Is child saving dead? Attitudes toward juvenile rehabilitation in Illinois

In recent times, juvenile rehabilitation has been attacked both by liberals seeking to insert greater due process rights and protections into the juvenile justice system and by conservatives calling for more stringent handling of serious youthful offenders. The apparent pervasiveness of this attack raises the question, Is the philosophy of child saving dead? Data drawn from a survey conducted in Illinois suggest, however, that juvenile rehabilitation continues to receive support both from the public and from various groups associated with criminal justice practice and policy making. At the same time, there is also support for the notion that young criminals are responsible for their actions and are currently being treated too leniently by our courts. Finally, child saving is embraced most firmly by judges, lawyers, correctional administrators, and prison inmates and least strongly by legislators, prison guards, and the general public.     

Patterns of offending in urban and rural areas

Although the level of crime varies dramatically across the urban-rural dimension, little research has been directed at the issue of the patterns of offending across this dimension. Using National Crime Survey (NCS) victimization data, this paper examines to what extent the patterns of offending by particular age, race, and sex subgroups are similar in urban and rural areas. It was found that the patterns of age, race, and sex offending are essentially the same in both urban and rural areas. Particularly impressive is the consistency in the rankings (from high to low) of the propensity of offending in urban and rural areas when age, race, and sex were examined simultaneously. Also, these NCS data generally parallel Uniform Crime Reports arrest data with respect to the offender characteristics of age, race, and sex. This suggests that existing criminological theories can be applied to rural, as well as urban, crime patterns regarding the issue of offender characteristics.     

Middlemen of the Law: An Ethnographic Inquiry into the English Legal Profession

The accomplishments of empirical research are often presented in a context that fails to show the process by which the results came about. This article examines the problems, hitches, and struggles encountered in a research project carried out on the English bar. And emphasis is given to the difficulty of tackling hitherto unexplored occupations that have had a long history of resisting research.     

On the Robustness and Validity of Groups

In response to Nagin's comment on our paper, Methodological Sensitivities to Latent Class Analysis of Long-Term Criminal Trajectories, we reconsider the robustness and validity of group-based approaches to criminal trajectories and introduce additional issues for future research. We emphasize the limitations of typological approaches and the dangers of reifying the idea of distinct offender groupings for research and policy. We also clarify misunderstandings about the use of hierarchical linear models for studying trajectories of crime. Our basic conclusion is that methods in criminology need to be more tightly linked with theory.