Annual Review of Criminology - Volume 1, 2018

Following a cursory review of early childhood influences, I discuss growing up during World War II and the subsequent experiences that led me to sociology and criminology. Early encounters with ideas, realities, and people—far too many to acknowledge properly—are noted briefly. I close with observations concerning a few issues of special significance and my experiences with them.

Replication is a hallmark of science. In recent years, some medical sciences and behavioral sciences struggled with what came to be known as replication crises. As a field, criminology has yet to address formally the threats to our evidence base that might be posed by large-scale and systematic replication attempts, although it is likely we would face challenges similar to those experienced by other disciplines. In this review, we outline the basics of replication, summarize reproducibility problems found in other fields, undertake an original analysis of the amount and nature of replication studies appearing in criminology journals, and consider how criminology can begin to assess more formally the robustness of our knowledge through encouraging a culture of replication.

Rates of street crime have dropped substantially over the past several decades, but important nuances of this decline are underappreciated and the reasons for it remain unclear. We suggest that the narrow conception of change adopted within criminology has hindered the field's capacity to develop a stronger scientific understanding of crime trends. Criminology has focused heavily on within-person changes in crime, devoting comparatively little attention to changes in aggregate crime rates. In this review, we make a case for integrating research on crime trends into the core of criminology. After describing the late twentieth century crime drop, we present a conceptual framework that situates the study of crime trends in the criminological theoretical literature and illuminates several unresolved questions central to criminological inquiry. We then highlight major shortcomings of current empirical approaches and outline several methodological improvements that would enhance our capacity to describe and explain crime trends.

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.

In this review, I argue for a broader perspective on exposure to violence, one that extends beyond victimization and direct witnessing of violence to consider exposure to violent situations and violent residential environments. The first part of the review focuses on the measurement of exposure to violence. I review national estimates of prevalence and trends in victimization and direct exposure to violence and describe novel forms of data measuring violent situations and violent environments. The second part of the article reviews theory and evidence on the consequences of exposure to violence. I discuss the theoretical and methodological problem of selection into violent situations and environments and describe several studies that directly address each problem through theory, data collection, and research design. I conclude with a call for a broader conceptualization of exposure to violence, and an expanded, more creative set of methods to measure and identify the long reach of violence.

This paper assesses the state of the literature on victimization and its correlates by examining a diverse set of victimization trends and by summarizing the known correlates of victimization exhibited in research conducted at varying levels of analysis. A broad assessment of victimization research is valuable because it can shed light on both the similarities and differences in a wide range of trends and correlates of criminal victimization, thus prompting useful integration of the diverse set of literatures in this field. We also highlight how some individual-level correlates of victimization vary across spatial contexts as well as in their magnitude over time. Our review suggests that further attention to the commonalities in correlates across various types of victimization, and to multilevel and macrohistorical contexts, can help improve the utility of victimization research findings for both theory and practice.

Historically speaking, criminological theory tends to pay great attention to identifying the various sources of criminal motivation while downplaying the opportunity to carry out crime in particular situations. However, perspectives that address situational opportunity have gained tremendous traction in the field over the past several decades to the point that there is now a substantial body of theory and research on the issue. This article reviews such theory and research within the context of four overlapping yet distinct lines of inquiry. First, we review scholarship that uses situational opportunity to understand individual victimization. Second, we discuss theory and research that link situational opportunity and high-crime places. Third, we explore scholarship that embraces a multicontextual opportunity perspective to understand crime and victimization events within neighborhood contexts. Fourth, we examine work that integrates situational opportunity into explanations of offending.

This review focuses on recent advancements along two lines of criminological inquiry. The first examines how schools unintentionally influence off-campus delinquency, especially through their effects on social bonds and strain. The second examines the effects of intensified school punishment and policing on both school safety and off-campus offending. The key variables of interest to both fields of inquiry are fundamentally endogenous, which has led to some theoretical stagnation in the field. However, studies that employ quasi-experimental methods have improved causal inferences regarding the effects of additional schooling (especially in good schools) and the criminogenic effects of school exclusion. The effects of school failure and educational expectations are ripe for similar analyses. A rigorous interdisciplinary research agenda is proposed to assess the impact of decriminalizing school discipline and expanding therapeutic and restorative disciplinary alternatives to better inform the efforts underway across the United States to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline while maintaining school safety.

The unprecedented growth of the penal system in the United States has motivated an expansive volume of research on the collateral consequences of punishment. In this review, we take stock of what is known about these collateral consequences, particularly in the domains of health, employment, housing, debt, civic involvement, families, and communities. Yet the full reckoning of the formal and informal consequences of mass incarceration and the tough-on-crime era is hindered by a set of thorny challenges that are both methodological and theoretical in nature. We examine these enduring challenges, which include (a) the importance of minimizing selection bias, (b) consideration of treatment heterogeneity, and (c) identification of causal mechanisms underlying collateral consequences. We conclude the review with a focused discussion on promising directions for future research, including insights into data infrastructure, opportunities for policy tests, and suggestions for expanding the field of inquiry.

This review sets out four main explanatory paradigms of penal policy—focusing on, in turn, crime, cultural dynamics, economic structures and interests, and institutional differences in the organization of different political economies as the key determinants of penal policy. We argue that these paradigms are best seen as complementary rather than competitive and present a case for integrating them analytically in a comparative political economy framework situated within the longue durée of technology regime change. To illustrate this, we present case studies of one exceptional case—the United States—and of one substantive variable—race. Race has long been thought to be of importance in most of these paradigms and provides a pertinent example of how the different dynamics intersect in practice. We conclude by summarizing the explanatory challenges and research questions that we regard as most urgent for the further development of the field and point to the approaches that will be needed if scholars are to meet these challenges and answer these questions.

This manuscript provides an overview of state-level research on penal change in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century. It outlines how research focused on developments in the states provides unique insights into the forces that helped drive mass incarceration and has generated rich historical accounts of how mass incarceration emerged within specific contexts. It charts some of the new theorizing that has emerged from state case studies, including those emphasizing how penal change is characterized by conflict and others that conceptualize state developments as they interact with federal processes. These insights are then considered against broader national theories of punishment. The manuscript outlines how some of the key forces operating at the state level, including penal cultures, institutional structures, and interest-group activism, conditioned state penal trajectories. Lastly, the piece identifies potential avenues for future state-level research on the forces shaping penal law and policy.

Mass incarceration is an unprecedented development, one with myriad adverse consequences. Although the expansion of US penal institutions is largely a function of changes in practice and policy rather than rising crime rates, reversing this trend will nonetheless be challenging. The need for comprehensive sentencing reform is clear, but political limits on legislative remedies and the failure of the courts to notably reduce the scale, or improve conditions, of confinement render these approaches highly uncertain. In the short term, unconventional methods that do not require legislative authorization, such as electing, pressuring, and incentivizing prosecutors to reduce penal severity, may be a promising way of addressing mass incarceration. The return and revitalization of parole or other systems of post-sentence review are also crucial and may be legitimated in terms of the need to incentivize rehabilitation and prevent the unnecessary and costly incarceration of the elderly. The recent mobilization of grass-roots movements for penal change that include those directly affected by both violence and mass incarceration is also auspicious, as their work may help to humanize the justice-involved and undermine the erroneous assumption that crime survivors are well-served by mass incarceration.

The origins and contours of inmate social organization were once central research areas that stalled just as incarceration rates dramatically climbed. In this review, we return to seminal works in this area and connect these with six interrelated changes to correctional contexts that accompanied mass incarceration. We argue that changes in prison racial, age, crowding, gender, offense type, and managerial characteristics potentially altered inmate informal organization and have yet to receive adequate criminological attention. We review the few recent studies that document contemporary inmate social life and call for increased researcher-practitioner partnerships that achieve mutual goals and embed criminologists within carceral settings. We suggest that network approaches are particularly useful for building on past qualitative and ethnographic insights to provide replicable results that are also easily conveyed to correctional authorities. As the era of mass incarceration peaks, we assert that the time is ripe for renewed interest in inmate society and its connections to prison stability, rehabilitation, and community reintegration.

A robust scientific literature has established the negative psychological effects of solitary confinement. The empirical findings are supported by a theoretical framework that underscores the importance of social contact to psychological as well as physical well-being. In essence, human beings have a basic need to establish and maintain connections to others and the deprivation of opportunities to do so has a range of deleterious consequences. These scientific conclusions, as well as concerns about the high cost and lack of any demonstrated penological purpose that solitary confinement reliably serves, have led to an emerging consensus among correctional as well as professional, mental health, legal, and human rights organizations to drastically limit the practice.

After decades of relative obscurity, research on desistance from offending has experienced an exponential, and much warranted, escalation in attention. This precipitous growth is motivated by the timely alignment of theory, data, and method that characterized the opening of the twenty-first century. Despite the growth of the field, fundamental questions remain. This chapter provides a focused review of key twenty-first-century theoretical and methodological developments on desistance as well as a pointed discussion of critical issues. After outlining the current definitions and longitudinal trends of desistance, we discuss contemporary theories and the studies that inform these theories. We use an organizational schema situating theories in terms of the primacy with which they place structural opportunities or subjective motivations in their explanations of the transition away from offending. We conclude by presenting avenues for advancing research in the areas of definitions, theoretical testing, and bridging the research-policy divide.

Since their introduction to criminology, turning points have been of substantial theoretical and empirical focus for scholars of desistance. In this review, we consider how criminologists have sought to identify change in the criminal career by reflecting on the identification and measurement of turning points. We contend that important life events, such as marriage and employment, are endogenous to the desistance process and as such present challenges for scholars regarding the causal identification of turning points. Specifically, we argue that both selection bias and simultaneity bias are fundamental principles of the life-course framework. We present a formal way to think about the causal identification of turning points in the face of endogeneity and also consider several conceptual issues relating to the definition and measurement of turning points. In the end, we encourage scholars to adopt creative methodological strategies to unpack turning points.

The systematic study of how available weapons influence the rates, patterns, and outcomes of criminal violence is new, but it is now a well-established and fast-growing subfield in criminology, legal studies, public health, and economics. This review focuses on the transactions that arm dangerous offenders, noting that if those transactions could be effectively curtailed it would have an immediate and profound effect on gun violence and homicide rates. Guns are legal commodities, but violent offenders typically obtain their guns by illegal means. Our knowledge of these transactions comes primarily from trace data on guns recovered by the police and from occasional surveys of gun-involved offenders. Because most guns used in crime are sourced from the stock of guns in private hands (rather than a purchase from a licensed dealer), the local prevalence of gun ownership appears to influence the transaction costs and the proportions of robberies and assaults committed with guns rather than knives or other weapons. Nonetheless, regulations that govern licensed dealers have been linked to trafficking patterns and in some cases to the use of guns in crime.

If there is agency and some decision-making process entailed in criminal behavior, then what are the incentives for crime and for conformity, and what is their role in offending decisions? Incentives have long been the province of economics, which has wide influence in criminology (e.g., Becker 1968). However, economics has evolved considerably since Becker's influential model. An important development has been the advent of behavioral economics, which some consider a branch of economics on par with macroeconomics or econometrics (Dhami 2016). Behavioral economics integrates empirical departures from traditional microeconomic theories into a rigorous and more descriptively accurate economic model of choice. This review explains how behavioral economic applications on offender decision-making can help refine criminological theories of choice and identify innovative possibilities for improving crime-control policies.

Fifty years ago, the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice urged the rapid adoption of information technology to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of the criminal justice system, including policing. They predicted that we could make great progress on the challenge of crime if only we could deliver the right information to the right police officer at the right time. In this twenty-first century era of Big Data, all the technologies described in the 1967 Commission report are widely available and accessible to police departments. This review characterizes what Big Data means for policing, discusses the technologies making Big Data possible, describes how police departments are putting Big Data to use, and assesses how close we are coming to realizing the vision offered in 1967. Although police may be rich in data, we still need to improve the extraction of information and knowledge from that data and put them to use to decrease crime and improve clearance rates.