eurogang definition. The effects of gang membership onset were tested using a propensity score analysis approach. Results: As previously reported with American data, gang onset has an impact on offending, antisocial behavior, drug use, commitment to deviant peers, and neutralization techniques. In addition, gang membership increases the probability of unwanted police contact, even adjusting for offending through a "double robust" procedure. Conclusion: Despite differences in social context, history of gangs and level of violence, we encounter more similarities than differences regarding consequences of gang membership. The impact on unwanted police contact deserves further research and policy attention.
Objectives: Apply computational agent-based modeling to explore the generative sufficiency of several mechanisms derived from the field of environmental criminology in explaining commonly observed patterns of interpersonal victimization.Method: Controlled simulation experiments compared patterns of simulated interpersonal victimization to three empirically derived regularities of crime using established statistical techniques: (1) spatial clustering (nearest neighbor index), (2) repeat victimization (Gini coefficient), and (3) journeys to crime (Pearson’s coefficient of skewness).Results: Large, statistically significant increases in spatial clustering, repeat victimization, and journey to crime skewness are observed when virtual offenders operate according to mechanisms proposed by the routine activity approach, rational choice perspective, and geometry/pattern theories of crime.Conclusion: This research provides support for several propositions of environmental criminology in explaining why interpersonal victimization tends to be spatially concentrated, experienced by a small number of repeat victims, and why aggregate journey to crime curves tend to follow a distance decay relationship. By extending previous work in agent-based modeling of property victimization, it also demonstrates that the same core mechanisms are sufficient to generate plausible patterns of crime when examining fundamentally different types of offending.
Objectives: The main objective of this study was to see if the characteristics of offenders’ crimes exhibit spatial patterning in crime neutral areas by examining the relationship between simulated travel routes of offenders along the physical road network and the actual locations of their crimes in the same geographic space. Method: This study introduced a Criminal Movement model (CriMM) that simulates travel patterns of known offenders. Using offenders’ home locations, locations of major attractors (e.g., shopping centers), and variations of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm we modeled the routes that offenders are likely to take when traveling from their home to an attractor. We then compare the locations of offenders’ crimes to these paths and analyze their proximity characteristics. This process was carried out using data on 7,807 property offenders from five municipalities in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) in British Columbia, Canada. Results: The results show that a great proportion of crimes tend to be located geographically proximal to the simulated travel paths with a distance decay pattern characterizing the distribution of distance measures. Conclusion: These results lend support to Crime Pattern Theory and the idea that there is an underlying pattern to crimes in crime neutral areas.
Objectives: To examine the social ecology of homicide in Toronto, Canada. Method: Using both ordinary least squares regression and negative binomial models, we analyze the structural correlates of 965 homicides occurring in 140 neighborhoods in Toronto between 1988 and 2003. Results: Similar to research in U.S. cities, Toronto neighborhoods with higher levels of economic disadvantage, higher proportions of young and Black residents, and greater residential instability have higher homicide rates. In contrast to U.S. studies, Toronto neighborhoods with higher proportions of residents who are recent immigrants also have higher homicide rates. In multivariate models, only two of these characteristics—economic disadvantage and the proportion of residents aged 15 to 24—are significantly associated with homicide in Toronto’s neighborhoods. Despite low levels of both lethal violence and spatial inequality in Toronto, the correlates of homicide in its neighborhoods are similar in some respects to those in U.S. cities. Conclusion: Our findings lend support to the notion of invariance in some ecological covariates of homicide but also highlight the need to be cautious about generalizing from U.S.-based research on the relationship between immigration and homicide.
Objectives: Describe the developmental trajectory of perceptions of the police by youth as they transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Method: A longitudinal experiment to evaluate the impact of the D.A.R.E. program (N = 1,773). Latent variable growth modeling was used. Results: A dramatic decline in the favorable attitudes of youth toward the police begins in about seventh grade. More negative perceptions of police are associated with minority racial status, negative experiences with officers, involvement in the delinquent subculture, and greater expressions of skewed legal norms. There is a long-term positive effect of D.A.R.E. on attitudes toward the police, particularly for African American youth. Conclusion: The study highlights the importance of theorizing about perceptions of the police from a life course perspective. Findings raise new policy questions about the long-term impact of school-based programs, such as D.A.R.E., and the role of multiple reference groups in the formation of minorities’ attitudes. More research is needed to gain a better understanding of the cognitive and experiential processes involved in attitude formation.
Objectives: Examine the prevalence and correlates of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization and offending, as well as the overlap of these experiences. Method: Data from wave 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were analyzed to examine IPV among adults ages 24 to 33. A multinomial logistic regression model was estimated to determine whether the correlates of IPV vary across victims, perpetrators, and victim-perpetrators. Results: Approximately 20% of respondents reported some IPV involvement in the past year, one-third of whom reported victimization and perpetration. The victim-offender overlap was observed for males and females across various measures of IPV. Bivariate correlations suggest victimization and perpetration have common correlates. Multivariate analysis, however, reveals considerable differences once we distinguish between victims, offenders, and victim-offenders and control for other variables. Perpetrators and victim-perpetrators were more likely to live with a nonspouse partner; feel isolated; display negative temperaments; and report substance use problems. "Victims only" were more likely to live with children and have lower household incomes. Conclusions: The victim-offender overlap exists for IPV across a variety of measures. Though perpetrators and victim-perpetrators have similar characteristics, those who are victims only appear distinctly different. We discuss the implications for theory, policy, and research.
Objectives: This study examined the effects of adolescent gang membership on educational attainment over a 12-year period. A broader conceptualization of gang membership—as a snare in the life course—is used to study its noncriminal consequences. Method: Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and propensity score matching were used to assess the cumulative and longitudinal effects of gang membership on seven educational outcomes, including educational attainment in years and six educational milestones. After adjusting for nonrandom selection into gangs, youths who joined a gang were compared annually to their matched counterparts from 1998 to 2009. Results: Selection-adjusted estimates revealed disparities between gang and nongang youth in education attainment. Youth who joined gangs were 30 percent less likely to graduate from high school and 58 percent less likely to earn a four-year degree than their matched counterparts. The effects of gang membership on educational attainment were statistically observable within one year of joining, and accumulated in magnitude over time to reach -0.62 years (ES=0.25) by the final point of observation. Conclusion: The snare-like forces linked to the onset of gang membership have consequences that spill into a range of life domains, including education. These findings take on added significance because of a historical context where education has a prominent role in social stratification.
Objectives: To examine patterns in the timing and location of incidents of maritime piracy to see whether, like many urban crimes, attacks cluster in space and time. Methods: Data for all incidents of maritime piracy worldwide recorded by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency are analyzed using time-series models and methods originally developed to detect disease contagion. Results: At the macro level, analyses suggest that incidents of pirate attacks are concentrated in five subregions of the earth’s oceans and that the time series for these different subregions differ. At the micro level, analyses suggest that for the last 16 years (or more), pirate attacks appear to cluster in space and time suggesting that patterns are not static but are also not random. Conclusions: Much like other types of crime, pirate attacks cluster in space, and following an attack at one location the risk of others at the same location or nearby is temporarily elevated. The identification of such regularities has implications for the understanding of maritime piracy and for predicting the future locations of attacks.
Objectives. The authors investigate whether the argument from life-course criminology that marriage leads to reduction in crime or whether the mechanisms leading to lower crime rates might take effect in a period of courtship before the transition to marriage. Method. Using data from population-wide, longitudinal Norwegian administrative registers, the authors estimate within-individual offending propensities before and after marriage for all men marrying in Norway 1997–2001. This approach allows for studying how offending develops over a decade around the time of marriage, for those men who actually marry. Results. The propensity to offend declines sharply prior to marriage. After marriage, there is a small increase in offending. This holds both for all offenses and when the analysis is restricted to felony offenses. Conclusions. The analysis provides no evidence for an effect of marriage on offending. Rather, the results suggest that the lower offending rates of marrieds develop over the years prior to marriage rather than as a consequence of the marriage.
This study examines whether developmental role attainment in three areas (high school graduation, employment, and marriage) mediates the relationship between childhood abuse and neglect and adult arrest. Children with documented cases of physical and sexual abuse and neglect (before age 11) and a comparison group of nonabused or neglected children were matched on age, sex, race, and approximate socioeconomic status (N = 1,169) and followed-up and interviewed at approximate age 29. Arrest records were collected from law enforcement agencies. Childhood abuse and neglect predicted decreased likelihood of graduating from high school, current employment, and current marriage and greater likelihood of juvenile and adult arrest. Each of these developmental roles partially mediated the relationship between childhood abuse and neglect and adult arrest. The importance of these three developmental milestones and implications of the results for intervening with abused and neglected youth are discussed.
Objectives. Inspired by ecological theories of crime, the aim of this study was to make use of a natural experiment to see if a U.K. soccer stadium generates or attracts crime in the area that surrounds it. Method. Data for theft and violent crime around Wembley stadium are analyzed to see if the rate (per-unit time and ambient population) of crime differ for days on which the stadium is used and those it is not. In addition, differences in the spatial and temporal distribution of crime are examined for these two types of days. Results. Analyses indicate that on days when the stadium is used, the rate of crime per-unit time is elevated, but that the rate per ambient population at risk is not. The spatial and temporal pattern of crime also clearly differs for the two types of days. For example, the level of crime is elevated in the surrounding area when the stadium is used relative to when it is not. Conclusions. The case study suggests that the facility studied contributes to levels of crime in the area that surrounds it. The research provides further support for ecological theories of crime and their utility in informing criminological understanding and policy-related questions.
Objectives: Test the influence of darkness in the street robbery crime event alongside temperature. Methods: Negative binomial regression models tested darkness and temperature as predictors of street robbery. Units of analysis were four 6-hr time intervals in two U.K. study areas that have different levels of darkness and variations of temperature throughout the year. Results: Darkness is a key factor related to robbery events in both study areas. Traversing from full daylight to full darkness increased the predicted volume of robbery by a multiple of 2.6 in London and 1.2 in Glasgow. Temperature was significant only in the London study area. Interaction terms did not enhance the predictive power of the models. Conclusion: Darkness is an important driving factor in seasonal variation of street robbery. A further implication of the research is that time of the day patterns are crucial to understanding seasonal trends in crime data.
Objectives: Estimate the dose–response relationship between time served in prison and offenders’ odds of recidivism. Methods: Using a large, representative sample of adult offenders released from prison under postrelease supervision in the state of Ohio, we examine the relationship between the length of time these offenders served in prison and their odds of recidivism during the year following their release. Multivariate logistic regression and analyses involving propensity score matching for ordered doses are both used to estimate the time served–recidivism relationship. Results: Analyses of these data revealed that offenders confined for longer periods of time had lower odds of recidivism, but these odds were only substantively lower for those offenders who served the longest periods of time in prison. Findings suggest the inverse effect of time served was not realized until after offenders have been confined for at least five years. Conclusion: Study findings indicate that the specific deterrent effect of prison sentences may be limited, and sentences less than five years may be reduced in order to save costs without a substantial threat to public safety.
Objectives: This study addresses the enduring question about whether exposure to deviant peers causes individuals to engage in deviance. Ample literature comments on this point, but methodological limitations prevent strong conclusions about causality. Method: The authors conducted a laboratory-based experiment under the guise of a memory/recall study for which participants could earn up to $20. All 91 participants had the opportunity to cheat on a computer-based word recall task by clicking on up to four links that provided access to the words in order to illegitimately earn more money for their performance. In the treatment condition (n = 47), subjects were exposed to a confederate who indicated an intention to cheat, justified this behavior, and cheated on the task. Results: Whereas none of the participants in the control condition cheated on this task, 38 percent of the participants in the treatment condition did. This effect endures when controlling for various attributes of participants in regression models. Supplemental analyses underscore the notion that clicking on the links reflected cheating rather than curiosity. Conclusions: This experiment provides evidence that exposure to a deviant peer can cause individuals to engage in deviance. Future experimental work should focus on determining the precise mechanism/mechanisms responsible.