NEIGHBORHOOD STRUCTURE AND RACE‐SPECIFIC RATES OF INTIMATE ASSAULT*

Addressing the methodological shortcomings of extant research on the racial invariance thesis, race‐specific rates of intimate assault are examined across census tracts in Hamilton County, Ohio. We extend Miles‐Doan's (1998) approach to examining neighborhood structural effects on intimate assault rates in order to test the racial invariance thesis. Findings reveal comparable effects of neighborhood disadvantage and population age structure on assault rates for African‐American males and white males, yet a stronger effect of “disinvestment” (in marriage and in neighborhoods) on rates for African‐Americans. These results conflict with previous city‐level analyses demonstrating stronger structural effects on other violent crime rates for whites.     

自愿、强制与控制引导--戒毒模式研究

控制引导模式是在现有的自愿模式与强制模式的基础上采用控制与引导这两种手段,将社区与强制戒毒区两方面的力量结合起来,相互配合,互助互动,创造一种协商参与的戒毒机制.应该在吸毒者从社区进入强制戒毒区、从强制戒毒区回归社区以及在社区实行自愿戒毒的过程中,一方面完善社区预警体系,加强社区控制功能,另一方面加强宣传引导,创造和谐的社区氛围,实现控制与引导兼顾,标本兼治的效果.     

CRIMINOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE: PERIOD AND COHORT EFFECTS IN SCHOLARSHIP

Period and cohort effects are explored in regard to criminological knowledge. Hypotheses are inspired by biographies and by research in the sociology of knowledge, based on Karl Mannheim's essay on generations, Maurice Halbwachs' partly conflicting arguments about the presentist orientation of collective memory and newer ideas about the institutional context of knowledge production. The data set results from content analysis of 1, 390 articles in leading American sociology, criminology, and law and society journals from 1951 to 1993, supplemented by information on the authors' "academic age." Results show that cohort membership has some effect and periods have considerable impact on topic, type of theory examined and data used by criminologists. These effects are interpreted against the background of post-World War II history: dominant ideological currents of different eras, historic events, changing academic institutions, and the ebb and flow of influential schools. Multivariate analyses indicate that period effects are largely but not fully explained by shifts in research funding and by the emergence of specialized fields with their own institutions.     

CLOSE‐UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIME

Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso‐area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land‐use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.     

DELINQUENCY AND GENDER MODERATION IN THE MOVING TO OPPORTUNITY INTERVENTION: THE ROLE OF EXTENDED NEIGHBORHOODS

A long history of research has indicated that neighborhood poverty increases youth's risk taking and delinquency. This literature predominantly has treated neighborhoods as independent of their surroundings despite rapidly growing ecological evidence on the geographic clustering of crime that suggests otherwise. This study proposes that to understand neighborhood effects, investigating youth's wider surroundings holds theoretical and empirical value. By revisiting longitudinal data on more than 1500 low‐income youth who participated in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized intervention, this article explores the importance of extended neighborhoods (neighborhoods and surroundings) and different concentrated disadvantage configurations in shaping gender differences in risk taking and delinquency. The results from two‐stage, least‐squares analyses suggest that the extended neighborhoods matter and they matter differently by gender. Among girls, extended neighborhoods without concentrated disadvantage were associated with lower risk‐taking prevalence than extended neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage. In contrast, among boys, localized concentration of disadvantage was associated with the highest prevalence of risk taking and delinquency. Interactions between the immediate and surrounding neighborhoods were similarly associated with differential opportunity and social disorganization mediators. Among the more critical potential mediators of the link between localized disadvantage and boys’ risk taking were delinquent network ties, strain, and perceived absence of legitimate opportunities for success.     

Timing as a source of regulatory influence: A technical elite network analysis of global finance

Rules governing the international financial system are the subject of some of the most intense distributional battles waged in any area of global governance. Who wins and who loses such battles – and why? I develop a novel analytical framework – technical elite network (TEN) theory – which explains the widely varying levels of influence that stakeholders enjoy over global financial standards. TEN theory draws attention to how issue‐specific characteristics of international finance – in particular, its highly technical and complex nature – shape the distributional consequences of global regulatory processes. It posits that such characteristics influence distributional outcomes by (i) affecting who claims first‐mover position and, thus, sets the agenda in global financial rulemaking, and (ii) ensuring that proposals made by first movers are increasingly difficult to alter at later stages of rulemaking. I provide empirical evidence for the theory by examining two regulatory regimes that are central to the efficiency and stability of the global financial system: the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Accounting Standards Board.     

Cross-national comparison of homicide: Age/sex-adjusted rates using the 1980 U.S. homicide experience as a standard

Cross-sectional studies of crime have typically relied on crude crime rates when making comparisons between countries. Crude rates control for population size but implicitly assume that all members of the population are equally at risk. Empirical studies have shown that, cross-nationally, risk varies by age and sex. Standardization of crime rates removes the confounding effects of variable age and sex population distributions. Since age/sex-specific crime rates are generally unavailable for many countries, the method of indirect standardization is the most desirable technique. Age/sex-adjusted homicide rates for 76 countries are presented, and two comparative measures are suggested. It is shown that while the United States has a higher homicide rate than all but 15 countries; in most cases, the magnitude of the difference, not controlling for age/sex differences, is overestimated. Crude rates underestimate differences between the United States and countries with higher rates of homicide.     

THE INTERACTION OF ANTISOCIAL PROPENSITY AND LIFE‐COURSE VARYING PREDICTORS OF DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR: DIFFERENCES BY METHOD OF ESTIMATION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY*

Recent criminological research has explored the extent to which stable propensity and life‐course perspectives may be integrated to provide a more comprehensive explanation of variation in individual criminal offending. One line of these integrative efforts focuses on the ways that stable individual characteristics may interact with, or modify, the effects of life‐course varying social factors. Given their consistency with the long‐standing view that person–environment interactions contribute to variation in human social behavior, these theoretical integration attempts have great intuitive appeal. However, a review of past criminological research suggests that conceptual and empirical complexities have, so far, somewhat dampened the development of a coherent theoretical understanding of the nature of interaction effects between stable individual antisocial propensity and time‐varying social variables. In this study, we outline and empirically assess several of the sometimes conflicting hypotheses regarding the ways that antisocial propensity moderates the influence of time‐varying social factors on delinquent offending. Unlike some prior studies, however, we explicitly measure the interactive effects of stable antisocial propensity and time‐varying measures of selected social variables on changes in delinquent offending. In addition, drawing on recent research that suggests that the relative ubiquity of interaction effects in past studies may be partly from the poorly suited application of linear statistical models to delinquency data, we alternatively test our interaction hypotheses using least‐squares and tobit estimation frameworks. Our findings suggest that method of estimation matters, with interaction effects appearing readily in the former but not in the latter. The implications of these findings for future conceptual and empirical work on stable propensity/time‐varying social variable interaction effects are discussed.     

THE CONTEXT OF MARRIAGE AND CRIME: GENDER,THE PROPENSITY TO MARRY,AND OFFENDING IN EARLY ADULTHOOD*

Marriage is central to theoretical debates over stability and change in criminal offending over the life course. Yet, unlike other social ties such as employment, marriage is distinct in that it cannot be randomly assigned in survey research to more definitively assess causal effects of marriage on offending. As a result, key questions remain as to whether different individual propensities toward marriage shape its salience as a deterrent institution. Building on these issues, the current research has three objectives. First, we use a propensity score matching approach to estimate causal effects of marriage on crime in early adulthood. Second, we assess sex differences in the effects of marriage on offending. Although both marriage and offending are highly gendered phenomena, prior work typically focuses on males. Third, we examine whether one's propensity to marry conditions the deterrent capacity of marriage. Results show that marriage suppresses offending for males, even when accounting for their likelihood to marry. Furthermore, males who are least likely to marry seem to benefit most from this institution. The influence of marriage on crime is less robust for females, where marriage reduces crime only for those with moderate propensities to marry. We discuss these findings in the context of recent debates concerning gender, criminal offending, and the life course.     

Exploring Some Analytical Characteristics of Finite Mixture Models

Finite mixture models have become increasingly prevalent in criminology over the past two decades. Yet there is no consensus about the appropriate criterion for model selection with finite mixture specifications. In this paper, we use simulation evidence to examine model selection criteria. Our focus is on mixture models for event count data like those often encountered in criminology. We use two indices to measure model selection performance. First, we examine how often each criterion chooses the correct specification. Then, we investigate how closely the finite mixture models selected by these criteria approximate the true mixing distribution used to simulate the event count data. We consider three sets of simulations. In the first set, the underlying model is itself a three component Poisson-based finite mixture model. In the two other sets of simulations, the underlying distribution of the Poisson rate parameter follows a continuous distribution. The analysis shows that both AIC and BIC perform well under certain sets of circumstances likely to be encountered by criminologists.