Verbal Ability and Persistent Offending: A Race-specific Test of Moffitt’s Theory

Theoretical questions linger over the applicability of the verbal ability model to African-Americans and the social control theory hypothesis that educational failure mediates the effect of verbal ability on offending patterns. Accordingly, this paper investigates whether verbal ability distinguishes between offending groups within the context of Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy. Questions are addressed with longitudinal data spanning childhood through young-adulthood from an ongoing national panel, and multinomial and hierarchical Poisson models (overdispersed). In multinomial models, low verbal ability predicts membership in a life-course-persistent-oriented group relative to an adolescent-limited-oriented group. Hierarchical models indicate that verbal ability is associated with arrest outcomes among White and African-American subjects, with effects consistently operating through educational attainment (high school dropout). The results support Moffitt’s hypothesis that verbal deficits distinguish adolescent-limited- and life-course-persistent-oriented groups within race, as well as the social control model of verbal ability.     

Binge Drinking Among College Students: A Partial Test of Akers’ Social Structure-Social Learning Theory

The present research continues to test the hypothesis from Akers’ Social Structure-Social Learning Theory (1998) that the effects of structural variables will be mediated by social learning processes. The present research uses Core Alcohol and Drug Survey data from eight diverse college campuses throughout the United States to study binge drinking. This research examines 13 structural features for a full range of college students. The results indicate the social learning variables (rewards, punishments and definitions) mediated most of the structural effects of binge drinking. There were significant interactions, which are not predicted by Akers. The paper discusses the implication of these findings for Akers’ mediation hypothesis.     

Policing a Negotiated World: A Partial Test of Klinger’s Ecological Theory of Policing

Objectives

Klinger’s (Criminology 35(2): 277–306, 1997) ecological theory of policing addresses the intersection of environment and police organizational structure on police patrol practices. The current study addresses the following question: ‘Is police response to calls for service influenced by the level of serious violent crime or the level of officer staffing?’

Methods

This question was addressed using crime, incident, and staffing data supplied by the Philadelphia Police Department. The dependent variable was the number of unfounded events per month, per police district, from 2004 to 2008. Analysis controlled for linear and non-linear trends, average monthly temperature, month length, and spatial effects. Data were analyzed using repeated measures multilevel modeling.

Results

Findings suggested that the quantity of unfounded events was associated with both workload and officer staffing levels. Consistent with theoretical predictions, higher workload was associated with more unfounded incidents while higher levels of officer staffing was associated with fewer unfounded incidents, net of ongoing trends and spatial effects.

Conclusions

These findings are consistent with the Ecological Theory of Policing and suggest that officers may shed workload in response to higher demands for service or lower levels of officer availability.

     

Neighborhoods,Individuals, and Instrumental Crime in Russia and Ukraine: A Multilevel Test of Merton’s Anomie Theory

Objectives

Empirically assess Baumer’s (Theor Criminol 11(1):63–93, 2007) efforts to unify Merton’s anomie/strain theory within a multilevel framework that anticipates instrumental crime among individuals who are both strongly committed to monetary success goals and weakly committed to the normative means for pursuing these goals, particularly if they possess certain other personal attributes or are embedded within anomic socio-cultural contexts.

Methods

Multilevel overdispersed Poisson regression models are estimated using survey data from 1431 adult residents of 41 neighborhoods in Lviv, Ukraine, and Nizhni Novgorod, Russia.

Results

Consistent with expectations, financial dissatisfaction among individuals appears to exacerbate the effect of the goals-means interaction on instrumental crime. However, no evidence was observed of moderation involving perceived risk of punishment, commitment to non-monetary success goals, and blocked legitimate opportunities. Although neighborhood anomie exerted a statistically significant main effect on instrumental crime, theorized cross-level interactions involving strong cultural emphasis on monetary success goals, weak cultural emphasis on normative means, and limited consensus regarding the normative means by which to pursue monetary success goals did not materialize.

Conclusions

Findings cast doubt on the cross-cultural generality of Baumer’s multilevel conceptualization of Merton’s strain/anomie theory. However, they confirm financial dissatisfaction as a key predictor of instrumental crime and moderator of unbalanced value commitments among individuals. They also suggest that future efforts to bridge the micro and macro strands of Merton’s theory will need to incorporate alternate theoretical predictors (e.g., personal morality) and consider ways in which an anomic social order contributes to deviant behavior directly rather than merely indirectly through the proportion of the population experiencing a goals-means disjuncture.

     

Responsibility and Control: Fischer’s and Ravizza’s Theory of Moral Responsibility

Law and Philosophy -     

Racial Context and Crime Reporting: A Test of Black’s Stratification Hypothesis

Contextual factors that contribute to race differences in reporting crime to the police are an important element in Donald Black??s theory of the behavior of the law, yet few studies have investigated whether these differences vary depending on social context. The present study investigates whether the relationships between victim and offender race and the reporting of crime are moderated by the level of racial stratification in a given place as Black??s stratification hypothesis would predict. Using victim survey data from 40 metropolitan areas, as well as data from other sources, we find results that are consistent with Black??s stratification hypothesis, namely, that victim and offender race are more strongly associated with the reporting of crime in those metropolitan areas where the gap in economic status between blacks and whites is larger and the groups are more residentially segregated. The theory, however, is unable to account for the high rates of reporting of black-on-black assaults found across the 40 metropolitan areas. The question of how the needs of black victims may outweigh their reluctance to call the police is an important issue for future research.     

Effects of Defendant Sexual Orientation on Jurors’ Perceptions of Child Sexual Assault

We examined mock jurors’ reactions to a sexual abuse case involving a male teacher and a 10-year-old child. Because gay men are sometimes stereotyped as child molesters, we portrayed defendant sexual orientation as either gay or straight and the victim as either a boy or girl. Jurors made more pro-prosecution decisions in cases involving a gay versus straight defendant, particularly when the victim was a boy. In boy-victim cases, jurors’ emotional feelings of moral outrage toward the defendant mediated these effects. On average, women jurors were more pro-prosecution than were men. Results have implications for understanding social perceptions of cross- and same-gender child sexual abuse and juror decision making in child sexual assault cases perpetrated by homosexual and heterosexual men.

The Influence of the Social Bond on Self-control at the Moment of Decision: Testing Hirschi’s Redefinition of Self-control

Hirschi (2004) redefined self-control as the tendency to consider the “full range” of potential costs relevant to a criminal act, suggesting that such costs vary in number and salience based on one’s level of self-control. He also suggested self-control, as expressed at the moment of decision, was influenced by the individual’s level of social bonding; those with fewer bonds would exhibit less self control by considering fewer costs and finding them less salient when making a decision. This study presents an initial attempt to examine Hirschi’s theoretical statement linking concepts from the two theories. Presented with a hypothetical drunk driving scenario, participants were asked to identify perceived costs and salience as a measure of self-control, as Hirschi (2004) suggested. Results support Hirschi’s assertion demonstrating that the social bond impacts offending likelihood through its relationship to self-control expressed within the decision. Future theoretical and empirical directions are outlined.     

A Partial Test of Moffitt’s Developmental Taxonomy: Examining the Role of Genetic Risk

A developing line of research indicates that behavioral patterns associated with the typologies identified in Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy may be influenced by genetic factors. Based on these findings, the current study examines whether Moffitt’s etiological explanations of life-course persistent offenders, adolescence-limited offenders, and abstainers have merit after controlling for genetic influences. To do so, a sample of twins drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were examined. The results revealed that genetic influences significantly predicted entry into each of the typologies identified by Moffitt even after controlling for theoretically relevant factors. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Crime, Freedom and Civic Bonds: Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy

There is no question Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom is an engaging and powerful book which will inform legal philosophy, particularly Kantian theories, for years to come. The text explores with care Kant’s legal and political philosophy, distinguishing it from his better known moral theory. Nor is Ripstein’s book simply a recounting of Kant’s legal and political theory. Ripstein develops Kant’s views in his own unique vision illustrating fresh ways of viewing the entire Kantian project. But the same strength and coherence which ties the book to Kant’s important values of independence blinds the work to our shared moral ties grounded in other political values. Ripstein’s thoughts on punishment are novel in that he embeds criminal law, both in its retributivist and consequentialist facets, into Kant’s overarching political philosophy to show how criminal law can be seen as one aspect of the supremacy of public law. But a criminal law solely focused on the preservation of freedom takes little notice of the ways criminal law need expand its view to account for how a polity can restore the victim of a crime back to civic equality, reincorporate offenders after they have been punished and cannot leave past offenders isolated and likely to reoffend, resulting in the rotating door prison system and communities of innocents who remain preyed upon by career criminals. Lastly, a political theory that does not prize our civic bonds will ignore the startling balkanization of our criminal punishment practices, where policing, arresting and imprisonment become tools of racial and social oppression. In illustrating the benefits in viewing criminal law as a coherent part of Kant’s political theory of freedom, Ripstein also highlights what is absent. It then becomes clear that though Kant presents one important facet of punishment, only a republican political theory can meet the most pressing moral demands of punishment by reminding us that criminal law must be used to preserve and strengthen civic society.     

The Empirical Status of Social Learning Theory: A Meta‐Analysis

Social learning theory has remained one of the core criminological paradigms over the last four decades. Although a large body of scholarship has emerged testing various propositions specified by the theory, the empirical status of the theory in its entirety is still unknown. Accordingly, in the present study, we subject this body of empirical literature to a meta‐analysis to assess its empirical status. Results reveal considerable variation in the magnitude and stability of effect sizes for variables specified by social learning theory across different methodological specifications. In particular, relationships of crime/deviance to measures of differential association and definitions (or antisocial attitudes) are quite strong, yet those for differential reinforcement and modeling/imitation are modest at best. Furthermore, effect sizes for differential association, definitions, and differential reinforcement all differed significantly according to variations in model specification and research designs across studies. The implications for the continued vitality of social learning in criminology are discussed.     

Rape Shield Laws and Sexual Behavior Evidence: Effects of Consent Level and Women’s Sexual History on Rape Allegations

Rape shield laws, which limit the introduction of sexual history evidence in rape trials, challenge the view that women with extensive sexual histories more frequently fabricate charges of rape than other women. The present study examined the relationship between women's actual sexual history and their reporting rape in hypothetical scenarios. Female participants (college students and a community sample, which included women working as prostitutes and topless dancers, and women living in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center) imagined themselves in dating scenarios that described either a legally definable act of rape or consensual sexual intercourse. Additionally, within the rape scenarios, level of consensual intimate contact (i.e., foreplay) preceding rape was examined to determine its influence on rape reporting. Women were less likely to say that they would take legal action in response to the rape scenarios if they had extensive sexual histories, or if they had consented to an extensive amount of intimate contact before the rape. In response to the consensual sexual intercourse scenarios, women with more extensive sexual histories were not more likely to say that they would report rape, even when the scenario provided them with a motive for seeking revenge against their dating partner.     

A Website Content Analysis of Women’s Resources and Sexual Assault Literature on College Campuses

In an effort to examine how higher education institutions have provided women with resources to handle issues that disproportionately affect them, this study assessed the availability of women’s resource centers on college campuses within the United States, with a particular focus on sexual assault-related resources. A website content analysis was conducted, through which we coded to assess ease of use, clarity, and comprehensiveness of the programs and information made available to women. Although many universities had sexual assault literature, few had women’s resource centers. In addition, the quality of literature and programs varied greatly among the universities. Future research should attempt to explain organizational differences in college responses to the call for resources, as well as examine women’s experiences with resources on campus. Portions of this research were presented at the 2006 meetings of the American Society of Criminology in Los Angeles, CA and at the 2006 meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society in Omaha, NE.

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Legal Argumentation and Justice in Luhmann’s System Theory of Law

The paper reconstructs Luhmann’s conception of legal argumentation and justice especially focussing on the aspects of contingency and self-referring operative closure. The aim of his conception is to describe/explain in a disenchanted way—from an external, of “second order” point of view—the work on adjudication, which, rather idealistically, lawyers and judges present as being a matter of reason. As a consequence of some surface similarities with Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy of justice, Teubner proposes integrating the supposed reductive image of formal justice described by Luhmann with the ideal conception of justice presented by Derrida. Here this kind of attempt is rejected as epistemologically wrong. In addition, Luhmann’s theory is argued to have other shortcomings, namely: the failure to understand the pragmatic function of principles, and the incapacity to describe the current legal questions linked with cultures and legal pluralism, which characterise our society.     

Eating Peas with One’s Fingers: A Semiotic Approach to Law and Social Norms

This paper proposes a semiotic theory of norms—what I term normative semiotics. The paper’s central contention is that social norms are a language. Moreover, it is a language that we instinctively learn to speak. Normative behaviour is a mode of communication, the intelligibility of which allows us to establish cooperative relationships with others. Normative behaviour communicates an actor’s potential as a cooperative partner. Compliance with a norm is an act of communication: compliance signals cooperativeness; noncompliance signals uncooperativeness. An evolutionary model is proposed to explain how this comes about: evolution has generated an instinctual proficiency in working with these signals much like a language—a proficiency that manifests in an emotional context. We see these social rules as possessing a certain ‘rightness’ in normative terms. This adaptive trait is what we call internalization. Internalization enhances the individual’s ability to speak this code. Because these signals communicate who is and who is not a reliable co-operator, sending and receiving cooperation signals is crucial to individual survival. Individuals who internalized the entire process and thus became more adept at speaking the language were at an advantage. Law seeks to shape the language of norms by maintaining the collective standards of society; as such, understanding how and why this normative language emerges is critical to understanding a core function of law.     

How Exceptional Is India? A Test of Situational Action Theory

This study explores the generalizability of Situational Action Theory (SAT) in India by testing hypotheses related to the person–environment interaction in explaining offending. Drawing on data from a sample of 872 students between the ages of 14 and 17 from an Indian city collected as part of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD3), we tested the hypothesis that Indian youths will report more delinquent acts if they have a higher propensity to commit crime combined with a greater exposure to criminogenic activities. Our findings show unequivocal support for the applicability of SAT in India where youths reported a slight increase in offending behavior if they exercised low self-control or if they were less moralistic (i.e., they were more crime-prone), or when exposed to criminal activities or peers. Consistent with tests of SAT in other contexts, we find that exposure to criminogenic environments increases offending for youth with higher levels of criminal propensity but does not impact youth with lower levels of criminal propensity. We speculate that the overall low rate of delinquent offending coupled with the cultural milieu of Indian youths may explain why criminogenic exposure may be less relevant in light of young people’s strong avoidance of rule-breaking.

     

A Test of Self‐Control Theory Across Different Socioeconomic Strata

The current investigation examined the relationships between family processes, self‐control, and adolescent deviance in a sample of N = 3,764 Swiss male and female youth pursuing an apprenticeship (lower SES) or attending a Gymnasium/teacher’s college (higher SES). Participants completed a questionnaire that included measures of family processes, self‐control, and deviant behaviors. Results indicated that self‐control predicted adolescent deviance in both groups, and that direct and indirect effects existed in the relationships between family processes, self‐control, and deviance. Findings provided evidence of comparatively few differences in the observed associations by SES, though the magnitude of the positive effect by low self‐control on deviance was more modest in male apprentices as compared to non‐apprentices. Findings are discussed in terms of the implications for Self‐Control Theory.     

Pathways of Victimization and Resistance: Toward a Feminist Theory of Battered Women’s Help‐Seeking

Although intimate partner abuse has been extensively researched over the last thirty years, battered women’s help‐seeking remains perplexingly undertheorized, particularly within criminology. This analysis aims to offer a corrective by applying the feminist pathways theoretical model—which examines women’s and girls’ offending behaviors in the context of their past victimization experiences—to battered women’s help‐seeking. Data from in‐depth life history interviews with 22 battered women in two states indicate that the women’s childhood victimization experiences informed their adult help‐seeking decisions in meaningful ways. The primary theoretical contribution of this analysis is the identification of specific mechanisms—five help‐seeking inhibitors and three help‐seeking promoters—through which childhood victimization influenced participants’ help‐seeking. Results of this analysis demonstrate the benefit of a feminist pathways theoretical model of battered women’s help‐seeking in order to better understand how pathways of victimization and resistance develop over the course of women’s lives.     

Suburbia’s “Crime Experts”: The Neo-Conservatism of Control Theory and the Ethos of Crime

This essay tackles the relationship between morality and crime by way of the debate surrounding Travis Hirschi’s double contribution to so-called “control theory,” first as “social bonding theory,” and subsequently as a “general theory” of crime. The assessment conducted herein construes the first version of “control” as an expression of patriotism, and its late formulation, on account of its emphasis on varying individual levels of self-mastery, as an implicit reaffirmation of the inevitability of class division. Over the years, the fixation with “self-control” has become a rubric for the suburban anxieties of an upper-middle class surrounded by expanding (ghetto) poverty and plagued by familial dysfunction and the alienation of its own offspring. In the final analysis, these reflections form the basis for a general reformulation, inspired by the sociology of Thorstein Veblen, of the relationship between class and crime and condign punishment by leveraging the notion of ethos (a common mindset peculiar to each class), and proving thereby that crime is systematically determined by this very mindset, which is the spiritual complement to class formation, rather than by the conventionally classless categories of rational self-interest or idiosyncratic proneness to violence.     

A Criticism of M. Siderits and J. L. Garfield’s ‘Semantic Interpretation’ of Nāgārjuna’s Theory of Two Truths

This paper proposes a critical analysis of that interpretation of the Nāgārjunian doctrine of the two truths as summarized—by both Mark Siderits and Jay L. Garfield—in the formula: “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”. This ‘semantic reading’ of Nāgārjuna’s theory, despite its importance as a criticism of the ‘metaphysical interpretations’, would in itself be defective and improbable. Indeed, firstly, semantic interpretation presents a formal defect: it fails to clearly and explicitly express that which it contains logically; the previously mentioned formula must necessarily be completed by: “the conventional truth is that nothing is conventional truth”. Secondly, after having recognized what Siderits’ and Garfield’s analyses contain implicitly, other logical and philological defects in their position emerge: the existence of the ‘conventional’ would appear—despite the efforts of semantic interpreters to demonstrate quite the contrary—definitively inconceivable without the presupposition of something ‘real’; moreover, the number of verses in Nāgārjuna that are in opposition to the semantic interpretation (even if we grant semantic interpreters that these verses do not justify a metaphysical reconstruction of Nagarjuna’s doctrine) would seem too great and significant to be ignored.