CRIME IN EMERGING ADULTHOOD*

The extent to which local life circumstances influence criminal activity has been the focus of much theoretical debate. Although empirical research has been initiated, it remains limited. Herein, we use data on 524 serious offenders from the California Youth Authority for a seven‐year post‐parole period to examine the relationship between changes in local life circumstances and criminal activity. We extend previous research by employing a statistical model that accounts for the joint distribution of violent and nonviolent crime during the late teens and twenties in order to present information on patterns of criminal activity during a newly recognized developmental period of the life course, “emerging adulthood.”     

Guiding Public Opinion through Social Agenda-Setting: China's media policy since the 1990s

Guidance of public opinion (yulun daoxiang) became the buzzword of the Chinese government's media policy from the 1990s. I illustrate this idea through borrowing the concept of agenda-setting from media studies. Partly, its introduction was a response to the crisis of the propaganda model in the mid-1980s. Recognizing its declining ability to control what people think, the party state shifted its focus from political ideology to social agenda. The guidance of public opinion is indirect, flexible and subtle in nature. It allows the state-controlled media to address people's daily concerns. Also, it realizes that responsiveness to public opinion is the key to guiding that opinion effectively. The media need to guide public opinion ‘correctly’, so as to promote political unity, social stability, and boost morale. An argument is advanced that the party state seeks to accomplish attention management through agenda-setting.     

DISTANCE DECAY REEXAMINED

The "journey to crime," or the study of the distance between an offender's residence and offense site, has been a subject of study within criminology for many years. Implications arising from such research touches the majority of criminological theories. An overriding conclusion from this line of research is that most crimes occur in relatively close proximity to the home of the offender. Termed the distance-decay function, a plot of the number of crimes that an offender commits decreases with increasing distance from the offender's residence. In a recent paper, Van Koppen and De Keijser raise the concern that inferring individual distance decay from aggregate-level data may be inappropriate. They assert that previous research reporting aggregated distance-decay functions conceals individual variations in the ranges of operation, which leads them to conclude that the distance-decay function is an artifact. We do not question the claim that researchers should not make inferences about individual behavior with data collected at the aggregate level. However, Van Koppen and De Keijser's analysis raises four important issues concerning (1) the interpretation of the ecological fallacy, (2) the assumption of linearity in offender movements, (3) the interpretation of geographic work on profiling, and (4) the assumption of random target selection within a delimited range of operation. Using both simulated and nonsimulated data, we present evidence that reaches vastly different conclusions from those reached by Van Koppen and De Keijser. The theoretical implications of our analyses and possibilities for future research are addressed.     

USING THE CORRECT STATISTICAL TEST FOR THE EQUALITY OF REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS

Criminologists are often interested in examining interactive effects within a regression context. For example, “holding other relevant factors constant, is the effect of delinquent peers on one's own delinquent conduct the same for males and females?” or “is the effect of a given treatment program comparable between first-time and repeat offenders?” A frequent strategy in examining such interactive effects is to test for the difference between two regression coefficients across independent samples. That is, does b₁= b₂? Traditionally, criminologists have employed a t or z test for the difference between slopes in making these coefficient comparisons. While there is considerable consensus as to the appropriateness of this strategy, there has been some confusion in the criminological literature as to the correct estimator of the standard error of the difference, the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of coefficient differences, in the t or z formula. Criminologists have employed two different estimators of this standard deviation in their empirical work. In this note, we point out that one of these estimators is correct while the other is incorrect. The incorrect estimator biases one's hypothesis test in favor of rejecting the null hypothesis that b₁= b₂. Unfortunately, the use of this incorrect estimator of the standard error of the difference has been fairly widespread in criminology. We provide the formula for the correct statistical test and illustrate with two examples from the literature how the biased estimator can lead to incorrect conclusions.     

CRIMINAL PROPENSITIES,DISCRETE GROUPS OF OFFENDERS,AND PERSISTENCE IN CRIME*

Criminal propensity theorists argue that the causes of variation in offending behavior can be traced to variation in one or more causal traits. Other theorists contend that there is actually more than one type of offender and that more than one causal mechanism operates to explain offending behavior. In this article, some of the implications of these two positions are considered. Then, their congruence with recidivism data from a cohort of post-age-16 North Carolina institutional releasees (N = 848) is assessed, The analysis focuses specifically on whether the correlates of offending persistence are similar across two categories of individuals: those who experienced their first adjudication at an early age and those who were first adjudicated at a later age. In support of both positions, some similarities and some differences in the correlates of persistence were discovered. The differences, however, were only evident when the threshold for late first adjudication was set to age 12. When this threshold was raised to higher ages, the differences disappeared.     

ON AMBIGUITY IN PERCEPTIONS OF RISK:IMPLICATIONS FOR CRIMINAL DECISION MAKING AND DETERRENCE*

Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level—increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit or refrain from crime. Here, we investigate this proposition. We find some evidence that individuals are “ambiguity averse” for decisions involving losses such as criminal punishments. This finding means that a more ambiguous perceived certainty of punishment is a greater deterrent of some crimes than a nominally equivalent but less ambiguous one. However, this effect depends on how large an individual's risk certainty perception is initially. That is, we find evidence for “boundary effects” (Casey and Scholz, 1991a, 1991b) in which this effect holds for lower probabilities but reverses for higher ones. For higher detection probabilities, individuals become “ambiguity seeking” such that a less ambiguous detection probability has more deterrent value than a nominally equivalent but more ambiguous detection probability. Results are presented from two distinct, but complementary, analysis samples and empirical approaches. These samples include a survey to college students with several hypothetical choice problems and data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a longitudinal investigation of serious adolescent offenders transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood.