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The article I wrote with Matthew J. Bronick for this journal in 1984 assessing the quality of doctoral programs in deviance, criminology, and criminal justice is criticized by Lawrence F. Travis in the present issue. The Travis critique focuses on two primary concerns. First, he raises a series of objections to the use of citation-based measures of the caliber of faculty, contending that assessments of quality ought to be qualitative in nature. Second, he criticizes our use of sociology-based doctoral programs as a standard of comparison for evaluating independent doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice. Although Professor Travis makes some valid points regarding the limitations of all measures that social scientists have available to them currently, I remain convinced of the validity of my 1984 findings and am confident that citation-based measures remain a useful indicator of the quality of faculty research. I think that the comparison with sociology also remains valid; although criminology is developing rapidly as an independent field, the vast majority of active criminologists today were trained in sociology and retain ties to that discipline.

While information regarding the doctoral programs in any discipline is of obvious and considerable relevance both to those in the discipline and to those seeking access to the best possible sites for graduate training, our knowledge about the quality of doctoral programs continues to be based on little more than speculation and highly ambiguous measures of institutional or departmental prestige. This study attempts to fill this gap for those who have special interests in the related fields of deviance, criminology, and criminal justice by ranking the thirty-six most significant doctoral programs in the nation by means of data derived from the Social Science Citation Index. Perhaps the most striking of our findings—and certainly to us the most distressing finding—is that those departments ranked by our measures as being the highest quality are consistently those which exist within the broader structure of departments of sociology. Given our firm conviction that the discipline of criminology is far, far more than that aspect of it which is closely related to issues of substantive significance to the field of sociology, we can only speculate that those in leadership positions in the growing number of independent schools or departments of criminology or criminal justice are not meeting their obligations to the discipline whose vitality and prospects depend so heavily on the quality of their judgment.

Discriminant analysis of both observational and records data from two juvenile court systems is used to assess differences in the type and activities of the people involved in legal processing of status and nonstatus offenders. The analysis indicates that there are differences between the processing of the two categories of offenders; however, contrary to expectations, the most powerful discriminating variables (detention and petitioner) are not those related to the degree in which the justice system has implemented the formalities mandated by the Gault decision. It is concluded that statutory distinctions between legal categories of juveniles have virtually no relevance for the degree of formality with which these cases are processed by the courts.

Polar deep-sea cores provide material for a thermo-time scale. An Antarctic Ocean deep-sea core from the Ross Sea can be correlated with three others from the same area, dated by Urry and described by Hough (1950). All the cores showed several alternations of glacial marine sediment and of fine-grained sediment which is apparently non-glacial. Organic deposits, notably radiolarian tests, are associated with glacial marine horizons and are lacking in the non-glacial ones, thus providing a zoological criterion for correlation. This association of sediments suggests inhibition of solar energy during deposition of strata where organic remains are lacking. For the period of sedimentation represented by the core, a record of Pleistocene and recent thermal regimen is provided. Amelioration of climates over the past 6000 years is indicated in this record.