NOT JUST “FOR THE THRILL OF IT”: AN INSTRUMENTALIST ELABORATION OF KATZ'S EXPLANATION OF SNEAKY THRILL PROPERTY CRIMES*

In his controversial challenge to criminologists, Jack Katz argues for a reexamination of situational factors that precipitate criminal acts, specifically those that concern crime's sensual dynamics. According to Katz, people's immediate social environment and experiences encourage offenders to construct crimes as sensually compelling. Although insightfil, I suggest that this thesis is limited, specifically as it applies to “sneaky thrill” property crime. Katz's emphasis on the enticements of theft, at the expense of other variables, negates a considerable body of research and leaves a theoretical hiatus that encourages explanations grounded in individual pathology. I suggest a revision of Katz 's approach that addresses these concerns. I test this reformulation with models of various stages of sneaky thrill theft. The results of this analysis affirm that the seduction of theft has an important instrumentalist component and is influenced by several background factors, namely, age, gender, and the strain associated with inadequate econ om ic opportunities.     

Debt Issued Through Others: Conduits,Joint Powers Authorities,and Borrowing Costs in California Local Governments

The issuance of debt is a complicated and time‐consuming task requiring governments to pay substantial fixed transaction costs. Conduit financings, where one entity issues debt on behalf of a government, including bond pools, where multiple governments issue debt together, are methods that offer the potential to reduce the burdens of participating governments, ideally lowering their costs. But conduit hosts have costs of their own to cover and may not be able to offer a cost advantage to their participants. In this paper we examine debt issued under the Marks Roos Act of 1985, a law created to facilitate pooling but actually used for conduit financing. We seek to determine how issuers fare using this mechanism rather than issuing by themselves. We examine issuance costs and borrowing costs (true interest cost) and find both to be significantly lower for those governments that issued by themselves.