DIFFERENTIAL RATES OF RURAL-URBAN DELINQUENCY: A Social Control Approach

Official statistics and numerous sociological studies indicate that rural areas generate lower rates of delinquency than do urban areas. This study attempts to explain these differential rates by drawing on the social control theory of Hirschi. Questionnaires were administered to a rural and an urban juvenile detention center population to investigate both extent of delin-quency involvement and degree of commitment to five institutional orders: family, church, school, peers, and formal authority. As hypothesized, the rural sample reported significantly less delinquent activity than the urban sample. Control theory also received support from the data. A strong inverse relationship was found between commitment and delinquency. When intro-duced as a control variable, commitment specified the original relationship between locality and delinquency. The specified relationships were strongest for rural youth with high commitment and for urban youth with low commitment.     

The Politics of Immigration and Public Health

The Conservative party's recent proposal to introduce compulsory medical examinations for immigrants should it win the upcoming election marks a departure in the politics of immigration and public health. For many years, the public health impact of immigration was kept out of party competition and successive governments pursued a voluntaristic approach to health checks. In this article, I outline the political history of immigration and public health, and consider the implications of attempts to raise the subject onto the public agenda. I argue that recent developments militate against a calm and balanced approach to the genuine public health concerns associated with immigration, which threatens not only to stigmatise immigrants and stoke anti-immigrant popular opinion, but also prevent the development of effective policies. In particular, the introduction of compulsory examinations may create perverse incentives for migrants to circumvent legal channels and thereby actually increase public health risks.     

TRENDS IN THE GENDER GAP IN VIOLENT OFFENDING: NEW EVIDENCE FROM THE NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY*

Recent research has compared male and female trends in violent offending in Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data with similar trends derived from victims' reports in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and has concluded that the two data sources produce contrary findings. In this article, we reassess this issue and draw different conclusions. Using pooled National Crime Survey (NCS) and NCVS data for 1973 to 2005, we find that the female‐to‐male offending rate ratios for aggravated assault, robbery, and simple assault have increased over time and that the narrowing of the gender gaps is very similar to patterns in UCR arrest data. In addition, we find that these patterns are in part caused by larger decreases in male than female offending after the mid‐1990s and not by recent increases in violent offending rates among females. We conclude that changes in the gender gaps in aggravated assault, robbery, and simple assault are real and not artifacts; therefore, these changes deserve serious attention in future research. We conclude with a discussion of several hypotheses that might account for a narrowing of the gender gap in nonlethal violent offending over time.