Crime in progress
Enduring Consequences of Right-Wing Extremism: Klan Mobilization and Homicides in Southern Counties
Rory McVeigh & David Cunningham
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the consequences of social movements typically aims to identify determinants of success or to draw attention to ways that social movements are able to secure new benefits for constituents by gaining concessions from political authorities. Yet social movements, even those that are ultimately defeated, may have an enduring impact on the communities in which they were once active. This impact may be far removed from the movement's stated goals and may be detrimental to constituents and to society at large. We identify an empirical relationship between Ku Klux Klan activism in the 1960s and increased numbers of homicides in southern U.S. counties in subsequent decades. We explain this finding by drawing attention to ways in which right-wing extremism can disrupt community cohesion, generate mistrust in legal authorities, and promote interpretations of conflict and conflict resolution that weaken constraints on violent behavior.
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Estimating the Deterrent Effect of Incarceration using Sentencing Enhancements
David Abrams
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Increasing criminal sanctions may reduce crime through two primary mechanisms: deterrence and incapacitation. Disentangling their effects is crucial, since each mechanism has different implications for optimal policy setting. I use the introduction of state add-on gun laws, which enhance sentences for defendants possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony, to isolate the deterrent effect of incarceration. Defendants subject to add-ons would be incarcerated in the absence of the law change, so any short-term impact on crime can be attributed solely to deterrence. Using cross-state variation in the timing of law passage dates, I find that the average add-on gun law results in a roughly 5 percent decline in gun robberies within the first three years. This result is robust to a number of specification tests and does not appear to be associated with large spillovers to other types of crime.
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Are Immigrant Youth Less Violent? Specifying the Reasons and Mechanisms
John MacDonald & Jessica Saunders
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2012, Pages 125-147
Abstract:
In this article, the authors present an overview of the relationship between immigrant households and crime and violence, drawing on sociological and public health literature. They present a critique of popular culture perspectives on immigrant families and youth violence, showing that crime and violence outcomes are if anything better for youth in immigrant families than one would expect given the social disadvantages that many immigrant households find themselves living in. They examine the extent to which exposure to violence among immigrant youth is comparably lower than among nonimmigrants living in similar social contexts and the extent to which social control and social learning frameworks can account for the apparent lower prevalence of violence exposure among immigrant youth. Their analyses show a persistent lower rate of violence exposure for immigrant youth compared to similarly situated nonimmigrant youth - and that these differences are not meaningfully understood by observed social control or social learning mechanisms. The authors focus then on the apparent paradox of why youth living in immigrant households in relative disadvantage have lower violence exposure compared to nonimmigrants living in similar social contexts. The answers, they argue, can be viewed from an examination of the effects that living in poverty and underclass neighborhoods for generations has on nonimmigrants in American cities.
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Estimating the Relationship between Alcohol Policies and Criminal Violence and Victimization
Sara Markowitz et al.
NBER Working Paper, March 2012
Abstract:
Violence is one of the leading social problems in the United States. The development of appropriate public policies to curtail violence is confounded by the relationship between alcohol and violence. In this paper, we estimate the propensity of alcohol control policies to reduce the perpetration and victimization of criminal violence. We measure violence with data on individual level victimizations from the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey. We examine the effects of a number of different alcohol control policies in reducing violent crime. These policies include the retail price of beer, drunk driving laws and penalties, keg laws, and serving and selling laws. We find some evidence of a negative relationship between alcohol prices and the probability of alcohol or drug related assault victimizations. However, we find no strong evidence that other alcohol policies are effective in reducing violent crimes. These results provide policy makers with guidance on potential approaches for reducing violence through alcohol beverage control.
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Julie Phillips & Kenneth Land
Social Science Research, May 2012, Pages 681-694
Abstract:
Cantor and Land (1985) developed a theoretical model that proposed two pathways through which economic activity - as indexed by the aggregate unemployment rate - could affect the rate of criminal activity. The first is by increasing levels of criminal motivation within the population as deteriorating economic conditions affect social strain and social control; the second is by influencing the availability and vulnerability of criminal targets and thus the number of criminal opportunities. Although much empirical research has applied this theoretical model, few analyses have done so at disaggregated units of analysis. We present the most comprehensive analysis to date by empirically evaluating this model with data on 400 of the largest US counties - and examine the effects of aggregation on results as these county data are combined to the state and national levels - for the years 1978-2005. For seven Index crimes at each of the three levels of analysis, and with or without controls for structural covariates at each level, the directional effects hypothesized by Cantor and Land are found for 78 out of 84 estimated relationships. Even after taking into account the lack of statistical independence of these estimates by drawing on recently developed statistical theory, this is a very unlikely outcome. In accordance with expectations based on theory and prior research, (a) some of these relationships are weak and not statistically significant, and (b) the strongest and most consistent patterns of relationships for both the crime opportunity and crime motivation effects are found for three property crimes: burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. Suggestions for further research on this topic are given.
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Understanding the Cycle: Childhood Maltreatment and Future Crime
Janet Currie & Erdal Tekin
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2012, Pages 509-549
Abstract:
Child maltreatment is a major social problem. This paper focuses on measuring the relationship between child maltreatment and crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of the most costly potential outcomes of maltreatment. Our work addresses two main limitations of the existing literature on child maltreatment. First, we use a large national sample, and investigate different types of maltreatment in a unified framework. Second, we pay careful attention to controlling for possible confounders using a variety of statistical methods that make differing assumptions. The results suggest that maltreatment greatly increases the probability of engaging in crime and that the probability increases with the experience of multiple forms of maltreatment.
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Race and Imprisonments: Vigilante Violence, Minority Threat, and Racial Politics
David Jacobs, Chad Malone & Gale Iles
Sociological Quarterly, Spring 2012, Pages 166-187
Abstract:
The effects of lynchings on criminal justice outcomes have seldom been examined. Recent findings also are inconsistent about the effects of race on imprisonments. This study uses a pooled time-series design to assess lynching and racial threat effects on state imprisonments from 1972 to 2000. After controlling for Republican strength, conservatism, and other factors, lynch rates explain the growth in admission rates. The findings also show that increases in black residents produce subsequent expansions in imprisonments that likely are attributable to white reactions to this purported menace. But after the percentage of blacks reaches a substantial threshold - and the potential black vote becomes large enough to begin to reduce these harsh punishments - reductions in prison admissions occur. These results also confirm a political version of racial threat theory by indicating that increased Republican political strength produces additional imprisonments.
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Charis Kubrin & Hiromi Ishizawa
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2012, Pages 148-173
Abstract:
Contrary to popular opinion, scholarly research has documented that immigrant communities are some of the safest places around. Studies repeatedly find that immigrant concentration is either negatively associated with neighborhood crime rates or not related to crime at all. But are immigrant neighborhoods always safer places? How does the larger community context within which immigrant neighborhoods are situated condition the immigration-crime relationship? Building on the existing literature, this study examines the relationship between immigrant concentration and violent crime across neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago - two cities with significant and diverse immigrant populations. Of particular interest is whether neighborhoods with high levels of immigrant concentration that are situated within larger immigrant communities are especially likely to enjoy reduced crime rates. This was found to be the case in Chicago but not in Los Angeles, where neighborhoods with greater levels of immigrant concentration experienced higher, not lower, violent crime rates when located within larger immigrant communities. We speculate on the various factors that may account for the divergent findings.
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Saturation Foot-Patrol in a High-Violence Area: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation
Eric Piza & Brian A. O'Hara
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study incorporates a quasi-experimental design to evaluate a saturation foot-patrol initiative in Newark, NJ. Violent crime was measured for one year prior and during the initiative within the target area, a surrounding catchment area, and two separate control areas. The overall findings provide further support for foot-patrol as a crime prevention tactic. Total street violence as well as the disaggregate categories of murder, shootings, and nondomestic aggravated assault decreased within the target area absent of any displacement effects. However, robbery suffered from substantial levels of both temporal and spatial displacement, showing saturation foot-patrol to have varying impact on different types of street violence. This finding suggests that police should design large-scale foot-patrol initiatives in a manner that does not allow offenders, particularly robbers, to easily gauge the scope of the intervention and identify alternate crime opportunities.
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Jennifer Varriale Carson, Gary LaFree & Laura Dugan
Terrorism and Political Violence, Spring 2012, Pages 295-319
Abstract:
Despite concerns about the growing threat posed by domestic radical environmental and animal rights groups to the United States, there has been little systematic quantitative evidence depicting the characteristics of their attacks over time. In this paper we analyze data on 1,069 criminal incidents perpetrated by environmental and animal rights extremists from 1970 to 2007. Based on the Global Terrorism Database's definition of terrorism, we classified 17 percent of these incidents as terrorist. To supplement the analysis, we also conducted interviews with a nonrandom sample of twenty-five activists who self-identified as part of the environmental or animal rights movements. We find that overall, the attacks staged by radical environmental and animal rights groups thus far have been overwhelmingly aimed at causing property damage rather than injuring or killing humans. Further, results from our interviews suggest that activists appear to weigh carefully the costs and benefits of illegal protest. Despite the fact that attacks by environmental and animal rights groups have thus far been almost universally nonviolent, concerns linger that this situation might change in the future.
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Go where the money is: Modeling street robbers' location choices
Wim Bernasco, Richard Block & Stijn Ruiter
Journal of Economic Geography, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article analyzes how street robbers decide on where to attack their victims. Using data on nearly 13,000 robberies, on the approximately 18,000 offenders involved in these robberies, and on the nearly 25,000 census blocks in the city of Chicago, we utilize the discrete choice framework to assess which criteria motivate the location decisions of street robbers. We demonstrate that they attack near their own homes, on easily accessible blocks, where legal and illegal cash economies are present, and that these effects spill over to adjacent blocks.
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Like Godfather, Like Son: Exploring the Intergenerational Nature of Crime
Randi Hjalmarsson & Matthew Lindquist
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2012, Pages 550-582
Abstract:
Sons (daughters) with criminal fathers have 2.06 (2.66) times higher odds of having a criminal conviction than those with noncriminal fathers. One additional paternal sentence increases sons' (daughters') convictions by 32 (53) percent. Compared to traditional labor market measures, the intergenerational transmission of crime is lower than that for high school completion but higher than that for poverty. At the intensive margin, the intergenerational crime relationship is as strong as those for earnings and years of schooling. Parental human capital and parental behaviors can account for 60-80 percent of the intergenerational crime relationship. Paternal role-modeling also matters.
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Delphine Theobald & David Farrington
Psychology, Crime & Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined the factors that predicted marital separation in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, which is a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 London males. We found that dishonesty, having a wife with a conviction(s), convictions, a poor relationship with parents, no exams passed, unprotected sex and having a shotgun marriage predicted marital breakdown. Males from broken homes due to marital conflict had a moderate risk of suffering marital breakdown themselves but the effect was mediated by having conviction(s). An analysis in which separated men were matched with controls on age at marriage, prior convictions and a propensity score predicting the likelihood of separation showed that a man's convictions increased after becoming separated. However, if a man formed a new intimate relationship, the increase in convictions after separation was reduced.
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Grant Harris et al.
Archives of Sexual Behavior, February 2012, Pages 221-229
Abstract:
In phallometric research, rapists have a unique pattern of erectile responses to stimuli depicting sexual activities involving coercion and violence. In this study, we attempted to determine the cues that control rapists' erectile responses to rape stories in the laboratory. A total of 12 rapists and 14 non-rapists were exposed to recorded audio scenarios that systematically varied with regard to the presence or absence of three orthogonally varied elements: sexual activity and nudity, violence and injury, and expression of non-consent. As expected from prior research, an index computed by subtracting participants' greatest mean responses to stories describing mutually consenting sexual activity from their greatest mean responses to stories describing rape was much higher among rapists than non-rapists. Both groups showed larger responses when stories involved sexual activity and nudity, but neither group exhibited a preference for cues of violence and serious injury, or for cues of non-consent. The element that produced the larger group difference, however, was the presence or absence of active consent. The results indicated that a sexual interest in (or indifference to) non-consent is at least as central to accounting for the unique sexual orientation of rapists as is sexual responding to violence and injury.
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Inequality and crime: Evidence from Russia's regions
David Hauner, Ali Kutan & Christy Spivey
Applied Economics Letters, Fall 2012, Pages 1667-1671
Abstract:
We examine the effect of inequality on crime in Russia's 88 regional entities from 2000 to 2005. Using dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation techniques, we consider both violent (murder and robberies) and nonviolent crime (thefts, economic crimes), and drug crimes and crimes committed by juveniles. The results indicate that inequality has a significant, positive effect on murders, robberies, thefts and juvenile crimes.
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Intergroup dynamics of extra-legal police aggression: An integrated theory of race and place
Malcolm Holmes & Brad Smith
Aggression and Violent Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The police are empowered to use various forms of coercion to accomplish legitimate duties, but they also may employ them gratuitously in violation of law or departmental policy. These extra-legal behaviors range in severity from verbal abuse, such as racial slurs and profanity, to unjustified physical force resulting in severe injury or death. Racial and ethnic minorities, especially those residing in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, may be disproportionately targeted for such practices. Scholars have offered several explanations for the differential employment of extra-legal police aggression, but an integrated theory of minority disadvantage has yet to be developed. In this article, we synthesize the existing literature into a model of extra-legal police aggression that considers intergroup dynamics of race and place. We argue that ordinary social psychological processes triggered by the characteristics of neighborhoods explain extra-legal police aggression against minority citizens.
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Michael White et al.
Justice Quarterly, March/April 2012, Pages 258-286
Abstract:
The potential for veterans to end up in the criminal justice system as a result of physical and psychological problems that may be combat‐related has generated much interest, illustrated most recently by the development of specialized veterans' courts. However, little is known about how often veterans are arrested and incarcerated, the nature of their problems, or the extent to which their military service has contributed to their criminality. Using interview data from 2,102 arrestees booked in Maricopa County (AZ) during 2009, this paper examines the problems and prior experiences of arrested military veterans and compares veteran and non‐veteran arrestees along a range of measures. Results indicate that veterans comprise 6.3% of the arrestee population, and that more than 50% of veterans report suffering from at least one combat‐related problem including physical injury, post‐ traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), other mental health problems, and substance abuse. Multivariate analysis indicates that veteran arrestees differ from non‐veterans on a number of key measures, most notably more frequent arrests for violent offenses and greater use of crack cocaine and opiates. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for the potential link between military service and criminality as well as for criminal justice policy and practice.
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David Hughes et al.
Criminal Justice and Behavior, April 2012, Pages 434-446
Abstract:
A core public policy question for jail diversion programs, regardless of what outcomes they achieve, is whether and to what extent they generate cost savings. Apart from a general pattern of cost shifting from the criminal justice system to the community mental health system, studies on the costs of jail diversion programs have yielded limited and equivocal results. In response to the mixed results on cost findings, we tested a simulation model to project the fiscal impact of jail diversion programs using data from actual criminal justice and mental health systems and the best outcome data from the literature. Using data from Travis County, Texas, in 2006 and 2007, our simulations that produced a net savings to the county had two key findings: (a) Unless the most serious misdemeanants and low-level felons are included for diversion, there will be no cost savings since there are too few jails days avoided; and (b) the cost burden was shifted from the criminal justice system to the community-based service system, which is already strained for resources.
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The failure of police ‘fusion' centers and the concept of a national intelligence sharing plan
Robert Taylor & Amanda Russell
Police Practice and Research, March/April 2012, Pages 184-200
Abstract:
The National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan (NCISP) originated primarily in response to the September 11 attacks with the intended goal of improving the coordination of law enforcement agencies through better mechanisms of intelligence sharing. These mechanisms have taken form as fusion centers whereby information is collected, stored, analyzed, converted into intelligence, and subsequently disseminated to other agencies. According to the NCISP, local fusion centers report to state fusion centers that ultimately report to the National Counter Terrorism Center for a coordinated response to potential criminal and terrorist threats. Though well-intentioned, there is very little evidence to suggest that the goals of improved communication and coordination have been accomplished through the NCISP or fusion centers. The authors argue that the structure and mission of law enforcement agencies undermines the very essence of fusion centers and what they are intended to do. In particular, agencies still possess a number of traits (e.g., autonomy and interagency ego) that hinder the effective and efficient sharing of information and intelligence. Moreover, local agencies operating fusion centers are required to assume roles, strategies, and techniques inherent to the military and federal law enforcement operations. These issues are reviewed and recommendations are discussed for future applications of fusion centers.
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Deborah Grubb & Katherine Bennett
Police Practice and Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human trafficking represents one of the largest criminal enterprises worldwide. International anti-trafficking efforts depend on the cooperation of individual governments to incorporate anti-trafficking measures within all levels of law enforcement. Millions of dollars have been appropriated for training and awareness programs within the USA. Research indicates, however, that there may be a lack of human trafficking awareness and training among local and state law enforcement agencies. Findings from a survey within the State of Georgia support the notion that training and awareness initiatives may not be reaching local counterparts.