Showing papers by "Francis T. Cullen published in 2017"

The Empirical Status of Deterrence Theory: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract: The literature on deterrence theory has undergone a number of changes in recent years. With the rise of new ways of thinking about rational decision-making and offending, four developments have changed the way criminologists view the deterrence perspective: the effectiveness of certain situational crime prevention strategies; the recognition of the importance of the "non-legal costs" of criminal behavior; the integration of deterrence theory with other criminological perspectives, such as social learning and self-control theories; and how the imposition of sanctions can actually lower individuals' perceived estimates of getting caught in the future, known as the "resetting effect". The body of "shaming" research points to the growing recognition of the complex effects that criminal sanctions have on individuals' future criminal behaviour. Even independent of shame, however, research has emerged indicating that individuals who have been punished end up being more inclined to commit future offenses than those who have not been punished.

Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological Theory

Abstract: Criminology is in a period of much theoretical ferment. Older theories have been revitalized, and newer theories have been set forth. The very richness of our thinking about crime, however, leads to questions about the relative merits of these competing paradigms. Accordingly, in this volume advocates of prominent theories are asked to "take stock" of their perspectives. Their challenge is to assess the empirical status of their theory and to map out future directions for theoretical development. The volume begins with an assessment of three perspectives that have long been at the core of criminology: social learning theory, control theory, and strain theory. Drawing on these traditions, two major contemporary macro-level theories of crime have emerged and are here reviewed: institutional-anomie theory and collective efficacy theory. Critical criminology has yielded diverse contributions discussed in essays on feminist theories, radical criminology, peacemaking criminology, and the effects of racial segregation. The volume includes chapters examining Moffitt's insights on life-course persistent/adolescent-limited anti-social behavior and Sampson and Laub's life-course theory of crime. In addition, David Farrington provides a comprehensive assessment of the adequacy of the leading developmental and life-course theories of crime. Finally, "Taking Stock" presents essays that review the status of perspectives that have direct implications for the use of criminological knowledge to control crime. Taken together, these chapters provide a comprehensive update of the field's leading theories of crime. The volume will be of interest to criminological scholars and will be ideal for classroom use in courses reviewing contemporary theories of criminal behavior.

Reinventing Community Corrections

Abstract: Community corrections in the twenty-first century faces three challenges: how to be an alternative to imprisonment, how to be a conduit for reducing recidivism, and how to do less harm to offenders and their families and communities. Community corrections will reduce imprisonment only if its use is viewed as a legitimate form of punishment and is incentivized, which involves subsidizing the use of community sanctions and making communities pay to imprison offenders (e.g., a cap-and-trade system). To reduce recidivism, it will be necessary to hold officials accountable for this outcome, to ensure that evidence-based supervision is practiced, to use technology to deliver treatment services, and to create information systems that can guide the development, monitoring, and evaluation of interventions. Doing less harm—avoiding iatrogenic effects—will require nonintervention with low-risk offenders, reducing the imposition of needless constraints on offenders (i.e., collateral consequences), and creatin...

Racial Discrimination and Pathways to Delinquency: Testing a Theory of African American Offending

Abstract: The current study draws on two cohorts of African American youths from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, Longitudinal Cohort Study to examine whether perceived racial discrimination directly and indirectly affects juvenile delinquency. The analyses reveal that racial discrimination may foster offending by increasing (1) the likelihood that African American youths will drop out of school and (2) the degree to which they associate with delinquent peers. Evidence supporting the pathway between racial discrimination, associating with delinquent peers, and offending was found after introducing controls for demographic, social, and individual trait factors. In a society that remains racialized, it thus appears that a full explanation of African Americans' offending should take into account the ways in which racial subordination may place African American youths on pathways that lead toward criminal involvement. Language: en

The Risk-Need-Responsivity Model Revisited: Using Biosocial Criminology to Enhance Offender Rehabilitation:

Abstract: During the past four decades, researchers and practitioners working in corrections have shifted from a “nothing works” to a “what works” orientation. Emphasizing the importance of adopting evidence...

Adolescent Criminal Behavior, Population Heterogeneity, and Cumulative Disadvantage Untangling the Relationship Between Adolescent Delinquency and Negative Outcomes in Emerging Adulthood

Abstract: Developmentalists suggest that adolescent criminal involvement encourages later life failure in the social domains of education, welfare, and risky sexual activities. Although prior research supports a link between crime and later life failure, relatively little research has sought to explain why this relationship exists. This research attempts to understand why crime leads to negative social outcomes by testing hypotheses derived from the perspectives of population heterogeneity and cumulative disadvantage. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the results reveal that net of control variables and measures of population heterogeneity, adolescent criminal behavior consistently predicts school failure, being on welfare, and risky sexual activities. The findings also suggest that after controlling for delinquency, adolescent arrest negatively affects these factors. Furthermore, stable criminal traits and adolescent delinquency interact when predicting measures of poor social adjustm...

Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Case Study in Organized Skepticism

Abstract: Growing evidence exists that the findings of individual studies—including classic experiments—often fail to replicate. Such published results, however, are considered by scholars, and taught to students, as established scientific truth. In this context, citations to Zimbardo and colleagues’ classic Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in criminology/criminal justice journals (1975–2014) were content analyzed to assess whether the study’s conclusions have been embraced or treated with skepticism. The data revealed that scholars were widely accepting of the SPE and, even when voicing concerns, supportive of its message. These results suggest the need to give replications higher priority and for scholars to adhere more closely to the scientific norm of organized skepticism. In the classroom, the continued, uncritical acceptance of the SPE—now more than 40 years old—can serve as an opportunity to teach students about the production and assessment of knowledge within criminology.

Explaining bullying victimization: assessing the generality of the low self-control/risky lifestyle model

Abstract: The integrated low self-control/risky lifestyle theoretical framework has proven useful for explaining various types of victimization. Bullying victimization (i.e., verbal, social, or physical attacks), however, may not fit this explanation very well if youths who are bullied do not have to engage in risky behaviors to be singled out by their peers, but could instead be targeted for other reasons (e.g., physical vulnerabilities). In this context, the current paper examines the generality of the low self-control/risky lifestyle model by assessing whether it can effectively explain which youngsters are more likely to be bullied. Using a sample of 1,901 middle school students, the results indicate that, although low self-control significantly predicts whether youths will engage in risky lifestyles (e.g., displaying aggressive attitudes, committing delinquent acts, using illicit substances), participating in such behaviors does not elevate the likelihood of bullying victimization. Instead, the authors...

Where is Latisha’s Law? Black Invisibility in the Social Construction of Victimhood

Abstract: Laws named after specific crime victims have become increasingly common. These laws are part of a broader effort to downgrade the status and rehabilitative needs of offenders and to hear the voices and trumpet the legitimate concerns of victims—often as a means of justifying punitive crime control policies. Beyond the substantive merit of individual statutes, collectively these named laws provide a clear image of which victims warrant protection and memorialization: Victims who are vulnerable in some way, who are pursued by predatory criminals into their otherwise safe domains, and—above all—who are White. In this regard, an analysis of 51 named laws from 1990 to 2016 reveals that the vast majority of them (86.3%) honor White victims. In asking the question, “Where is Latisha’s Law?,” we seek to illuminate the virtual invisibility of African American victims and the implicit social construction of which lives matter more in American society.

Choosing Our Criminological Future: Reservations About Human Agency as an Organizing Concept

Abstract: Although perhaps useful in inspiring creative inquiries, this essay argues that human agency should not be embraced as criminology’s single background assumption or be its organizing concept. Positivist study of causality cannot be avoided if the criminological enterprise is to be scientific, to take seriously developmental processes across the life course, and to be the basis for progressive interventions. Rather than embrace the limiting conception of human agency, scholars should create the new field of cognitive criminology that explores offender thinking and the subjective side of offending. Ray Paternoster’s many contributions would form a solid foundation for this undertaking.

Social Concern and Delinquency: An Empirical Assessment of a Novel Theory

Abstract: Using the Pathways to Desistance data, this study provides a test of Agnew’s social concern theory. Social concern is hypothesized to reduce criminality through four components: care about the welf...

Labeling Theory and Correctional Rehabilitation: Beyond Unanticipated Consequences

Abstract: As Louis Schneider (1975: 331) notes, “the sociologist always has an understandable desire … to get away from the obvious, to penetrate deeper, to be analytically resourceful, to bring enlightenment.” This is often achieved by pointing out what is latent in social life and has unanticipated consequences (Merton, 1936). Particularly valued are those revelations that illuminate the ironic—how efforts to reach one social goal actually have the opposite results. Unmasking “fatal remedies,” as Sam Sieber (1981) calls them, brings special status, for here the scholar shows sufficient wisdom to depict how the road to social hell is paved with good intentions.

Public Opinion about the Death Penalty

Abstract: This chapter describes the level and trends in support for the death penalty in the United States based on the traditional one-question opinion poll. It illustrates four important areas: support for the juvenile death penalty; how support varies when the respondents can choose an alternative penalty, such as life in prison without parole; the impact of more information about the death penalty on attitudes; and how concerns about innocent people being executed affects death penalty support. In 2005, with a 5–4 decision in Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled the use of the death penalty on juveniles unconstitutional. Prior to this case, however, scholars engaged in research assessing public support for the execution of juveniles. One purpose of this line of inquiry was to demonstrate that global attitudes about capital punishment would not necessarily apply to wayward youths.

What Correctional Treatment Can Tell Us about Criminological Theory: Implications for Social Learning Theory

Abstract: This chapter proposes that correctional treatment has much to tell the authors about criminological theory. It explores the implications of rehabilitation for theories of crime in three stages. The chapter focuses on the status of correctional treatment research, examining its traditional neglect by criminologists and its resurgence as a body of literature that, if only grudgingly and gradually, is prompting more attention. It discusses the potential role of research on treatment interventions for "testing" criminological theories, conveying both what such studies can and cannot tell authors about the adequacy of explanatory models. The chapter assesses the extent to which specific theories are supported and challenged by findings from correctional rehabilitation research. In short, correctional treatment research should be viewed with appropriate caution. Social learning theory, however, also would predict that appropriate parental supervision and expressions of affection might be conduits through which prosocial values are expressed and prosocial behaviors modeled.

The Role of Place in Probation and Parole

Abstract: In order for probation and parole authorities to reduce recidivism among their supervisees, they must target the known causes of crime: opportunity and propensity. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of community supervision agencies fail to reduce offenders’ inclinations to commit crime, and even more so, ignore the role of offenders’ environments in providing chances to commit crime. This chapter discusses ways of combating these shortcomings through “environmental corrections,” a framework that applies the tenets of environmental criminological theories to probation and parole supervision. We identify two routes through which offender supervisors can reduce recidivism, organized around the role of place. First, probation and parole agencies can knife off the crime opportunities of their supervisees, developing case plan stipulations that reorganize offenders’ routine activities so that criminogenic settings are avoided and replaced with prosocial influences. Second, probation and parole agents can provide cognitive skills training to their supervisees to get them thinking about places differently, such that remaining crime opportunities are avoided and resisted.

Subterranean Values, Self-Deception, and White-Collar Crime

Abstract: The American Dream and its culture of competition contain, to use David Matza and Gresham Sykes's term, subterranean values that are favorable to those who are predisposed to employ self-deception to secure their advantage through white-collar illegalities. The history of white-collar crime and efforts to control it illustrate all of the general principles that have been identified regarding deception. Coleman extended neutralization theory by arguing that white-collar offenders latch on to neutralizations that derive from the culture of competition. Sykes and Matza theorized that juvenile delinquents use neutralizations to short-circuit the hold of traditional values so that they can engage in deviant or criminal behavior without suffering any psychic costs. The motivation to justify or excuse white-collar crime through the use of neutralizations may actually be deeply embedded in unconscious mechanisms of brain functioning that promote self-deception. The processes of self-deception apply in organizations.

The sociological imagination revisited: lessons from America’s Safest City

Abstract: In America’s Safest City, Simon Singer embraces the sociological imagination to situate juveniles’ personal troubles within the context of middle-class affluence and modernity. In so doing, he departs from the standard research paradigm that seeks to explain delinquency by using secondary data sets that contain limited measures of theoretical constructs identified by reigning perspectives. Singer’s decision has resulted in a rich analysis that is replete with criminological lessons about the nature of delinquency. Four such lessons are presented here, which include: (1) a lower-class bias has clouded thinking about crime; (2) the reaction to crime differs across classes; (3) parents matter in producing adolescence-limited antisocial youths; and (4) suburban delinquency may be a precursor to white-collar crime.