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Agricultural crime victimization--including theft of farm crops, livestock, pesticides, and equipment--and efforts to address it remain largely ignored despite the potential of such crime to adversely affect the lives and businesses of farmers and increase the costs of food to consumers. The Agricultural Crime, Technology, Information, and Operations Network (ACTION) initiative, located in California's central valley, was recently developed to combat such crime. The authors present findings from a process and outcome evaluation of this program. The findings are limited by the design of the study but nonetheless suggest that efforts to increase guardianship measures among farmers (e.g., marking equipment and livestock and using surveillance equipment), to "harden targets" (e.g., locking tractors and storing chemicals in locked storage sheds), and to arrest and prosecute offenders may help reduce agricultural crime victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a semiparametric information-theoretic framework for modeling the determinants of rare events aggregated at intracity areal units while allowing for various forms of error correlation structures. The approach is applied to an examination of the effects of socioeconomic and demographic macrocharacteristics of communities on the amount of violence they experience. We investigate and find evidence of some instability in these processes across types of violence and level of areal aggregation. However, we also find evidence of a stable predictor—resource deprivation—for all the types of violence analyzed and at both levels of areal aggregation considered. In addition, we find evidence of a spillover effect of a community's resource deprivation on the level of violence its neighboring areas can expect. We discuss our findings in light of their substantive, methodological, and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A justification for lengthier stays in prison stems from the belief that spending more time in prison reduces recidivism. Extant studies, however, have provided limited evidence for that belief and, indeed, suggest the effect of time served may be minimal. Few studies have employed rigorous methodological approaches, examined time spans of more than one to two years, or investigated the potential for the relationship between recidivism and time served to be curvilinear. Drawing on prior scholarship, this paper identifies three sets of hypotheses about the functional form of the time served and recidivism relationship. Using generalized propensity score analysis to examine data on 90,423 inmates released from Florida prisons, we find three patterns: greater time served initially increases recidivism but then, after approximately one year, decreases it, and, after approximately two years, exerts no effect; estimation of the effects associated with durations of more than five years are uncertain. The results point to potential criminogenic and beneficial effects of time served and underscore the need to identify how varying durations of incarceration affect recidivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]