Objectives There is an increasing understanding that mental health may be a collateral consequence of joining a gang. The objective of the present study is to assess the effect of gang joining on a set of diverse mental health outcomes that include depression, anxiety, hostility, and paranoid ideation. Methods To reduce bias in our comparisons, we balance gang-joiner and gang-abstainer groups by applying

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09511-y

Objectives Despite theoretical interest in how dimensions of the built environment can help explain the location of crime in micro−geographic units, measuring this is difficult. Methods This study adopts a strategy that first scrapes images from Google Street View every 20 meters in every street segment in the city of Santa Ana, CA, and then uses machine learning to detect features of the environment

Objectives While a wealth of research reports a robust association between intimate partner victimization and depression, the relationship has not been tested using twin-based research designs to control for unmeasured genetic and shared environmental confounding. Methods Twin data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health are analyzed to test the causal hypothesis that intimate

Objectives This article explores the merits of commercially-based survey data on crime through cross-validation with established crime metrics. Methods Using unpublished data from 166 countries covering the period between 2006 and 2019, the article describes the geographical distribution across global regions and trends over time of three types of common crime, homicide, and organised crime. The article

Objectives To test the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis—that system-level racial and ethnic disparities accumulate from intake to final disposition—by investigating relative and absolute disparities across different pathways through the juvenile justice system. Methods Using a sample of 95,670 juvenile court referrals across 140 counties in four states, the present study employed multinomial logistic

Objectives Examine whether a death-in-police-custody incident affected community reliance on the police, as measured through citizen calls requesting police assistance for non-criminal caretaking matters. Methods This study used Baltimore Police Department (BPD) incident-level call data (2014–2017) concerning non-criminal caretaking matters (N = 234,781). Counts of non-criminal caretaking calls were

Objectives To provide quantitative attention to the correlates of the gender gap in illegal pay. Guided by the literatures on the gendered nature of offending, illegal earnings, and the gender gap in legal pay, we ask: what factors are associated with the gender gap in illegal pay? Methods We use the Delaware Decision Making Study, a sample of incarcerated offenders, to unpack the gender gap in illegal

Objectives Mass shootings seemingly lie outside the grasp of explanation and prediction, because they are statistical outliers—in terms of their frequency and severity—within the broader context of crime and violence. Innovative scholarship has developed procedures to estimate the future likelihood of rare catastrophic events such as earthquakes that exceed 7.0 on the Richter scale or terrorist attacks

Objectives Crime diversity is a measure of the variety of criminal offenses in a local environment, similar to ecological diversity. While crime diversity distributions have been explained via neutral models, to date the environmental and social mechanisms behind crime diversity have not been investigated. Building on recent work demonstrating that crime rates can be inferred from street level imagery

Objectives Examines the neighborhood-level relationship between gang graffiti and gang violence in a large city in the western region of the US during a peak period of local gang feuds in 2014–15. Methods Bayesian Poisson log-linear mixed regression models with a spatio-temporal autoregressive process are estimated using a combination of data for N = 42,276 space–time units. Results Consistent with

Objectives This study examines the impact of alcohol consumption in a Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium on area level counts of crime. The modal practice at MLB stadiums is to stop selling alcoholic beverages after the seventh inning. Baseball is not a timed game, so the duration between the last call for alcohol at the end of the seventh inning and the end of the game varies considerably, providing

Objectives To examine how the practice of daily proactivity affects and responds to changes in crime at micro geographic and temporal scales. Methods Police calls for service and automated vehicle location data from a large suburban jurisdiction were used to create comprehensive measures of police proactivity. Panel data and the generalized method of moments framework were applied to tease out the

Objectives We test the effects of four policy scenarios on recruitment into organized crime. The policy scenarios target (i) organized crime leaders and (ii) facilitators for imprisonment, (iii) provide educational and welfare support to children and their mothers while separating them from organized-crime fathers, and (iv) increase educational and social support to at-risk schoolchildren. Methods

Area-based prevention studies often produce results that can be represented in a 2-by-2 table of counts. For example, a table may show the crime counts during a 12-month period prior to the intervention compared to a 12-month period during the intervention for a treatment and control area or areas. Studies of this type have used either Cohen’s d or the odds ratio as an effect size index. The former

Objectives Much recent work has focused on how crime concentrates on particular streets within communities. This is the first study to examine how such concentrations vary across the neighborhoods of a city. The analysis evaluates the extent to which neighborhoods have characteristic levels of crime concentration and then tests two hypotheses for explaining these variations: the compositional hypothesis

Objectives I draw on general strain theory, a framework often used to understand adolescent behavior, and augment it with aspects of the stress process perspective to examine the time-varying consequences of paternal incarceration for adolescent behavior. Methods I use six waves of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a cohort of children born around the turn of the twenty-first

Introduction The most widely used data set for studying police homicides—the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation—is collected from a voluntary sample. Materials and Methods Using a journalist-curated database of police-related deaths, we find the SHR police homicide data to be substantially incomplete. This is due to both non-reporting and substantial under-reporting

Objectives We examine how responsive offenders are to illegal monetary incentives. We draw from rational choice theory, prospect theory, and models of labor supply to develop expectations regarding the relationship between criminal efficiency, which is the average earnings per offense, and frequency of offending. Methods We use OLS, fixed effects, and first-difference estimators to analyze data from

Objectives Test the reliability of geotagged Twitter data for estimating block-level population metrics across place types. Evaluate whether the proportion of Twitter users on a block at a given time who are local residents, inter-metro commuters, or tourists is correlated with incidences of public violence and private conflict for four different time periods: weekday days, weekday nights, weekend

Objectives This paper offers novel experimental evidence that violent crimes can be successfully reduced by changing the situational environment that potential victims and offenders face. We focus on a ubiquitous but understudied feature of the urban landscape—street lighting—and report the first experimental evidence on the effect of street lighting on crime. Methods Through a unique public partnership

Objectives The current study develops a methodology to identify spatially relevant buffer sizes for micro-place evaluation research. It applies this methodology in an examination of the causal impact of demolitions on crime in Detroit, Michigan. Methods We utilize Ripley’s bivariate K-function to guide our choice of buffer size. We select a buffer size as the distance at which the examined spatial

Objectives Living in close proximity to recent, violent crime may undermine sense of safety in the home territory by increasing perceived crime risk. Yet it is also possible that practicing active guardianship by responding to local problems will moderate this association by reducing perceived vulnerability to crime. In this study we examine the association between residents’ proximity to recent violence

Objectives Although previous studies have theorized the importance of physical and social boundaries (edges) in understanding crime in place, the relationship between edges and the level of crime has been less studied empirically. The current study examines the effects of physical and social boundaries on crime in street segments. Methods To empirically measure boundaries, we introduce an approach

Objectives Longitudinal studies from the criminology of place suggest crime hot spots are repeatedly found in the same locations within cities over extended periods of time. Program evaluations of hot spots policing interventions often use much shorter temporal windows to define hot spots. This study examines if stability of patterns is still found when using short and intermediate periods of time

Objectives We tested the impact of juvenile arrest on asset accumulation, debt accumulation, and net worth from ages 20–30. We also examined whether indicators of family formation, school and work attainment, and subsequent justice system contacts explained any effects. Methods We used longitudinal data on 7916 respondents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort. Our treatment variable

Objectives Prior meta analyses of hot spots policing show that the approach reduces crime, but report relatively small mean effect sizes based on Cohen’s d. The natural logarithm of the relative incidence rate ratio (log RIRR) has been suggested as a more suitable effect size metric for place-based studies that report crime outcomes as count data. We calculate the log RIRR for hot spots policing studies

Objectives Research consistently shows that crime concentrates on a few repeatedly victimized places and targets. In this paper we examine whether the same is true for extortion against businesses. We then test whether the factors that explain the likelihood of becoming a victim of extortion also explain the number of incidents suffered by victimized businesses. The alternative is that extortion concentration

Objectives To understand the impact of measurement and analytic choices on assessments of police use of force (UOF) and racial disparities therein. Methods We collected and standardized UOF data (N = 9982 incidents) from a diverse set of 11 police departments, and measured departments’ aggregate force severity in five ways. We assessed the sensitivity of racial disparities in UOF severity to a series

Objectives Previous research in criminology has overlooked that cohort effects on crime should be age-time-specific (Ryder in Am Sociol Rev 30(6):843–861, 1965) and consequently assumed cohort effects to be the same across the life course. The current study addresses these limitations by modeling cohort effects as the differential impacts of social change depending on age groups. With this new operationalization

To examine the specific deterrent effect of prison on driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) recidivism. The study outcomes were the probabilities of DUI re-offending over 6 months, 24 months and 5 years ‘free time’ (i.e. time not spent in custody). The comparison group consisted of offenders convicted of DUI offending who received a suspended sentence of imprisonment. The effect of imprisonment

Test the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact that police trustworthiness and legitimacy are affected more by negative than by positive experiences of interactions with legal agents by analyzing changes in attitudes towards the police after an encounter with the police. Test whether prior attitudes moderate the impact of contact on changes in attitudes towards the police. A two-wave panel survey

Gangs are thought to enhance participation in violence. It is expected then that gang-related violent crimes trigger additional crimes in a contagious manner, above and beyond what is typical for non-gang violent crime. This paper uses a multivariate self-exciting point process model to estimate the extent of contagious spread of violent crime for both gang-related and non-gang aggravated assaults

Criminological scholars have long been interested in how macro-level characteristics of cities, counties, or metropolitan areas are related to levels of crime. The standard analytic approach in this literature aggregates constructs of interest, including crime rates, to the macro geographic units and estimates regression models, but this strategy ignores possible sub-city-level processes that occur

Crime counts are sensitive to granularity choice. There is an increasing interest in analyzing crime at very fine granularities, such as street segments, with one of the reasons being that coarse granularities mask hot spots of crime. However, if granularities are too fine, counts may become unstable and unrepresentative. In this paper, we develop a method for determining a granularity that provides

Low self control has been the principal focus of population heterogeneity perspectives in terms of capturing an individual’s antisocial and criminal propensity (ACP). However, conceptual descriptions of the stability of psychopathy, combined with evidence that this construct predicts chronic and violent offending, implies that it may be a more accurate indicator of ACP. The current study evaluated

Building on Hagerstrand’s time geography, we expect temporal consistency in individual offending behavior. We hypothesize that repeat offenders commit offenses at similar times of day and week. In addition, we expect stronger temporal consistency for crimes of the same type and for crimes committed within a shorter time span. We use police-recorded crime data on 28,274 repeat offenders who committed

We investigate the spatio-temporal variation of monthly residential burglary frequencies across neighborhoods as a function of crime generators, street network features and temporally and spatially lagged burglary frequencies. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the model as a forecasting tool. We analyze 48 months of police-recorded residential burglaries across 20 neighborhoods in Amsterdam

Does increased enforcement deter criminal organizations from their activities and, more broadly, crime? In recent years, Japan has cracked down on criminal organizations known as the yakuza. Yakuza Exclusion Ordinances (YEO) are third-party policing policies that apply economic sanctions on the yakuza by preventing citizen and corporations from paying off the yakuza. In this paper, we examine intended

Objectives Assess whether the number of rounds fired in an officer-involved shooting is related to police officer features. Data The data come from 55 member agencies in the Major Cities Chiefs Association. The full dataset describes 2574 officers involved in 1600 shootings between 2010 and 2018 but only incidents involving multiple officers provide information. Our final dataset included 317 shooting

Objectives: Test whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhood to the next. Estimate whether perceived police legitimacy predicts an individual’s willingness to cooperate in weak-norm neighborhoods, but not in strong-norm neighborhoods where most people are either willing or unwilling to cooperate, irrespective of their perceptions

Objectives What drives the consumption of illicit cigarettes? While criminology has rarely addressed the divers of the illicit cigarette markets from a theoretical and empirical perspective, studies from other disciplines point to two classes of causes. Some studies stress the impact of cigarette prices and taxes on the market for illicit cigarette; others emphasize the importance of different non-price

ObjectivesThis study aims to assess the evidential value of the knowledgebase in criminology after accounting for the presence of potential Type I errors. MethodsThe present study examines the distribution of 1248 p-values (that inform 84 statistically significant outcomes across 26 systematic reviews) in meta-analyses on the topic of crime and justice published by the Campbell Collaboration (CC) using

Unfortunately, the subjected Special Issue article has been inadvertently included in the regular issue volume 34, Issue 3, September 2018, of this journal. We apologize for the error.

Objective The increasing availability of large administrative datasets has led to an exciting innovation in criminal justice research—using administrative data to measure experimental outcomes in lieu of costly primary data collection. We demonstrate that this type of randomized experiment can have an unfortunate consequence: the destruction of statistical power. Combining experimental data with administrative

Objectives Concerns about the value of features of psychopathy to explanations of offending may be driven by challenges with testing this relationship as opposed to the construct’s limited predictive validity. The current study introduced psychopathology network modeling as an analytic strategy capable of addressing these challenges through a more nuanced description of the structural and statistical

Objectives The current study examines the percentage of a state’s total expenditures that is allocated for corrections in an attempt to untangle how the influence of key determinants helped to shift state resources in ways likely to aid prison expansion. This study further attempts to address how the salience of crime, partisan politics, and racial and social threats may have shifted over time and

Correction To: Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:631–662 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-018-9385-x .

Objectives Evaluate the deterrent effect of a program that increases the certainty and celerity of sanction for arrestees ordered to abstain from alcohol and other drugs on substance-impaired driving arrests. Methods We examine participant compliance with orders to abstain from alcohol and other drug use via breathalyzer, body-worn continuous alcohol monitoring devices, transdermal drug patches, and

Objectives Given the challenges of conducting experimental studies in criminology and criminal justice, propensity score matching (PSM) represents one of the most commonly used techniques for evaluating the efficacy of treatment conditions on future behavior. Nevertheless, current iterations of PSM fail to adjust for the effects of longitudinal clustering on participant exposure to treatment conditions

Objectives We illustrate how a machine learning algorithm, Random Forests, can provide accurate long-term predictions of crime at micro places relative to other popular techniques. We also show how recent advances in model summaries can help to open the ‘black box’ of Random Forests, considerably improving their interpretability. Methods We generate long-term crime forecasts for robberies in Dallas

Objectives To evaluate the impact of proactive police response on residential burglary and theft from vehicle in micro-time hot spots as well as whether spatial displacement occurs. Methods Over 2 years, 114 treatment and 103 control micro-time hot spots were assigned to groups using “trickle-flow” randomization. Responses were implemented as part of the police department’s established practices, and

To examine the influence of street block slope on robbery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Data visualizations were used to examine how street block slope varies across the city. Negative binomial regression models were used to estimate the influence of street block slope on robbery net of betweenness, facility composition, and socio-demographics. A 1% increase in street block slope was associated with roughly

Objectives Review causal mediation analysis as a method for estimating and assessing direct and indirect effects. Re-examine a field experiment with an apparent implementation failure. Test procedural justice theory by examining to which extent procedural justice mediates the impact of contact with the police on police legitimacy and social identity. Methods Data from a block-randomised controlled

Objectives This study examines: (a) whether the association between juvenile delinquency and educational attainment differs by gender, and (b) which factors underlie such gender differences. Methods In order to account for the influence of unobservable family-background factors, this study applies sibling fixed-effects models on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health)

Objectives Despite abundant attention to offending specialization in criminology, scholars have only recently started to explore opportunity-driven explanations for within-individual patterns of specialization. The current study examines whether unstructured socializing with specific friends can explain within-individual changes in adolescents’ degree of specialization in delinquency and substance

Objectives We examined the effects of victimization on several aspects of well-being in a longitudinal study of a general population sample. Previous research has often been inconclusive, as it was largely based on cross-sectional data and prone to problems of unobserved heterogeneity and selection bias. We examined both between-person differences and within-person changes in well-being in relation

Research demonstrates that crime is concentrated. This finding is so consistent that David Weisburd refers to this as the “law of crime concentration at place”. However, most research on crime concentration has been conducted in the US or European cities and has used secondary data sources. In this study, we examine whether the law of crime concentration applies in the context of sub-Saharan Africa

Objectives The present study tests hypotheses regarding the moderating influence of neighborhood-level criminal opportunity on the relationship between crime generators and block-level crime. Methods We first estimated multilevel negative binomial regression models for violent, property, and drug crimes to identify crime-type specific crime generators on each block. We then estimated a series of crime-type

Objectives The civil society perspective predicts that civic and voluntary organizations promote the welfare of communities by enhancing social capital and cohesion. Here, I examine whether black Protestant churches, because of their dual emphasis on personal piety and social justice, function as agents of civil society in the southern United States by reducing crime, and whether structural context