Parental Suicidality as a Risk Factor for Delinquency Among Hispanic Youth

Several studies have examined the factors associated with juvenile delinquency, but this literature remains limited largely because it has not moved beyond traditional factors generally and because of the lack of research conducted on minority—especially Hispanic—youth. This study seeks to overcome these two limitations by using data from a longitudinal study of 2,491 Hispanic (Puerto Rican) youth ages 5–13 (48.5% female) socialized in two different cultural contexts, Bronx, New York and San Juan, Puerto Rico, in an effort to examine the relationship between parental suicidality and offspring delinquency. Results indicate that while traditional risk/protective factors and parental mental health issues relate to delinquency in expected ways, youths whose parents attempted suicide engaged in more frequent and varied delinquency over time. Implications for theory and future research are addressed.     

Does Adolescent Bullying Distinguish Between Male Offending Trajectories in Late Middle Age?

The perpetration of bullying is a significant issue among researchers, policymakers, and the general public. Although researchers have examined the link between bullying and subsequent antisocial behavior, data and methodological limitations have hampered firm conclusions. This study uses longitudinal data from 411 males in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development from ages 8 to 56 in order to examine the relationship between adolescent bullying and distinct late middle adulthood trajectories of offending, in which different groups of males follow different offending pathways. Results show that self-reported bullying predicts only certain adult offending trajectories but that the effect becomes insignificant once controls are introduced for childhood risk factors, although this may be due to the small number of the most chronic offenders. Study implications and directions for future research are noted.     

Social Change, Values and Political Agency: The Case of the Third Way

The third way is based on both sociological claims about a changed world, and normative propositions about appropriate conduct within that world. Four types of claim concerning the relationship between social change and political values are identified within third way advocacy. In each case, the degree of political agency implied is assessed. This ranges from a position which minimises the room for political interventions in the face of social change, to one which gives primacy to the role of political values. A successful third way project, or alternative, needs not only to be grounded in contemporary social change, but also to show how to steer it.     

AUTISM IN CHILDREN AND PARENTS:

Family court professionals are increasingly involved with divorces between parents of autistic children where the parents themselves may also have either diagnosed or undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). Yet, there have been no published guidelines for the court professionals who are managing these cases (National Autistic Society, 1991; Singer, 2003 ). The goal of this article is to familiarize divorce professionals with the growing phenomenon of autism and to delineate specific recommendations for the management of these cases in the family law context.     

Does the Network Centrality of Government Actors Matter? Examining the Role of Government Organizations in Aquaculture Partnerships

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual participants in such efforts. Moreover, little work on collaborative governance examines how individual incentives and barriers to collective action are formed within the nested nature of these contexts. We contribute to the study of collaborative governance by formally investigating how the relative centrality of government actors in collaborative policy‐making venues affects individual relationship building and learning for participants therein. We find that government actor centrality is positively associated with relationship building and learning. However, in testing two different conceptualizations of “centrality,” we find that the definition of this construct clearly matters.     

Inked into Crime? An Examination of the Causal Relationship between Tattoos and Life-Course Offending among Males from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

Purpose

There have been a number of prior studies that have investigated the relationship between tattoos and crime with most documenting evidence of an association. Specifically, prior research often suggests that individuals with tattoos commit more crime, are disproportionately concentrated in offender and institutionalized populations, and often have personality disorders. Having said this, the bulk of the prior research on this topic has been correlational.

Methods

In the current study, we rely on data from a prospective longitudinal study of 411 British males from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development and employ propensity score matching to determine if the link between tattoos and crime may in fact be causal.

Results

Results suggest that having tattoos is better considered as a symptom of another set of developmental risk factors and personality traits that are both related to tattooing and being involved in crime rather than as a causal factor for predicting crime over the life-course.

Conclusions

Study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

Overkill? An Examination of Comparatively Excessive Death Sentences in North Carolina, 1990–2010

This study examines death/life capital sentences in one southern state, North Carolina, during the period 1990 to 2010 to determine the extent to which they are comparatively excessive/lenient. The study employs data derived from a variety of official sources on the population of capital trials in the state during this timeframe and follows the analytic techniques developed by David Baldus and his colleagues and by Paternoster and Kazyaka in their studies of comparative excessiveness in capital sentencing in California, Georgia, and South Carolina, respectively. The results show a substantial number of death sentences that meet the standard for excessiveness, but the data also show a nearly equal number of life sentences that may be deemed too lenient. The implications of these findings are discussed.