Offending and Early Death in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

Criminal offending has many negative outcomes. Researchers have recently begun to consider the impact offending has on offenders' health, with a few studies focusing on differential mortality risk. Yet, prior research has been limited due to selective samples, restricted range of follow-up time period, limited set of explanatory variables, and lack of theoretical guidance. This paper examines the risk of early death among 411 South London males in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development followed into their late 50s. Attention is paid not only to differential risk of death between nonoffenders and offenders, but also to the risk within the population of offenders and through consideration of theoretical frameworks and associated predictor variables. Results show that high-rate chronic offenders evince the highest risk of death, an effect that continues even after controlling for childhood individual and environmental risk factors as well as participation in a range of analogous behaviors.     

The Muslim paranoia narrative in counter-radicalisation policy

With the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the issue of radicalisation has loomed large in Western policy debates. Recent summits on countering violent extremism have sought to highlight the importance of undermining extremist narratives, mobilising moderate Muslims who oppose ISIS and working to address drivers of radicalisation. This article explores the ideological underpinnings of this approach. It focuses on what I call the “Muslim paranoia narrative”, a recurring feature of Western radicalisation discourse that helpfully captures its ideological commitments and their contemporary significance. Analysing its manifestation in American political culture, I argue that the Muslim paranoia narrative indicates a powerful process of ideological reproduction that works against approaches to counter-radicalisation centred on engagement and collaboration with Muslim communities.     

A Criminal Career Study of the Continuity and Discontinuity of Sex Offending during the Adolescence-Adulthood Transition: A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Incarcerated Youth

Longitudinal research has seriously challenged assumptions that juvenile sex offenders (JSO) are characterized by high level of dangerousness, mental health problems, and crime specialization in sex offenses. The current study examines the longitudinal pattern of offending among a sample of JSO and a sample of juvenile nonsex offenders. The research design includes longitudinal data over a nine-year period allowing the examination of offending patterns and the crime mix from age 12 to age 23. The findings highlight that, while JSO are prone to persist offending in adulthood, there is limited continuity of sex offending. Further, the findings stress the importance of taking into account nonsexual juvenile delinquency, more specifically, youth violence, to make a better assessment of early adult offending outcomes of JSO.     

Putting a price on drugs: An economic sociological study of price formation in illegal drug markets

Prices in illegal drug markets are difficult to predict. Based on qualitative interviews with 68 incarcerated drug dealers in Norway, we explore dealers’ perspectives on fair prices and the processes that influence their pricing decisions. Synthesized through economic sociology, we draw on perspectives from traditions as different as behavioral economics and cultural analysis to demonstrate how participants in illicit drug distribution base their pricing decisions on institutional context, social networks, and drug market cultures. We find that dealers take institutional constraints into consideration and search for niches with high earnings and low risks. The use of transactions embedded in social networks promotes a trusting form of governance, which enables strategic network management and expedient distribution but also uncompetitive pricing. Finally, dealers’ pricing decisions are embedded in three different cultures narratives: business, friendship, and street cultural stories, with widely varying implications for prices. Our findings demonstrate how an economic sociology of illicit drug distribution can extend insights from behavioral economics and cultural studies into a coherent criminology of illegal drug markets.     

Marriage,Cohabitation, and Crime: Differentiating Associations by Partnership Stage

A wealth of scholarship generally finds that marriage protects against crime, but there is less consistent evidence for cohabitation. In this article, we contribute to scholarship on marriage and put forward new evidence about cohabitation by examining marital and cohabiting partnerships as transitions with distinct stages of entry, stability, and dissolution. We use within-person change models with contemporary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to analyze these stages for the full sample and separately for men and women. The findings show differential protective associations of marriage and cohabitation depending on the stage of the partnership. Both recently formed cohabiting partnerships and stable cohabiting partnerships are associated with reductions in the level of offending, although to a lesser degree than marital relationships. Cohabiting partnerships that are stable, in that they have lasted at least a year, are associated with larger decreases in offending, particularly among women.     

死刑存废的逻辑辩论(可行性问题)

从死刑的必要性考问中得出"应立即进行死刑废止实践"的结论,但是每一种社会实践都离不开一定的具体条件,因此分析死刑废止的现实条件,对废止实践进行可行性研究是死刑存废逻辑辩论的最后环节。从民意、法制统一、暴力犯罪等方面着手分析这一可行性。     

EXAMINING THE GENETIC UNDERPINNINGS TO MOFFITT'S DEVELOPMENTAL TAXONOMY: A BEHAVIORAL GENETIC ANALYSIS*

In recent years, criminological research has observed an increase in studies examining different offending trajectories. Much of this research has been guided by Moffitt's (1993) developmental taxonomy of life‐course persistent offenders, adolescence‐limited offenders, and abstainers. Moffitt (1993) argued that the etiologies of these different pathways could be traced to several biosocial factors, including perhaps genetic factors. To date, research has failed to address this possibility directly. The current study addressed this gap in the literature by examining the extent to which genetic factors explain variance in different offending patterns. Analysis of sibling pairs (N = 2,284; ages spanned between 11 and 27 years) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) revealed that genetic factors contributed significantly to being classified in each of the different offending patterns. Specifically, genetic factors explained between 56 and 70 percent of the variance in being classified as a life‐course persistent offender across different coding strategies, 35 percent of the variance in being classified as an adolescence‐limited offender, and 56 percent of the variance in being classified as an abstainer. We discuss the importance of integrating genetics into future studies examining offending trajectories.