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.     

Long Term Influences of Age–Education Transition on the Brazilian Labour Market

The objective of this study is to estimate the long term mean earnings of the male Brazilian population, taking into account the ageing process of the population and the increase in educational attainment. Using census data, household sample surveys, as well as population and education projections, estimates indicate that an ageing population and an increase in education will have a 2 percent impact on the annual growth of an average income in Brazil by 2050. The challenge for the future is to improve the proportion of the Brazilian population with completed college degrees.     

How do established voters react to new parties? The case of Italy, 1985–2008

The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties – indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset consisting of election studies conducted in Italy between 1985 and 2008. We find that a new party system causes confusion as to where parties stand in left-right terms, making it difficult for voters to make their choices on the basis of ideological cues. The confusion is greatest among older voters – those already set in their habits of voting, but only the very oldest cohorts (containing voters over 60 years old) are significantly debilitated.     

Locking up my generation: Cohort differences in prison spells over the life course

Crime rates have dropped substantially in the United States, but incarceration rates have remained high. The standard explanation for the lasting trend in incarceration is that the policy choices from the 1980s and 1990s were part of a secular increase in punitiveness that has kept rates of incarceration high. Our study highlights a heretofore overlooked perspective: that the crime–punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave. With individual-level longitudinal sentencing data from 1972 to 2016 in North Carolina, we show that cohort effects—the lingering impacts of having reached young adulthood at particular times in the history of crime and punishment—are at least as large (and likely much larger) than annual variation in incarceration rates attributable to period-specific events and proclivities. The birth cohorts that reach prime age of crime during the 1980s and 1990s crime–punishment wave have elevated rates of incarceration throughout their observed life course. The key mechanism for their elevated incarceration rates decades after the crime–punishment wave is the accumulation of extended criminal history under a sentencing structure that systematically escalates punishment for those with priors.     

Self-reported offending,maturational reform,and the Easterlin hypothesis

The maturational reform hypothesis and the Easterlin cohort size hypothesis are used to specify models in which age, period, and cohort effects on self-reported crime and delinquency are estimated. Curvilinear effects, logarithmic transformations, and the distinction between prevalence and frequency of offending are considered. The maturational reform hypothesis is supported for general delinquency but not for serious (Index) delinquency, for which there appears to be a steady decline in the behavior with age. The Easterlin hypothesis is supported for both general and Index delinquency. Theoretical, methodological, and substantive implications of the results are discussed.     

Female delinquents in a birth cohort: Tests of some aspects of control theory

In the light of the rather low, empirical interest in the etiology of female crime and delinquency, this study presents and discusses some findings on aspects of control theory. The data are taken from Project Metropolitan, a longitudinal study of a Stockholm birth cohort comprising 15,117 cases (males and females) studied during a 30-year period. Of the females 791 cases or 11% acquired records of delinquency, drug use, or crime up to age 26. The delinquents were divided according to assumed seriousness and compared to the nondelinquents on two dimensions of the social bond called Attachment to school and Commitment to education. The results show, first, that delinquency varies with the strength of the social bond and, second, that the ability to predict future delinquency with knowledge of these aspects of the bond is limited, as the variance proportions accounted for are low. However, when comparing the explained variances to some well-known studies, we find that the differences are not so extensive.This paper is published in its complete form by the Project Metropolitan Research Report series, Department of Sociology, University of Stockholm, 1989. The summary tables presented here are found in original form in the original version.     

Lifetime conviction risk—a synthetic cohort approach

How common are convictions? The stigma of a criminal record can have serious social and financial consequences for the individual. It is a fundamental question in relation to any policy how many people will be affected by it. For example, if it is desirable to make sentencing generally stricter, or restrict ex-offenders' employment opportunities, how many people will that apply to? Little is known about how many people acquire a criminal record over their life-course. In this paper, I apply life-table methods to a synthetic cohort to calculate the lifetime conviction risk. The findings show that a substantial proportion of the population will be convicted of a crime at some point. Not surprisingly, the figures for men are substantially higher than for women.     

Case-control studies: Design issues for criminological applications

The current understanding of the determinants of homicide derives primarily from studies in which data are aggregated for geopolitical units. Case-control studies and other analytic methods are needed to test causal hypotheses regarding the risk of homicide victimization or perpetration for individuals. Strengths and limitations of the case-control method are illustrated by comparing the design with cohort studies. Fundamental issues include the selection and comparability of cases and controls, effects of biases, interpretation of risk estimates, and problems of implementation. Increased use of this method should advance our understanding of homicide and other forms of intentional violence.Presented in part at the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego, California, November 16, 1985.     

Age-cohort analysis of arrest rates

Logistic regressions of age-period-cohort models for city arrest rates are estimated with data from seven U.S. cities for the years 1970–1980 to study the dependence of officially designated criminality in select offense categories on age. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to determine how dependent the findings are on details of model specification.