IS BEING “SPIRITUAL” ENOUGH WITHOUT BEING RELIGIOUS? A STUDY OF VIOLENT AND PROPERTY CRIMES AMONG EMERGING ADULTS

Although prior research has had a tendency to confirm a negative association between religiousness and crime, criminologists have been slow to incorporate new concepts and emergent issues from the scientific study of religion into their own research. The self‐identity phrase “spiritual but not religious” is one of them, which has been increasingly used by individuals who claim to be “spiritual” but disassociate themselves from organized religion. This study first examines differences in crime between “spiritual‐but‐not‐religious” individuals and their “religious‐and‐spiritual,” “religious‐but‐not‐spiritual,” and “neither‐religious‐nor‐spiritual” peers in emerging adulthood. Specifically, we hypothesize that the spiritual‐but‐not‐religious young adults are more prone to crime than their “religious” counterparts, while expecting them to be different from the “neither” group without specifying whether they are more or less crime prone. Second, the expected group differences in crime are hypothesized to be explained by the microcriminological theories of self‐control, social bonding, and general strain. Latent‐variable structural equation models were estimated separately for violent and property crimes using the third wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The overall results tend to provide a partial support for the hypotheses. Implications for criminology and future research are discussed.     

Gender and “Other People's Money”: An Analysis of White-Collar Offender Sentencing

Although the female share of white-collar crime arrests (e.g., fraud, forgery, and embezzlement) continues to increase, little is known about the nature of women's involvement in these offenses, or the extent to which the legal treatment of white-collar offenders differs by gender. Using national survey data on employee crime, the present research addresses these voids in the literature. Consistent with prior research, women's roles in fraud offending are restricted by their positions in the organizational hierarchy. In support of the focal concerns perspective, results show that the decision to incarcerate and length of sentence are primarily shaped by indicators of offender blameworthiness. Findings reported here contribute to the literature on gender and white-collar crime, and also extend the growing body of focal concerns research to a previously unexplored sentencing context.