Crime,Disorder and Decay in Chicago's Latino Community

Abstract

This paper utilizes results of citywide surveys to examine trends in Chicago during the 1990s in the extent of crime, social disorder, and physical decay. These trends depict a tale of three cities, for trends in neighborhood problems differed dramatically for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. All fared differently, and no group was “average.” By the beginning of the new century, Whites saw some improvement in neighborhood conditions, and Blacks experienced major improvements, but conditions for Latinos actually worsened. Analysis indicates that a combination of language and geographical concentration were among the factors associated with worsening conditions. The paper concludes with the recommendation that the city, the police department, and the community itself redouble their efforts to address the problems facing Latinos in Chicago.     

Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Law and Legal Authorities: Evidence from the Caribbean

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the social sciences in recent years. The process‐based model of regulation, which links people's assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations. Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization, theory, and future research are discussed.     

Traffic Stop Encounters: Officer and Citizen Race and Perceptions of Police Propriety

The continued legacy of racism and discrimination contribute to racial and ethnic differences in attitudes about the police. This research investigates citizen reports of proper police behavior during traffic stops to understand how officer/citizen race and ethnic pairs influence reports of impropriety. Analysis of 6,301 citizen reports of traffic stop encounters with the police from a unique national survey reveals that net of other important explanatory variables, African-Americans are less likely than whites to report proper police behavior when they encounter officers of any race. In addition, citizen reports indicate that the white/black and black/white officer/citizen encounters are significantly less likely to result in a report of proper police behavior than the white/white officer/citizen pairing. The results show limited support for the importance of citizen race and officer/citizen pairs in determining perception of police behavior.     

Understanding Drivers of Crime in East Baltimore: Resident Perceptions of Why Crime Persists

Urban neighborhoods are frequently associated with high rates of crime, unemployment, poor educational systems, poor housing conditions, and health related problems. Theories of social disorganization, social isolation, and broken windows all explain how and why social problems develop and persist within urban settings. Drawing on these theories, this study examines how residents perceive local community problems in an East Baltimore neighborhood. Eight focus groups were conducted with participants who live and/or work in the area to identify common neighborhood issues. Problems commonly identified were: the presence of physical disorder, issues related to crime and law enforcement, lack of employment opportunities, and limited youth activities. Embedded under many of these themes was the recognition that the neighborhood lacks collective efficacy to fix community problems and maintain social control. Implications for improving neighborhood disadvantage will be discussed.     

Abetting a Crime: A New Approach

Law and Philosophy - In “Abetting a Crime,” Husak puzzles over what, exactly, abettors are held liable for. Having (correctly) dismissed the proposal that derivative liability can...     

The Effects of a School Policing Program on Crime,Discipline, and Disorder: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation

This study analyzes the impacts of school-based law enforcement officers on school crime, disciplinary actions, and disciplinary problems in 238 middle and high schools in West Virginia using a non-equivalent groups design and three years of data. Propensity score weights are utilized to reduce selection biases resulting from non-random group assignment in observational data. Binary and multinomial logistic treatment models are used when estimating treatment effects to examine whether the extent to which police officers are present in schools impacts problem outcomes. Findings indicated that while the presence of school police officers increased drug-related crimes and out-of-school suspensions for drug crimes regardless of whether they were present in schools for a single year or multiple years, there were deterrent effects observed for violent crimes and incidents of disorder when police officers were present in schools during all school years. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

     

Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence

Objectives

A survey of empirical research concerning the determinants of an individual’s perceptions of the risk of formal sanctions as a consequence of criminal behavior. The specific questions considered are: (1) How accurate is people’s knowledge about criminal sanctions? (2) How do people acquire and modify their subjective probabilities of punishment risk? (3) How do individuals act on their risk perceptions in specific criminal contexts?

Methods

Three broad classes of extant studies are reviewed. The first is the relationship between objective sanctions, sanction enforcement, and risk perceptions—research that includes calibration studies and correlational studies. The second is the relationship between punishment experiences (personal and vicarious) and change in risk perceptions, in particular, research that relies on formal models of Bayesian learning. The third is the responsiveness of would-be offenders to immediate environmental cues—a varied empirical tradition that encompasses vignette research, offender interviews, process tracing, and laboratory studies.

Results

First, research concerning the accuracy of risk perceptions suggests that the average citizen does a reasonable job of knowing what criminal penalties are statutorily allowed, but does a quite poor job of estimating the probability and magnitude of the penalties. On the other hand, studies which inquire about more common offenses (alcohol and marijuana use) from more crime-prone populations (young people, offenders) reveal that perceptions are consistently better calibrated to actual punishments. Second, research on perceptual updating indicates that personal experiences and, to a lesser degree, vicarious experiences with crime and punishment are salient determinants of changes in risk perceptions. Specifically, individuals who commit crime and successfully avoid arrest tend to lower their subjective probability of apprehension. Third, research on the situational context of crime decision making reveals that risk perceptions are highly malleable to proximal influences which include, but are not limited to, objective sanction risk. Situational risk perceptions appear to be particularly strongly influenced by substance use, peer presence, and arousal level.

Conclusions

The perceptual deterrence tradition is theoretically rich, and has been renewed in the last decade by creative empirical tests from a variety of social scientific disciplines. Many knowledge gaps and limitations remain, and ensuing research should assign high priority to such considerations as sampling strategies and the measurement of risk perceptions.     

Governing Cocaine Supply and Organized Crime from Latin America and the Caribbean: The Changing Security Logics in European Union External Policy

The logics of the European Union’s policy and practices against narcotic drugs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have undergone a substantial shift the past decade: from development to security. Based on an empirical mapping of the EU’s drug-related projects in LAC, this article argues that an ‘integrated and balanced’ approach to drugs policy is being replaced by a bifurcation between the broader domains of development policy and security policy. Questions are raised as to how the EU’s projects on development and security might counteract one another, and how the Union’s programme aimed at dismantling transnational organized crime along the cocaine trafficking routes to Europe might have unintended consequences. While keeping in mind the shifting tectonics of the international drug prohibition consensus, the article goes on to analyze the increasingly salient security rationale in EU external drugs policy against the backdrop of the EU’s emerging role as a global security actor. In doing so, it touches upon the intrinsic tensions between human rights and (supra) national security.     

社区矫正：二元化刑事政策背景下的社区治理新模式探索

随着中国公民社会的兴起和“小政府、大社会”的政府改革方向，政府职能和权力突破了只在行政机关内部上下转移的框架，管理重心、权力向社会、社区和民间组织转移。社区，作为公民社会生活中一个最基本的稳定的社会单元，社区治理正打破传统的政府一体化统管局面，在现代公共行政管理中发挥着重要作用，而社区矫正，作为与监禁矫正相对的行刑方式，我们认为，应该成为发展和完善社区治理的一个重要契机，并且与社区治理相融合。本文将结合社区治理理论和刑事政策学，以此为切入点探索社区治理的新模式。     

Community Safety Maps for Children in Japan: An Analysis from a Situational Crime Prevention Perspective

Recent years have witnessed several major crimes against children both inside, and in the vicinity of, schools in Japan. These criminal incidents have heightened parental and community concerns regarding the safety of children in school. From the perspective of situational crime prevention, this study attempts to examine the nature and characteristics of community safety maps designed for children. It assesses the potential benefits of these maps and analyzes the structural and cultural obstacles for their implementation. This paper calls for more research into further innovative crime prevention strategies that can be used in Japanese schools so as to prevent children from becoming victims of crimes.     

Comparing Discourse to Officer Perceptions: The Problems of War and Militarization in Wildlife Crime Enforcement

‘War’ has become a common model and metaphor for biodiversity conservation in Africa. By discussing the specific challenges of wildlife crime enforcement in Uganda, this article challenges the ‘war on wildlife crime’ discourse. It concludes that in the context of Uganda, the discourse is profoundly unhelpful because of a lack of alignment between the problems highlighted by Ugandan law enforcement officers interviewed and the solutions typically favoured in the ‘wars on crime’. Most wildlife crimes are subsistence-driven and interviewees’ requests are for basic equipment and conventional capacity building. Findings demonstrate that the language of war, militarization and securitization should be used with caution as it risks constructing an image of wildlife crime that is misleading—and one that prevents responses that are effective in the long term.     

Sometimes Ignorance is Bliss: Investigating Citizen Perceptions of the Certainty and Severity of Punishment

Deterrence lies at the heart of the criminal justice system and policy. There is a lack of information on citizen??s perceptions regarding a critical element of the deterrence process as it manifests through the communication of sanction threats. This study uses data from over 400 adults to examine their knowledge regarding the probability of detection and the average punishments for DUI, and also assesses the contribution of demographic and theoretical variables in predicting perceptions of detection probabilities and punishment estimates. Results show that persons over-estimate the likelihood of detection and provide higher estimates for average sentence lengths, but very few variables predict deterrence perceptions. An investigation of the resetting effect shows that persons tend to lower the estimated likelihood of punishment after experiencing a punishment. Deterrence may work better if researchers and policy officials understand what influences these perceptions and how they may be modified.     

社区矫正重犯预防的理论与实践——以发挥社区优势构建罪犯回归支持系统为视角

随着人类文明程度的不断提高，刑罚文明已经成为整个社会文明的一个重要组成部分和表现形式，非监禁刑以其人性化行刑的特征得到了世界上大多数发达国家的青睐，包括中国在内的一些发展中国家也已经开始尝试进行刑罚改革，探索适合自己国家的非监禁刑行刑模式。以社区矫正为主要方式的社会化刑罚执行形态已经成为一种不可逆转的世界行刑发展趋势。