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Self-report data is valuable to criminologists for its potential at revealing offending patterns free from biases affecting official data obtained by police. An issue of great interest is whether racial differences in crime rates evident in official data persist when analyzing self-report offending data. In their landmark study, Elliott and Ageton (1980) argued that early self-report crime studies failed to find evidence of race differences primarily due to measurement limitations. They argued previous studies focused on minor offenses, contained item overlap and did not precisely measure high frequency offending, all of which obscured differences by race. After addressing these limitations through the design of the National Youth Survey, Elliott and Ageton reported evidence more consistent with official crime data, though differences were somewhat contingent on offense type and scaling method employed. Lessons of the Elliott and Ageton study placed an important imprint on the study of race and self-reported offending. Yet, a core question persists: Are Elliott and Ageton’s conclusions regarding the race-crime relationship confirmed by nearly four decades of research? To address this question, the current study uses meta-analysis methods to synthesize research since 1980 that estimates the association between self-reported measures of racial identification and self-reported offending. Findings suggest that while there is evidence of a statistically significant association between some measures of race and self-reported crime, nearly all measured relationships are extremely weak, generally approaching zero.

To revitalize victimization theory this chapter carves out new territory centered on the contributions of cultural theories for understanding criminal victimization. We begin with a brief review of the contributions of victimization theory and research in criminology, followed by a critique of this body of work. Next we explore cultural theories of crime, explaining why these popular explanations of offending may be fruitful for theoretical advancements in victimization scholarship. Finally, we expand the small but important literature on the culture–victimization nexus by identifying new ways that cultural theory pushes victimization research into productive new lines of inquiry and theoretical debate.

From the early twentieth century onward, research has found little to no support for a positive association between immigration and crime (Hayford 1911). In fact, much available research finds the opposite; more immigration leads to less crime. While the scholarly community has largely debunked as myth the idea that more immigrants lead to more crime, there remain many questions about the nature of the relationship between immigration and crime. Three articles in this special issue take up these more nuanced questions. The research presented in this special issue contributes new findings and perspectives on immigration, crime, law, and justice. The analyses range from studies of the relationship between undocumented immigration and crime among youthful offenders to studies of newspaper coverage of immigration and crime in Europe. Moreover, the questions addressed are informed by a productive mixture of quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence from the present and the past. As we look to the future, we encourage scholars to build from the work presented herein and to seek diverse data to build a better understanding of the complex ways that immigration, crime, law, and justice are interconnected.

Are immigration and crime related? This review addresses this question in order to build a deeper understanding of the immigration-crime relationship. We synthesize the recent generation (1994 to 2014) of immigration-crime research focused on macrosocial (i.e., geospatial) units using a two-pronged approach that combines the qualitative method of narrative review with the quantitative strategy of systematic meta-analysis. After briefly reviewing contradictory theoretical arguments that scholars have invoked in efforts to explain the immigration-crime relationship, we present findings from our analysis, which (a) determined the average effect of immigration on crime rates across the body of literature and (b) assessed how variations in key aspects of research design have impacted results obtained in prior studies. Findings indicate that, overall, the immigration-crime association is negative—but very weak. At the same time, there is significant variation in findings across studies. Study design features, including measurement of the dependent variable, units of analysis, temporal design, and locational context, impact the immigration-crime association in varied ways. We conclude the review with a discussion of promising new directions and remaining challenges in research on the immigration-crime nexus.

Beginning with the moral statisticians, social science researchers have shown interest in explaining why outcomes like crime and disease varied together across aggregate social communities. Underlying this interest was a notion that deleterious social phenomena exhibit persistent and regularized variation across geospatial units because they are influenced by a common set of underlying causes. But because of specialization trends in the social sciences, our grasp of the degree to which crime and other undesirable social phenomena vary together across macro-social units, or our ability to explain that covariance, has not sufficiently progressed. This study sought to reinvigorate interest in documenting and explaining the overlap of crime and adverse health outcomes. It examined the extent of covariance between both criminal (homicide) and non-criminal (infant mortality and sexually transmitted diseases) deleterious social outcomes across 524 large U.S. counties. Drawing from social disorganization, immigrant revitalization, racial isolation, and social support perspectives, the study posited hypotheses arguing that lethal violence and two adverse health events are similarly impacted by theory-specified explanatory factors. Findings reveal support for each theoretical perspective and identify important “common causes” that are reasons why homicide, infant mortality and sexually transmitted diseases co-vary across aggregate social communities.

This chapter explores patterns of racial/ethnic disparity within two institutional venues, health and criminal justice. It shows that people of color, especially African Americans, bear a disproportionate burden of various negative health outcomes as well as outsized exposure to criminal justice system confinement. Theories that offer potential explanations for both the general association between health and incarceration and for the similarity of patterns of racial disparity in these phenomena are discussed. The chapter concludes with recommendations of ways to remedy the health and criminal justice inequities that have been a persistent and unwelcome fact of American society for many decades.

Decades of criminological research has established that victimization is strongly connected with offending—this pattern is among the most durable in the criminological literature. However, there are plausible reasons to believe that under some theoretically defined conditions, the association can vary across the life course. Using 10 waves from the Pathways to Desistance data, which follow more than 1,300 youth from early adolescence into adulthood, we model within-individual change in the victimization–offending association as well as evaluate possible theoretical reasons for this change. Our results show that the influence of victimization on offending weakens as people age, although the association remains positive across the life course. The core substantive predictors, however, could not account for this temporal weakening of the association. We discuss the implications of these results for further theoretical development on offending.

Immigration and gentrification are two sources of population change that occur in geographic communities. Immigration refers to the inflow of foreign-born residents, while gentrification involves middle- and upper-income residents moving into poor urban communities. Scholars have speculated that both types of population change may be related to crime rates. The nature of those relationships, however, is debated. Classic criminological perspectives, such as Social Disorganization Theory, suggest that these population changes are likely to result in increased crime rates. More recent perspectives proffer an opposing viewpoint: that immigration and gentrification may lower crime rates. Some research suggests that these opposing arguments may each draw empirical support but under differing social conditions or circumstances. Regarding the effects of immigration on crime, one theory is that immigration is most likely to be a crime-protective factor when it occurs in places where there is a well-established immigrant population base and institutional supports. And immigration may contribute to higher crime rates in places that lack the strong preexisting immigrant population and institutions. Study design variations also appear to impact the findings that researchers investigating the immigration-crime relationship have found, with longitudinal studies more consistently reporting the immigration works to reduce (rather than increase) crime. With respect to gentrification, scholars suggest that its effects on crime are likely to hinge on factors such as the racial composition of the place, the timing or stage at which the gentrification process is observed, or the degree to which gentrifying neighborhoods are surrounded by poor non-gentrifying neighborhoods or by other communities that have already progressed through the gentrification process.

Purpose Important facets of the association between violent crime victimization and criminal offending remain unsettled. Drawing on key aspects of General Strain Theory, this study examined whether violent crime victimization affects overall offending proclivity as well as the character—violent vs. nonviolent—of criminal behavior. Additionally, it tested a recent theory extension positing that larger effects of violent victimization will be found among individuals with a greater confluence of criminogenic risk factors. Methods Multi-level latent variable item-response models are used to examine data from a sample of nearly 3,000 tenth-grade students from thirty Kentucky counties. Results Quantitative analyses indicated that greater violent victimization was associated with both higher scores on a latent index of overall offending and with an elevated propensity for violent criminality in particular. Contrary to expectations, effects of violent victimization on overall offending and the propensity for violence were not higher for individuals with higher scores on a multidimensional risk index. Conclusion In support of General Strain Theory, violent victimization elevates the overall amount of criminal offending and increases odds that crimes involve violent rather than nonviolent behaviors. However, variations in the preceding effects across levels of criminogenic risk are not consistent with the theory.

This study draws upon two competing cultural perspectives—culture-as-values and culture-in-action—in order to examine the relationship between street codes and the propensity to violently victimize others. Specifically, it explores whether individual-level and school-level street codes, net of one another, are related to three types of violence: assault, robbery and sexual battery. In addition, it considers whether these effects vary according to three contextual characteristics: 1) the location of the offending—in-school versus out-of-school; 2) school-level economic disadvantage; and 3) school efficacy. Three-level ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using four waves of survey data from over 3,000 students nested within 103 schools. Results provide evidence that individual-level street codes are related to violent offending in a manner that is, largely speaking, not tied to context. However, there is some evidence that the effects of school-level street codes on offending differ between outside of school and in school settings and are conditioned by levels of school disadvantage and efficacy. Overall, some support is offered for both the culture-as-values and culture-in-action perspectives.

Objectives: Previous research has neglected to consider whether trends in immigration are related to changes in the nature of homicide. This is important because there is considerable variability in the temporal trends of homicide subtypes disaggregated by circumstance. In the current study, we address this issue by investigating whether within-city changes in immigration are related to temporal variations in rates of overall and circumstance-specific homicide for a sample of large US cities during the period between 1980 and 2010. Methods: Fixed-effects negative binomial and two-stage least squares (2SLS) instrumental variable regression models are used to analyze data from 156 large US cities observed during the 1980-2010 period. Results: Findings from the analyses suggest that temporal change in overall homicide and drug homicide rates are significantly related to changes in immigration. Specifically, increases in immigration are associated with declining rates for each of the preceding outcome measures. Moreover, for several of the homicide types, findings suggest that the effects of changes in immigration vary across places, with the largest negative associations appearing in cities that had relatively high initial (i.e., 1970) immigration levels. Conclusions: There is support for the thesis that changes in immigration in recent decades are related to changes in rates of lethal violence. However, it appears that the relationship is contingent and varied, not general. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Scholars often have used the group threat thesis to explain why punitiveness varies across places. This research regularly has found that punitiveness is harsher in places with a larger minority population. Yet researchers only have had a rudimentary grasp of why this is the case. Moreover, most prior research has focused only on the United States, giving us little knowledge of whether the group threat thesis is a viable explanation of cross-national differences in punitiveness. In the current study, we postulate that the relative size of the out-group population affects punitiveness indirectly, via its impact on individual intolerance toward ethnic out-groups. We test this thesis cross-nationally with data from individuals residing in 27 European countries. Our findings are consistent with the argument that greater racial/ethnic diversity at the country level affects individuals’ attitudes toward minority out-groups, which in turn increases their support for severely punishing criminal offenders.

Objectives Much victimization research focuses on specific types of crime victims, which implies that the factors responsible for some victimization outcomes are distinct from others. Recent developments in victimization theory, however, take a more general approach, postulating that victimization regardless of type will share a similar basic etiology. This research examines how and whether the risk factors that are associated with violent victimization significantly differ from those that predict nonviolent victimization.

This study tests the extent to which an adherence to the subculture of violence uniquely predicts a tendency to favor violence or instead predicts a more generalized offending repertoire, of which violence is part. Specifically, we use a unique analytic technique that provides the opportunity to distinguish empirically between the “violent offender” and/or the “frequent offender.” The results suggest that holding values favorable toward violence consistently predicts general offending but do not identify youth who systematically favor violence over nonviolence. This discussion considers the impact of these findings for the continued utility of the subculture of violence perspective.

Research Summary Payday lenders have become the banker of choice for many residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods in recent years, often trapping the most vulnerable residents in a cycle of debt. The substantial costs that customers of these fringe bankers incur have long been documented and have been the subject of much policy debate as part of the controversy over financial services generally in recent years. Yet there is reason to believe there are broader community costs that all residents pay in those neighborhoods where payday lenders are concentrated, costs which have not yet been recognized or taken into consideration in policy debates. One such cost may be an increase in crime. Social disorganization theory provides reason to expect that where payday lending proliferates, neighborhood crime rates increase. In a study of Seattle, Washington, a city that has seen a typical increase in the number of payday lenders, we find that a concentration of payday lending leads to higher violent and property crime rates, controlling on a range of factors traditionally associated with neighborhood crime. The findings suggest important policy recommendations that could ameliorate these costs. Policy Implications Several steps could be taken by state and federal financial regulatory officials (including legislators and regulators), private industry and nonprofit financial service providers, and law enforcement agencies to help eliminate the predatory practices ofpayday lenders, along with the subsequent community costs, and to provide access to small consumer loans on an equitable basis. Among the steps that could be initiated immediately are the following: 1. Congress could cap the interest rate thatpayday lenders are allowed to charge at 36% as several states have done and Congress did for loans to members of the military and their families; 2. Credit unions could, profitably, offer small loan programs that enable their members to access credit on reasonable terms and to save and accumulate wealth as some community development credit unions are currently doing; 3. Federal banking officials could provide Community Reinvestment Act credit to depository agencies that provide small consumer loans on equitable terms in order to encourage larger lenders to offer such services; 4. Stateandlocalgovernmentscouldenactzoninglawslimitingthenumberanddensity ofpayday lenders as several have already done. 5. Financial service regulators could establish suitability standards requiring lenders to offer only those loans that are in the financial interests of the borrowers and 6. Law enforcement officials could provide additional service in neighborhoods where payday lending outlets are concentrated. There may well be additional community costs that have not been recognized To further understand the range of costs associated with payday lending, we propose the following research agenda. 1. Property values may be adversely affected as crime rates increase and those costs should be estimated; 2. Owners ofpayday lending outlets often reside outside of the neighborhoods in which the businesses are located, resulting in a drain of capital from those areas that should be quantified; 3. The costs in other communities beyond Seattle should be determined; 4. To complement this snapshot of Seattle, longitudinal research should be conducted Access to a wide range of financial services on an equitable basis has become the subject of much policy debate and social science research in recent years. Payday lenders constitute part of a network of fringe bankers that have been concentrated in low-income, minority communities but have begun to spread throughout metropolitan areas. Costs to borrowers have been documented with some precision. But broader community costs have not been subject to scrutiny. That payday lending is associated with crime should, in fact, come as no surprise. How we choose to respond to that connection remains to be determined.

A rapidly growing body of criminological research focuses on longitudinal trajectories of offending, with the aim of exploring stability and change in antisocial behavior. A particularly intriguing debate within this area involves the issue of whether there are multiple classes of offenders defined by distinct longitudinal patterns of offending. Parallel research on criminal victimization, however, is lacking, with few studies exploring potential variation in individual trajectories of victimization. The current analysis uses data from a panel of nearly 4,000 adolescents observed across a 4-year period to address this question. The authors examined whether there are distinct classes of victimization trajectories across this time period. The analysis revealed four groups. Descriptive analyses for key correlates of victimization were then conducted to explore their potential correspondence with those of the observed victimization classes. The findings have implications for theory and empirical research regarding between-individual differences and intraindividual change in victimization.

This study revisits a familiar question regarding the relationship between victimization and offending. Using longitudinal data on middle- and high-school students, the study examines competing arguments regarding the relationship between victimization and offending embedded within the “dynamic causal” and “population heterogeneity” perspectives. The analysis begins with models that estimate the longitudinal relationship between victimization and offending without accounting for the influence of time-stable individual heterogeneity. Next, the victimization-offending relationship is reconsidered after the effects of time-stable sources of heterogeneity, and time-varying covariates are controlled. While the initial results without controls for population heterogeneity are in line with much prior research and indicate a positive link between victimization and offending, results from models that control for time-stable individual differences suggest something new: a negative, reciprocal relationship between victimization and offending. These latter results are most consistent with the notion that the oft-reported victimization-offending link is driven by a combination of dynamic causal and population heterogeneity factors. Implications of these findings for theory and future research focusing on the victimization-offending nexus are discussed.

Extant research testing the Southern culture of violence theory has not fully investigated the logical implications of the theoretical mechanisms asserted to be at work. This analysis builds on prior research by examining the effects of a widely used measure of Southern cultural influence on homicide-type differentiation across cities and over time. Specifically, we examine whether the measure of Southern cultural influence is more likely to generate argument or conflict homicides than other types and whether the Southern influence has been diminishing over time.The results of multilevel latent variable models of homicide-type differentiation for 1980, 1990, and 2000 suggest that the Southern cultural influence does contribute to differentiation toward more argument homicides relative to other types. Relative to felony homicides, the data indicate this pattern has been easing off over time, but relative to drug and gang homicides, it has not.

Crime scholars have long conceptualized culture as a set of values that violence is used to defend or reinforce (i.e., honor). This analysis moves beyond this framework by conceptualizing culture as a toolkit providing strategies of action that individuals use to negotiate social situations. Qualitative data obtained from participant responses to vignettes describing potential conflict situations are analyzed to explore the merit of the cultural toolkit framework as it pertains to the “southern culture of violence” thesis. Contrary to the traditional culture as values model, these data indicate that interpersonal violence is a situationally viable response for diverse groups of people, including males and females, Blacks and Whites, the young and the older. The interplay between culture and social structure is also apparent. Although culture provides individuals with a toolkit, structural factors provide situations in which individuals must decide which cultural tools are most appropriately used. Violence is most viable when individuals feel that the police cannot be relied on and when they perceive that there is an imminent or potentially recurring threat to their family or themselves. Rarely is violent action justified to achieve overarching values, although values are clearly part of the toolkit that informs social action. Participants also frequently report that some segments of their community would consider violence to be an appropriate response even when they personally disagree with that assessment. This highlights the role of agency, where individual lines of action may be constructed independently from perceived community expectations, another major point of departure from the values model.

Recent scholarship traces the roots of southern violence to the Scots-Irish, who brought a relatively violent “cracker culture” with them to the United States in the eighteenth century. The tolerance for violence inherent in cracker culture was believed to be transmitted throughout the south to other whites and was maintained, in part, through evangelical Christian doctrine. Moreover, Thomas Sowell (2005) recently argued that some southern blacks were also influenced by “cracker culture,” leading to the emergence of a “black redneck” phenomenon influencing homicide among blacks. Using county-level data circa 2000, this study empirically evaluates the merit of the cracker culture/black redneck thesis. Negative binomial regression analyses for a full sample of counties suggest that a measure of southern cracker/black redneck culture is an important factor affecting contemporary rates of argument homicide among both whites and blacks. When counties are divided into south and non-south sub-samples, the result...

Against the backdrop of the precipitous decline in urban homicide clearance over the past several decades, this study examines factors that may be linked to within-city, over-time variation in homicide clearance rates from 1980 to 2000. Conceptual arguments focusing on case-level characteristics of homicides as well as the broader macrosocial context are delineated and empirically tested. Results from a fixed-effects regression analysis reveal that changes in clearance rates are linked to changes in the situational characteristics of murder incidents such as the percentage of cases involving strangers, firearms, other felonies, and arguments. In addition, within-city changes in immigration are found to be associated with lower clearance rates, whereas drug market arrests are associated with higher clearance rates. Contrary to politically popular assertions, clearance rates do not appear to be a function of changes in police personnel or workload.

This study extends the macro-level criminological research tradition by examining the links between socioeconomic disadvantage, poverty concentration, and homicide in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan U.S. counties. Most research in this tradition has tested structural theories using urban areas as the unit of analysis. This “urban bias” has resulted in a limited understanding of the social forces driving violence in nonmetropolitan areas. To partially address this problem, we link the literature on the spatial and social organization of nonmetropolitan communities with the social isolation perspective from the urban poverty literature. We hypothesize that the spatial concentration of poverty drives up rates of homicide in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas regardless of levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. Negative binomial regression for 1,746 nonmetropolitan and 778 metropolitan counties suggest that both socioeconomic disadvantage and poverty concentration elevate homicide in metropolitan areas. However, in nonmetropolitan counties only socioeconomic disadvantage has a significant impact. We conclude by discussing the implications of these differential findings for the social isolation perspective.

A popular perception is that immigration causes higher crime rates. Yet, historical and contemporary research finds that at the individual level, immigrants are not more inclined to commit crime than the native born. Knowledge of the macro-level relationship between immigration and crime, however, is characterized by important gaps. Most notably, despite the fact that immigration is a macro-level social process that unfolds over time, longitudinal macro-level research on the immigration-crime nexus is virtually nonexistent. Moreover, while several theoretical perspectives posit sound reasons why over-time changes in immigration could result in higher or lower crime rates, we currently know little about the veracity of these arguments. To address these issues, this study investigates the longitudinal relationship between immigration and violent crime across U.S. cities and provides the first empirical assessment of theoretical perspectives that offer explanations of that relationship. Findings support the argument that immigration lowers violent crime rates by bolstering intact (two-parent) family structures.

Previous research has cited both racial and class segregation as important correlates of black homicide rates. We extend this line of inquiry by considering an interaction effect of racial and class integration on city-level variation in black homicide rates. Specifically, we contrast the effects contact between disadvantaged blacks and three distinct groups—more affluent blacks, disadvantaged non-blacks, and more affluent non-blacks—has on black homicide rates. Analyses of black homicide victimization and socioeconomic data for 159 central cities in the year 2000 indicate that higher levels of residential exposure between disadvantaged blacks and more affluent blacks does little to reduce rates of violence among blacks. Likewise, greater contact between disadvantaged blacks and disadvantaged non-blacks also fails to suppress rates of black violence. In contrast, when disadvantaged blacks have higher levels of exposure to more affluent non-blacks, homicide rates among blacks are consistently lower. Implications of these findings for theory and research on urban disadvantage and serious violent crime are discussed.

Recent criminological research has explored the extent to which stable propensity and life-course perspectives may be integrated to provide a more comprehensive explanation of variation in individual criminal offending. One line of these integrative efforts focuses on the ways that stable individual characteristics may interact with, or modify, the effects of life-course varying social factors. Given their consistency with the long-standing view that person–environment interactions contribute to variation in human social behavior, these theoretical integration attempts have great intuitive appeal. However, a review of past criminological research suggests that conceptual and empirical complexities have, so far, somewhat dampened the development of a coherent theoretical understanding of the nature of interaction effects between stable individual antisocial propensity and time-varying social variables. In this study, we outline and empirically assess several of the sometimes conflicting hypotheses regarding the ways that antisocial propensity moderates the influence of time-varying social factors on delinquent offending. Unlike some prior studies, however, we explicitly measure the interactive effects of stable antisocial propensity and time-varying measures of selected social variables on changes in delinquent offending. In addition, drawing on recent research that suggests that the relative ubiquity of interaction effects in past studies may be partly from the poorly suited application of linear statistical models to delinquency data, we alternatively test our interaction hypotheses using least-squares and tobit estimation frameworks. Our findings suggest that method of estimation matters, with interaction effects appearing readily in the former but not in the latter. The implications of these findings for future conceptual and empirical work on stable propensity/time-varying social variable interaction effects are discussed.

Ample speculation and some evidence suggests that the decline in homicide rates since the early 1990s was partially attributable to declining levels of drug market activity. This analysis explores that explanation, along with an alternative: the strength of the drug market–lethal violence relationship has weakened over time. We outline several conceptual reasons to expect period‐specific differences in the drug market–homicide relationship. These include the aging of market participants, shifts in the normative and transactional climate of markets, and changes in structural factors affecting the magnitude of the relationship between drug market indicators and homicide rates (such as socioeconomic disadvantage). These arguments are evaluated for a sample of large US cities. The results generally show a pattern of attenuation in the drug market–homicide relationship and lead us to conclude that part of the homicide decline is likely due to a drop in the amount of drug market activity, some of it is attribut...

This study analyzes the extent to which there are similar patterns of violent offending and victimization in a panel of adolescents. Three explanatory perspectives are assessed: population heterogeneity, state dependence, and a mixed model. Data are drawn from a four-wave panel study of 3,976 adolescents. The main study measures comprise self-report indices for victimization and delinquency. Theoretical perspectives are specified through three distinct statistical approaches—latent growth curve, autoregressive simplex, and autoregressive latent trajectory (ALT) models. The analysis then incorporates the effects of relevant time-stable and time-varying influences. A mixed perspective, represented by the ALT model, best fits the data for both violent victimization and offending. Covariates drawn from the two perspectives have similar effects as well. The findings provide some support for a similar mechanisms hypothesis.

Recent work indicates that marriage contributes to desistance from crime. However, two prominent interpretations of this relationship have been offered. The first, rooted in informal control theory, suggests that the “marriage effect” is a direct result of social bonds that tend to accompany matrimony. The second contends that the effect is indirect and due to the impact of marriage on patterns of delinquent peer association. Using data from waves 5 and 6 of the National Youth Survey, this study re-analyzes these interpretations by examining the relationship between marital attachment, delinquent peer association and desistance from marijuana use. Although change in delinquent peer association is a powerful predictor of marijuana desistance, findings are also consistent with the control theory interpretation of the marriage effect. Implications and limitations of the current study are noted.

Sociologists have frequently cited the importance of the local institutional base for bolstering social organization and control, and ultimately reducing crime rates. Local noneconomic institutions may be particularly relevant to controlling urban Black crime rates, because in the face of limited access to the legitimate labor force, access to institutions such as churches and civic organizations helps to extend social networks, increase civic engagement, transmit mainstream norms, and provide a forum from which to address community problems. This analysis examines the links between measures of access to such noneconomic institutions and Black homicide rates for a sample of large urban areas circa 1990. The results indicate that after controlling for socioeconomic disadvantage, racial inequality and various other relevant measures, institutional access is negatively associated with Black homicide rates. However, this violence constraining impact appears to be most dramatic in urban areas where Blacks are most highly segregated from Whites. Implications of these results are discussed.

This study extends research in the subculture of violence tradition by examining the simultaneous effects of individual- and aggregate-level proviolence values on violent behavior. With data from a survey of 3,690 seventh-grade students nested within 65 Kentucky schools, we found that an initially observed between-school effect of violent values on in-school violent behavior is not a contextual effect. Rather, the between-school effect of violent values is primarily a reflection of the individual-level association between violent values and violent behavior. Moreover, we found that the effect of individual values remains evident after measures of impulsivity and exposure to violent peers are controlled. No evidence of cross-level interaction effects involving individual values and the school-level violent value context was found.

Many scholars have speculated that the dramatic rise of homicide rates in the late 1980s and their subsequent decline in the 1990s was driven by the expansion and contraction of illegal drug markets and/or law enforcement attempts to regulate these markets. However, the empirical evidence to this end is limited in important ways. This analysis extends prior research and provides evidence of the following: (1) Change in drug market indicators are positively associated with change in both Black and White homicide rates in large U.S. cities between 1984 and 1997. (2) This relationship is substantially stronger for Blacks than for Whites. (3) The socioeconomic moderators of the drug-market/violence link vary by race, with racial inequality being especially important for Blacks and resource deprivation being especially important for Whites. The main implications of the analysis are that the drug-market/ lethal violence connection is much more complex than previously thought, and that simplistic theoretical accounts of the drug market-violence nexus need additional development.

Recently, Zimring and Hawkins (1997) have suggested that drug markets are a “contingent cause” of the increase in homicide rates. That is, where structural conditions known to produce violence are already in place, the drug distribution-homicide link may be exacerbated. This analysis uses hierarchical linear modeling to investigate two key research questions: (1) Is within-city variation in illicit drug market activity positively associated with within-city variation in homicide rates during the 1984–1997 period? (2) Is the illicit drug market-homicide association contingent on preexisting violence conducive socioeconomic conditions? Using three measures of drug market activity, analyses provide affirmative evidence on both questions. Theoretical and research implications of these findings are discussed.

Recent research in urban sociology posits that the proliferation of female-headed families in American cities is a result of declining economic prospects due to profound changes in the structure of the urban economy. Meanwhile, macro-level theory and research in criminology suggest that an association exists between family structure and rates of lethal violence among juveniles. Given these two streams of sociological thought, there is good reason to expect that increases in juvenile homicide rates since 1970 may be due, in part, to changes in the structure of the economy and the family during the 1970 to 1990 period. However, the nexus between deindustrialization, female-headed families, and juvenile homicide has received little attention in extant research. The objective of the current study is to remedy this gap in the literature by bringing together ideas about deindustrialization and female headship in an attempt to explain city-level changes in Black and White juvenile homicide rates between 1970 and 1990. In particular, the research investigates the hypothesis that a decline in the manufacturing base of cities increased rates of female headship and thereby indirectly raised homicide rates. Race differences in the hypothesized structural relationships also are examined.

Structural theories in criminology generally assume that the effects of structural conditions on homicide are the same for all race-groups. However, previous homicide research testing this assumption contains methodological shortcomings and has produced inconsistent findings. Therefore, the validity of the “racial invariance assumption” remains highly questionable. Using 1990 data for 125 U.S. cities, this study addresses some of the limitations of previous research in an effort to provide a more definitive examination of race differences in the effects of important structural factors on homicide rates. Contrary to the expectations of the structural perspective, the results from this study reveal substantial and statistically significant race differences. Specifically, the associations between homicide and several measures of socio-economic deprivation (e.g., poverty, unemployment, income inequality, female-headed households, deprivation index) are found to be stronger among whites than blacks. A primary implication of these results is that the current versions of many structural theories need revision in order to account for observed race differences in the effects of structural factors and to explain fully the black-white gap in homicide rates.

This paper investigates residential differences in self-reported marijuana use among adolescents and young adults in a national sample. Data from the first five waves of the National Youth Survey are examined using a pooled time-series cross-sectional research design. Based on these data, significant residential differences in self-reported marijuana use are found. Specifically, rural youths report lower levels of marijuana use relative to their non-rural counterparts (i.e., suburban or urban residents). Hypotheses from determinist, compositional and subcultural explanations of rural-urban behavioral differences are discussed and tested empirically. While variables from each theoretical model explain some variance in marijuana use, only variables from subcultural theory can fully account for differences in the marijuana smoking behavior patterns of rural and non-rural residents.

One of the most exciting developments in the field of criminology is the emergence of studies that seek to explain variation in crime rates across aggregate social communities. These studies have an underlying theoretical theme: crime rates across communities are strongly correlated with structural inequality, or the stratification of communities on several key socioeconomic dimensions. This article reviews the current state of knowledge on the link between structural inequality and crime rates across communities. Specifically, it looks at theory and research that examines whether and how structural inequality affects crime rates in macro-level social communities such as cities, metropolitan areas, counties, and neighborhoods. It also discusses the notion that dimensions of structural inequality increase crime rates by increasing criminal motivation among those individuals who directly experience deprivation, and that such inequality contributes to crime by creating community-level differences in the extent of collective informal social control.

Purpose – Despite the commonly held stereotype that immigration and crime go hand in hand, there are but a few studies that examine the relationship between immigration and crime across macro-social units, including neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Even fewer focus on homicide, particularly homicide disaggregated by motive and circumstance. The current study addresses this shortcoming by examining the relationship between immigration and homicide across large cities in the United States. Methodology – We extend prior work by disaggregating homicide into different “types” based upon motive and circumstance to determine whether immigration is linked not only to overall homicide rates but also to specific types of lethal violence that some suggest may be higher in places where immigrants are more prevalent. Findings – Cities with greater immigrant concentration have lower homicide rates. There is a significant and fairly strong positive relationship between immigration and gang-related homicides. Value – This analysis with disaggregated homicide adds to the findings that immigration is not associated with increased crime. Its finding of a correlation between immigration and gang-related homicides points to the next question that needs to be addressed with appropriate data.

While school-based adolescent victimization has received a great deal of public attention, there exist relatively few theoretically driven studies aimed at explaining this phenomenon. We address this paucity by providing a test of a criminal-opportunity model of school-based victimization using data on over 3,000 students from 40 different Kentucky middle and high schools. The effects of opportunity-related concepts are estimated for both violent and property victimization, and comparisons are made for each victimization type across middle- and high-school student subsamples. Findings suggest that criminal opportunity theory is relevant to the understanding of school-based victimization. In particular, indicators of exposure to crime and target antagonism appear to be robust predictors. Further, there appears to be substantial generalizability in the effects of opportunity-related variables across violent versus property victimization as well as across middle-school versus high-school contexts.

Research Summary Payday lenders have become the banker of choice for many residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods in recent years, often trapping the most vulnerable residents in a cycle of debt. The substantial costs that customers of these fringe bankers incur have long been documented and have been the subject of much policy debate as part of the controversy over financial services generally in recent years. Yet there is reason to believe there are broader community costs that all residents pay in those neighborhoods where payday lenders are concentrated, costs which have not yet been recognized or taken into consideration in policy debates. One such cost may be an increase in crime. Social disorganization theory provides reason to expect that where payday lending proliferates, neighborhood crime rates increase. In a study of Seattle, Washington, a city that has seen a typical increase in the number of payday lenders, we find that a concentration of payday lending leads to higher violent and property crime rates, controlling on a range of factors traditionally associated with neighborhood crime. The findings suggest important policy recommendations that could ameliorate these costs. Policy Implications Several steps could be taken by state and federal financial regulatory officials (including legislators and regulators), private industry and nonprofit financial service providers, and law enforcement agencies to help eliminate the predatory practices of payday lenders, along with the subsequent community costs, and to provide access to small consumer loans on an equitable basis. Among the steps that could be initiated immediately are the following: 1 Congress could cap the interest rate that payday lenders are allowed to charge at 36% as several states have done and Congress did for loans to members of the military and their families; 2 Credit unions could, profitably, offer small loan programs that enable their members to access credit on reasonable terms and to save and accumulate wealth as some community development credit unions are currently doing; 3 Federal banking officials could provide Community Reinvestment Act credit to depository agencies that provide small consumer loans on equitable terms in order to encourage larger lenders to offer such services; 4 State and local governments could enact zoning laws limiting the number and density of payday lenders as several have already done. 5 Financial service regulators could establish suitability standards requiring lenders to offer only those loans that are in the financial interests of the borrowers; and 6 Law enforcement officials could provide additional service in neighborhoods where payday lending outlets are concentrated. There may well be additional community costs that have not been recognized. To further understand the range of costs associated with payday lending, we propose the following research agenda. 1 Property values may be adversely affected as crime rates increase and those costs should be estimated; 2 Owners of payday lending outlets often reside outside of the neighborhoods in which the businesses are located, resulting in a drain of capital from those areas that should be quantified; 3 The costs in other communities beyond Seattle should be determined; 4 To complement this snapshot of Seattle, longitudinal research should be conducted. Access to a wide range of financial services on an equitable basis has become the subject of much policy debate and social science research in recent years. Payday lenders constitute part of a network of fringe bankers that have been concentrated in low-income, minority communities but have begun to spread throughout metropolitan areas. Costs to borrowers have been documented with some precision. But broader community costs have not been subject to scrutiny. That payday lending is associated with crime should, in fact, come as no surprise. How we choose to respond to that connection remains to be determined.