Criminology最新文献

Does increased representation of Black individuals in the police force lead to less aggressive policing of Black individuals? The current study uses a Chicago panel data set with monthly police unit observations between 2013 and 2015 to understand 1) how police units’ representation of Black individuals affects the number of stops of Black residents and 2) how individual police officers patrol differently depending on the racial/ethnic background of co-working officers. Using fixed-effects negative binomial regression, we found that increasing racial congruence between police officers and the community being patrolled was associated over time with fewer stops of Black residents. Individual analyses showed that Black (vs. White) officers stopped fewer Black civilians, with larger effects in police units with higher percentages of Black officers, indicating a unit group effect. Furthermore, as the number of Black officer co-workers in a shift increased, Black civilian stops declined for all officers, including White officers, which is consistent with active representation. These findings indicate that a more diverse and representative police force can reduce aggressive policing of minority communities by mitigating group threat and cultivating positive cross-racial exchanges within police organizations and smaller peer groups.

The Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) of 1990 requires the federal government to publicly release official hate crime statistics annually; the HCSA does not, however, mandate that local agencies submit hate crime reports to the government in the first place. Although research has evaluated the reporting of hate crime statistics in a dichotomous fashion (compliance vs. noncompliance), the current study suggests that the consistent and invariable reporting of zero hate crimes in a particular jurisdiction over time is unlikely and thus better conceptualized as a third response strategy: ceremonious compliance. We examine this strategy as a potentially unique institutional behavior, structured by local political and historical contexts, including discursive differences in the identification of hate crime as an important social problem, and localized histories of racial oppression. This research then uses multilevel multinomial logistic regression models to estimate variation in the likelihood of differential compliance strategies (i.e., true compliance, ceremonious compliance, noncompliance), according to several political and historical factors, including Republican vote share, location in the Confederate South, and historical lynchings. Findings reveal that political and historical contexts are important predictors of agency responses to hate crime, with a particular tendency toward ceremonious compliance in Republican-leaning locales.

Guardianship is a core tenet of routine activity theory and collective efficacy. At its outset, routine activity research assumed that the mere presence of a guardian was sufficient to disrupt many forms of crime. More recent research, however, has taken as a starting point that would-be-guardians must take on an active role for a reduction in crime to occur. Integrating research on bystander intervention and guardianship-in-action, the current study elaborates the individual-level motivations and decision processes of guardianship to answer the following questions: Who serves as a reactive guardian? How do they do so? And why? We tasked young adults (N = 1,032) included in the recent waves of the Zurich Project on the Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood (z-proso) to assess a 70-second video depicting a sexual harassment event. We examined participants’ willingness to engage in a range of intervention options as a function of their prosocial attitudes, safety considerations, socioemotional motivations, and moral considerations. Results show a complex decision process leading to whether and how a would-be guardian decides to intervene to disrupt sexual harassment, such that prosocial motivations and emotional reactions are weighed against perceptions of danger when deciding on a specific course of action.

During the last decade, health criminology—the study of health outcomes for justice-involved individuals and their families—has gained traction in the field. We extend health criminology to the study of street gangs by drawing on the stress process perspective. Gang membership is conceptualized as a primary stressor that leads to secondary stressors with direct and indirect adverse effects on mental health. Leaving a gang, we hypothesize, offers relief by shrinking the stress universe to improve mental health. We test the gang disengagement–mental health link using panel data from a sample of 510 active gang members in the Northwestern Juvenile Project, longitudinal entropy balancing models, and mental health outcomes related to both clinical diagnosis and functional impairment. The results indicate that gang disengagement leads to improvements in mental health and functioning. Compared with those who stayed in gangs, those who left experienced improvements in global functioning, overall mental health diagnosis, behavior toward others functioning, substance abuse functioning, and alcohol-related diagnoses. Secondary stressors partially, but not fully, mediated this association. Our findings extend the inventory of research on the benefits of disengagement from gangs to health outcomes and support interventions designed to promote gang disengagement.

Although racial disparities in criminal justice contact are long-standing and the subject of continuing public debate, few studies have linked early-life social conditions to racial disparities in arrest over the life course and in changing times. In this article, we advance and test a theoretical model of racial inequality in long-term arrest histories on a representative sample of nearly 1,000 individuals from multiple birth cohorts in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Large Black–White disparities in arrests from ages 10 to 40 arise from racial inequalities in exposure to cumulative childhood advantages and disadvantages rather than from race-specific effects. Smaller but meaningful Hispanic–White gaps follow a similar pattern, and the same explanations of racial disparities hold across different offense types and across birth cohorts who came of age at different times during 1995 to 2021. These findings indicate that inequalities in early-life structural factors, which themselves are historically shaped, trigger processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage that produce racial disparities in arrests over the life course and that persist across different points in contemporary history.

Legal financial obligations (LFOs) associated with justice system involvement are increasingly a focus for policymakers and researchers seeking to understand sources of inequality and the factors that promote successful reentry. These conversations often rely on an assumption that LFOs are associated with or may even drive higher rates of recidivism. The empirical research in this area, however, has not kept up with the growing strength of these claims. This study reports findings that may offer a new perspective and contribute to an evidence-based debate. Multisourced administrative data on all individuals released from carceral supervision in an East Coast state (N = 21,301) over 3 years are used to examine the complex relationship between criminal justice debt and reoffending. We detail the results of survival analyses estimating the impact of these debts on various forms of recidivism. Broadly, we find that even though the relationship between case-level LFO assessments and future offending did not reach statistical significance, the association with the cumulative effect of monetary sanctions over the life course did. Furthermore, the impact of LFO debt is greater for certain racial groups, supporting theoretical and practical inquiries into factors informing structural disadvantage. Implications for policy and future research are considered.

Crime is often considered a behavior of teenagers and young adults, peaking in adolescence, and declining with age. A growing body of research, however, has demonstrated that the age–crime relationship is neither universal, as the contours of the age–crime distribution vary across countries, nor uniform, as it varies over time. We argue that the dynamics of the age–crime relationship can best be understood through a lens situating birth cohorts within the broader sociohistorical contexts in which they enter their formative years. We apply this framework to the Republic of Korea, a country that has experienced rapid demographic transitions accompanied by decades of economic development and social upheaval after the Korean War. Our findings suggest that the age–crime distribution in Korea has shifted substantially since the mid-1970s, moving from the quintessential age–crime curve characteristic of Western countries to one in which the modal age at arrest is now concentrated in middle age. We find that much of this change can be attributed to the aging of a specific birth cohort—the 86 generation—whose members were dually disadvantaged by being born during a fertility boom and entering young adulthood during the pro-democracy student movements in the 1980s.

Intimate partner homicide (IPH) continues to be a form of violence disproportionately affecting women in the United States, and access to firearms can greatly increase the likelihood that intimate partner violence becomes lethal. In response to concerns about firearms violence and their prevalence in IPH incidents specifically, states have passed restrictive firearms laws and policies. In this study, we provide an analysis of female IPH victimization disaggregated by race/ethnicity that incorporates state-level firearms legislation. Our analytical approach is informed by intersectionality and accounts for other key intimate partner violence policies and structural predictors. We find that the relationship between firearms legislation and IPH varies in magnitude and direction across specific race/ethnicity female victimization groups. As such, our findings provide support for an intersectional framework in that restrictive firearms laws are not consistently associated with lower levels of IPH when incidents are disaggregated by gender and race/ethnicity.

Amid punitive shifts in crime and immigration control during the 1980s and 1990s, Hispanic individuals comprised a growing share of the population confined in U.S. prisons and jails. Although it is widely acknowledged that the nation's wars on crime and drugs contributed to higher rates of minority arrest, limited empirical research has examined whether the merging of immigration control with criminal justice practice during this period intensified these disparities. This article uses county-level arrest data from California between 1980 and 2004 to investigate whether intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) leasing jail space for immigrant detention increased rates of Hispanic arrest. Employing a quasi-experimental design that leverages the staggered adoption of IGSAs across counties, this study finds that these agreements increased rates of Hispanic arrest but had no discernible impact on arrest rates for White or Black residents. Supplemental analyses reveal that these increases were driven by misdemeanor arrests and were particularly pronounced in counties where the Hispanic population comprised between 11 and 22 percent. These findings suggest that IGSAs may trigger minority threat concerns that increase arrests, shedding additional light on Hispanic representation in the criminal justice system.

The veil of darkness (VOD) is a practical and rigorous methodology for examining racial disparities in police traffic stop behavior. Past research, however, has been littered with methodological inconsistencies inhibiting cross-study comparison and decisions regarding policy. Accordingly, we clarify four aspects of its implementation: 1) coding daylight, our treatment condition; 2) constructing an intertwilight period; 3) accounting for seasonal differences in driving or patrol patterns; and 4) modeling VOD multivariable regression equations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of methodological decisions as they pertain to the method's functionality as a natural experiment. Furthermore, we propose a novel weighting procedure to account for seasonal driving population differences. We examined more than 50,000 traffic stops conducted by Michigan State Police during 2021 to demonstrate our suggested framework for future analyses.