THE VICTIM–OFFENDER OVERLAP IN CONTEXT: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF NEIGHBORHOOD STREET CULTURE*

Although numerous studies have found a strong relationship between offending and victimization risk, the etiology of this relationship is not well understood. Largely absent from this research is an explicit focus on neighborhood processes. However, theoretical work found in the subculture of violence literature implies that neighborhood street culture may help to account for the etiology of this phenomenon. Specifically, we should expect the magnitude of the victim–offender overlap to vary closely with neighborhood‐based violent conduct norms. This research uses waves 1 and 2 of the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS) to test the empirical validity of these notions. Our results show that the victim–offender overlap is not generalizeable across neighborhood contexts; in fact, it is especially strong in neighborhoods where the street culture predominates, whereas it is significantly weaker in areas where this culture is less prominent. These results indicate that neighborhood‐level cultural processes help to explain the victim–offender overlap, and they may cause this phenomenon to be context specific.     

The New Institutionalism and EC Governance: The Promise and Limits of Institutional Analysis

The "new" institutionalisms" in rational choice and historical analysis are being applied with increasing sophistication and accuracy to the study of European Community governance. The basic premise of such institutional approaches is that EC institutions, once created, "take on a life of their own," acting as independent or intervening variables between the preferences and power of the member governments on the one hand, and the ultimate policy outputs of EC governance on the other. The challenge for institutionalist theory consists in constructing a precise analytical tool-box that will allow us to make specific predictions about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, EC institutions may exert such an independent causal influence. EC institutions matter, I suggest, insofar as they: lend stability to an existing institutional structure; shape any subsequent amendment of those institutions; allow individual member governments to be outvoted by qualified majority; cause member states to lose control of events through lock-ins; and subject member governments to the actions of supranational agents whose behavior they can control only imperfectly.     

THE STRUCTURAL COVARIATES OF URBAN HOMICIDE: REASSESSING THE IMPACT OF INCOME INEQUALITY AND POVERTY IN THE POST-REAGAN ERA*

Numerous studies have explored the relationship between rates of homicide and income inequality and poverty. However, a general consensus on the theoretical and empirical connections among these variables has yet to be reached. This article reports the findings of a city-level analysis of this relationship, using 1990 data for the 190 largest cities in the United States. In order to address several methodological and theoretical concerns in prior literature, three separate measures of inequality and three categories of disaggregated homicide rates are analyzed. The results suggest that both inequality and poverty have significant and independent positive effects on rates of homicide in U.S. cities following the largest increase in the economic gap between rich and poor in our nation's history.     

THE FEDERAL JUDICIAL SYSTEM

Since Chief Justice Taft's highly activist tenure, many people have looked to the Supreme Court for leadership in efforts to modernize federal judicial administration. This article reviews the role of the Chief Justice of the United States in federal judicial administration. as well as organizational and procedural improvements in court management at all three tiers of the federal court system, as seen by one trained in public administration Although improvement is apparent. other needed steps include less emphasis on the number of judgeships and more careful long-range planning and experimentation with new techniques