GENERAL DETERRENCE THROUGH CIVILIAN GUN OWNERSHIP: AN EVALUATION OF THE QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE*

It has often been argued that civilian firearm ownership acts as a deterrent to crime. Much of the support for this claim is based on incidents that have called attention to the prevalence of privately owned guns. We examined several such incidents and failed to and persuasive evidence of a deterrent effect.     

An Enforcement Taxonomy of Regulatory Agencies

A variety of multivariate techniques were used to develop a taxonomy of regulatory agencies from the first comprehensive study of the disparate enforcement strategies employed by business regulatory agencies in one country. Seven types of agencies were identified: Conciliators, Benign Big Guns, Diagnostic Inspectorates, Detached Token Enforcers, Detached Modest Enforcers, Token Enforcers and Modest Enforcers. Agencies were distinguished primarily according to their orientation to enforcement versus persuasion, according to their commitment to detached (or arms length) command and control regulation versus cooperative fostering of self-regulation, and according to their attachment to universalistic rulebook regulation versus particularistic regulation. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to view regulatory agencies as lying on a single continuum from particularistic non-enforcers who engage in cooperative fostering of self-regulation to rulebook enforcers whose policy is detached command and control. This approximates the suggestions of Hawkins and Reiss for distinguishing regulatory agencies according to a "sanctioning/deterrence" versus "compliance" dimension. The predominant regulatory style in Australia, however, is distant from both poles, being a perfunctory regulatory approach which is neither distinctively diagnostic and educative nor litigiously "going by the book"; rather it amounts to "going through the motions". The typology also partially conforms to Black's categorisation of social control as penal, therapeutic, conciliatory and compensatory.     

THE DELINQUENCY OF CHILDREN BORN TO YOUNG MOTHERS: RESULTS FROM THE ROCHESTER YOUTH DEVELOPMENT STUDY*

This paper examines the relationship between a mother's age at first childbirth and the delinquent behavior of her children. Using data from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS), an ongoing longitudinal study of adolescent development, we found that children born to mothers who began childbearing at a young age were more prone to general delinquency, violence, and arrest than were children born to mothers who began childbearing when they were older. This “early first‐birth effect” was far larger in white and Hispanic families than in African‐American families. Mediating analyses found that the early first‐birth effect was most attributable to the unstable composition of families in which early childbearing occurs. That said, a substantial portion of the effect remains unmediated.     

A LATENT TRAIT APPROACH TO UNIFYING CRIMINAL CAREERS *

We propose a latent trait model that simultaneously accounts for both participation in crime and the frequency of crimes, phenomena that the criminal career model attributes to different causal processes. The criminal career model is predicated on a categorical distinction between active offenders and nonoffenders, but the latent trait model assumes a continuous distribution of propensity to offend. Our specific statistical model relates a relatively stable and general latent propensity to engage in crime to the frequency of criminal behavior. The latent trait model successfully fit both the proportion of offenders (participation) and frequency of offending for several samples and several measures of offending. The model fit both samples of whites and nonwhites and both males and females. This shows that separate causal processes are not necessary to account for group differences in frequency and in participation, which disproves the major evidence in favor of the criminal career model. Finally, the latent trait model yielded evidence that disparate sex differences in rates of participation for different categories of offenses are consistent with a single difference on a latent trait. This demonstrates the latent trait model's potential for parsimoniously unifying knowledge about criminal careers.     

THE TIMING OF COURT PROCESSING: TOWARDS LINKING THEORY AND METHOD*

The time required for a case to traverse the criminal justice system is of central importance to participants. Time translates into issues of efficiency and is likely to be closely related to the cost of a case. The role of time has, however, largely been ignored in studies of court processing, though it has a history in the sociology of law. This research uses event-history data from California to model the effects of offense, offender, and processing factors on the time it takes to move a case from entrance into the system at arrest to disposition by guilty plea or trial. A model that mirrors the dynamics of case processing is used to assess the dependencies of inertial forces on case and defendant characteristics This focus on the processing time to each of the potential outcomes allows for the linking of theories and methods of processing.     

Punishment and Justice in Adam Smith*

Abstract. The modern interpretation of Smith as a retributive theorist of punishment is challenged in favour of a view of his work as containing a curious amalgam of retributive and utilitarian elements. This unsynthesised theoretical compound accounts for many of the contradictory positions assumed by him, examples of which are given in the article. At the level of “punishment” (i.e., punishment considered without a political dimension), the retributivehtilitarian dichotomy is observed in his discussions of merit and demerit (which are utilitarian in their logic) and propriety and impropriety (which are retributive). At the level of state punishment, the same dichotomy is seen in his juxtaposition of considerations of individual justice and the political ends of punishment. A final section locates Smith's “double cleft stick” theoretically in his position on the one hand in the Hobbesian materialist tradition and on the other in his historical stance half-way between the individualism of the contractarians and the full blown utilitarianism of Bentham.     

A Commentary on Victimization Research and the Importance of Meaning Structures

This article examines the largely atheoretical tradition of victimization research and some of the unintended consequences of work in the area. In using a legalistic definition of crime, victimization research has failed to incorporate the public's definition of crime and victimization. While “street” and property crime have a decided impact upon people's lives, the consequences of real or alleged corporate and political crimes also affect people's concep-tions of their lives. The authors outline the beginnings of a theoretically apposite reinterpretation of perceptual victimlogy findings and related methodological concerns, and suggest ways that social scientists can become actively involved in the debunk-ing of the “crime wave” mentality perpetuated through the media by providing alternate interpretations of crime statistics.