Criminology最新文献

Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet whether the former contributed to the latter remains unclear. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that evaluated highly focused interventions atypical of day-to-day policing, used cities as the unit of analysis, or could not rule out endogeneity. This study addresses each of these issues, thereby advancing the evidence base concerning the effects of policing on crime. Leveraging two exogenous shocks presented by the onset of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and social unrest after the murder of George Floyd, we evaluated the effects of sudden and sustained reductions in high-discretion policing on crime at the neighborhood level in Denver, Colorado. Multilevel models accounting for trends in prior police activity, neighborhood structure, seasonality, and population mobility revealed mixed results. On the one hand, large-scale reductions in stops and drug-related arrests were associated with significant increases in violent and property crimes, respectively. On the other hand, fewer disorder arrests did not affect crime. These results were not universal across neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of debates concerning the appropriate role of policing in the 21st century.

Would police racial and gender diversification reduce Black Americans’ fear of the police? The theory of representative bureaucracy indicates that it might. We tested the effects of officer diversity in two experiments embedded in a national survey that oversampled Black Americans, producing several findings. First, in early 2022, nearly 2 years after George Floyd's killing, most Black Americans remained afraid of police mistreatment. Second, in a conjoint experiment in which respondents were presented with 11,000 officer profiles, Black Americans were less afraid when the officers were non-White (Black or Hispanic/Latino) instead of White and when they were female instead of male. Third, in a separate experiment with pictured police teams, Black Americans were less afraid of being mistreated by non-White and female officers. Fourth, experimental evidence emerged that body-worn cameras (BWCs) reduced fear among both Black and non-Black respondents. These findings support calls to diversify police agencies and to require officers to wear and notify civilians of BWC.

Marshaling ethnographic data from a county jail, this study introduces “autonomy”—a novel concept and measurement of the degree to which an actor's exchange initiations are regulated by other exchange relations. This study rearticulates mutual dependence arguments about the social order of penological living in terms of social exchange theory and offers several innovations: 1) the structural forms of exchange relations in a penal housing unit stratify “carceral autonomy” across members of a social order; 2) diminished carceral autonomy contributes to the buildup of “exchange frustration”—the mixture of discontent and sadness experienced when goals cannot be achieved due the structure of an exchange network; 3) deprivations, inefficacies, and imported cultural standards contribute to what is exchanged and with whom in a penological setting; 4) caretaking in penological housing units is as much about maintaining social order through a form of generalized exchange as it is about network members helping each other; and 5) the emotional landscape of penological living can be mapped, in part, by examining the distribution of carceral autonomy and exchange frustration.

Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate data, a focus on prisons rather than on jails, limited measures of unemployment, and the fact that the health of the labor market is endogenous to incarceration. We instrument for local exposure to the rise of Chinese exports (“the China Shock”) to estimate the effect of job loss on American incarceration. Marshaling a new data set of prisoners and jail inmates by race at the commuting zone level, we show that negative shocks to local labor markets led to significant increases in total incarceration rates for both Blacks and Whites. The effect seems to be driven by increased prison rather than jail populations. This estimate is invisible to ordinary least squares, which may help explain null results reported by past work. Counterfactual exercises suggest that the effect of job loss was punitively consequential. Had employment gains from the 1990s been preserved into the 2000s, the U.S. incarceration rate would have grown significantly less than it did.

Individuals enter police encounters with expectations about how these interactions will unfold. These expectations are often rooted in racialized personal, vicarious, and collective experiences with the police. Bayesian updating posits that the way youth perceive treatment by the police during stops and arrests combines with prior expectations and perceptions to shape current views of the law, whereas subtyping suggests this process differs by race. This study examines intra- and interracial variability in these processes using longitudinal survey data from 3,085 Black and White youth. Regardless of race, youth who indicate they were treated with disrespect during police encounters had lower perceptions of procedural justice than did those with no contact, whereas contact perceived as respectful had no significant effects. For White but not Black youth, police encounters rated as “neutral” are associated with more negative views of the police. Other forms of legal socialization are also racialized, including messages conveyed in the media and by parents. Limited evidence exists that prior views of the police moderate the effect of police encounters on procedural justice or that these conditioning effects vary by race. Findings support updating, but race differences do not neatly align with findings expected with updating or subtyping theory.

Recently, new social anxieties about transgender people have begun to emerge, framed as an issue of “grooming”—a term typically used in the context of child sexual abuse. In this way, moral panic about transgender people seems to be merging with oft-repeated social fears about pedophilia, resulting not only in policies criminalizing trans people and their allies but also in escalating hatred and threats toward trans-affirming educators. This pattern requires further inquiry. As a trans academic who has been at the center of moral panic, my own hate mail can provide material for this exploration. I conducted a content analysis of 231 letters and e-mails sent to me containing messages of hate, to answer the following research questions:

This article delves into the connections between time trends in unstructured socializing and other dramatic changes in adolescence since the 1950s. Osgood et al.’s (1996) individual-level application of routine activity theory proposed that unstructured socializing contributes to crime by exposing people to situations conducive to deviance, and a large body of research supports this idea. Unstructured socializing has proven useful as an explanatory bridge that links crime and deviance to key social factors like age, class, and gender. The present article expands on two recent studies (Baumer et al., 2021; Svensson & Oberwittler, 2021), which showed that changing rates of unstructured socializing help explain time trends in delinquency as well. Based on time trends across many domains of adolescent life, I argue that changes in unstructured socializing were a manifestation of the rise and fall of a teen culture of independence from the 1950s to the 2020s. The effectiveness of unstructured socializing as an explanatory bridge demonstrates the value of focusing on ordinary, everyday activities for tapping into features of life that are consequential and that vary across social conditions.

Spurred by the success of public health violence interventions, and accelerated by policy pressure to reduce violence without exacerbating overpolicing and mass incarceration, streetwork programs—those that provide anti-violence services by neighborhood-based workers who perform their work beyond the walls of parochial institutions—have positioned themselves as the most important non–law-enforcement violence prevention option available to urban policy makers. Yet despite their importance, the state of the field seems difficult to interpret for academics and practitioners alike. In this article, we make several contributions that bring forth new findings and deliver new perspectives on streetwork as a violence reduction strategy. First, we offer an extended analytic review of the streetwork evaluation literature that connects the study of contemporary public health violence interventions to a preceding tradition of criminologically inspired streetwork studies. Second, we present the results of an impact evaluation of StreetSafe Boston (SSB)—a multiyear streetwork intervention that served 20 Boston gangs. We find that the SSB intervention had no detectable effect on violence among the gangs that it served. We conclude by offering a framework for understanding a field at multiple crossroads: past and present, proclaimed successes and failures, help and harm.

Scholars have long described the American penal state and welfare state as joined by a common logic of social marginalization. But researchers have only recently begun to explore how the individuals who pass through the carceral system also interact with welfare state programs. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, in this article, I explore how formerly incarcerated individuals make claims on the welfare state and how participation varies across social programs and states, as well as by race, drawing on theories of social welfare rights-claiming and system avoidance. In so doing, I provide the first nationwide estimates of the extent to which previously incarcerated adults use social safety net resources. I find that participation in welfare programs varies with incarceration history, program structure, and race. Rather than finding patterns consistent with system avoidance, I find that previously incarcerated White Americans seem to engage in active rights claiming, participating in public assistance programs more than similarly eligible never-incarcerated counterparts. All formerly incarcerated individuals, however, have limited access to more generous social insurance programs, and the shift to an increasingly employment-based social safety net seems likely to further limit access to the welfare state for the growing population of Americans leaving prison.

Institutionalized gangs are youth groups that have developed the ability to persist, expand, and restructure organizationally around criminal activities and have imposed their norms and behavioral prescriptions on the communities where they operate. So how does a gang member manage to leave these groups and abandon violent crime? This article proposes a new theoretical model of gang disengagement based on a comparative case study with MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs in Central America. It is based on 112 in-depth interviews with former gang members in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The article identifies three forms of gang disengagement: religious conversion, secular pass, and walking away. Two factors, the gang's organizational structure and its territorial reach, mediate in the choices gang members have when leaving an institutionalized gang. The specific combination of these factors makes some disengagement modes more likely than others. The article underscores the role of gang governance in shaping gang members’ disengagement processes.