Annual Review of Criminology - Volume 2, 2019

A life-span developmental approach describes Joan McCord's career and highlights her pioneering contributions to criminology and, more broadly, to understanding human development. The main focus of this article is on her exceptional scientific contributions through the assessment of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study experimental preventive intervention. We highlight her efforts to understand how a delinquency prevention intervention caused iatrogenic effects and the lessons she drew for evaluation research. Important contributions to key issues in developmental criminology are summarized, such as the different roles of mothers, fathers, and neighborhoods in the development of delinquency as well as the importance of differentiating discipline from punishment. We describe how Dr. McCord relied on philosophy, how she tackled oppositions between theory-driven and data-driven research in criminology, and how she helped young investigators learn how to learn, and we end by highlighting her contributions to the organization and development of criminology in the United States and around the world.

When ethnographers study street crime, they anticipate that readers might shame them for shaming the poor. One common response is to compromise the quality of ethnographic data. Another is to pass righteous indignation away from the poor by arguing the causal significance of deindustrialization, class inequalities, racial prejudice, policing, colonialism, or hostility toward immigrants. Almost always, such arguments are gratuitous: The evidence for the structural and historical causes offered by ethnographers does not vary with the situational and biographical variations in behavior that make for high-quality ethnographic data. Nevertheless, if we read around the rhetorical practices that contemporary ethnographers of crime use to shift shame away from their subjects and themselves, we learn how street crime is produced through small criminogenic social circles. Considered as a set, recent ethnographies have significantly advanced knowledge about the social psychology of criminality, and they provide promising leads for improving the understanding of variations in crime patterns over time and across metropolitan spaces.

Broken windows theory (BWT) has heavily influenced social science and policy over the past 30 years. It posits that disorder in neighborhoods leads to elevated crime by inviting additional criminal activity and by discouraging the positive social behavior that prevents crime. Scholars have debated the veracity of BWT, and here we conduct a meta-analysis of 96 studies to examine the effects of disorder on residents’ (a) general proclivities for aggressive behavior and (b) perceptions of and attitudes toward their neighborhood (e.g., fear of crime), with particular attention to aspects of research design that might confound causal inference. We found no consistent evidence that disorder induces greater aggression or more negative attitudes toward the neighborhood. Studies that found such effects disproportionately utilized weaker research designs that omit key correlates or confound perceptions of disorder with other neighborhood attitudes. We explore implications for theory, research, and policy.

A large body of empirical research exists that attempts to determine whether or not police discriminate on the basis of race. We investigate whether the methods used typically produce valid inferences. We find that they often most likely do not and that results may diverge from reality in either direction, indicating discrimination when it is not present or alternatively indicating a lack of discrimination when it is in fact present. The reason for this is that tests make assumptions about police behavior that are often implausible. Because of this, the simplest forms of benchmark and outcome tests should not be used, although the problem is more general. We discuss several possible ways to improve inferences about the absence or presence of discrimination, such as employing matching or weighting techniques and using novel, computationally intensive methods.

Over the past decade, a considerable literature has emerged within criminology stemming from the collection of social network data and the adoption of social network analysis by a cadre of scholars. We review recent contributions to four areas of crime research: co-offending networks, illicit networks, gang-rivalry networks, and neighborhoods and crime. Our review highlights potential pitfalls that one might encounter when using social networks in criminological research and points to fruitful directions for further research. In particular, we recommend paying special attention to the clear specifications of what ties in the network are assumed to be doing, potential measurement weaknesses that can arise when using police or investigative data to construct a network, and understanding dynamic social network processes related to criminological outcomes. We envision a bright future in which the social network perspective will be more fully integrated into criminological theories, analyses, and applications.

The randomized experiment has achieved the status of the gold standard for estimating causal effects in criminology and the other social sciences. Although causal identification is indeed important and observational data present numerous challenges to causal inference, we argue that conflating causality with the method used to identify it leads to a cognitive narrowing that diverts attention from what ultimately matters most—the difference between counterfactual worlds that emerge as a consequence of their being subjected to different treatment regimes applied to all eligible population members over a sustained period of time. To address this system-level and long-term challenge, we develop an analytic framework for integrating causality and policy inference that accepts the mandate of causal rigor but is conceptually rather than methodologically driven. We then apply our framework to two substantive areas that have generated high-visibility experimental research and that have considerable policy influence: (a) hot-spots policing and (b) the use of housing vouchers to reduce concentrated disadvantage and thereby crime. After reviewing the research in these two areas in light of our framework, we propose a research path forward and conclude with implications for the interplay of theory, data, and causal understanding in criminology and other social sciences.

Criminologists have long focused their attention on the inner-city street corner and neglected the suburban cul-de-sac. Crime in the suburbs should be of greater criminological concern. Cities are no longer centrally located. Suburbanization has impacted not only where most Americans live but also the types and reasons for crime. We begin this review with an overview of the unique structures of the suburb and the rise of the suburban city. We complicate the image of the dangerous city and the safe suburb and examine broad trends in crime and safety within each. The reasons and types of suburban crimes are further related to the decentered, diffused, and less public places of suburbia. Types of crime are described and prospects for future research into the structure and culture of suburbanization as they relate to comparative criminological research are discussed.

In this review, we consider theory and research focused on girls’ and women's violence, with an emphasis on studies that inform long-running debates about whether uniquely gendered explanations are required to understand such behaviors. The review emphasizes potentially malleable social processes and influences as well as studies that have explored neighborhood, family, and peer-based sources of risk. We also examine contemporary research on precursors of a specific type of aggression—intimate partner violence—where self-reports of perpetration have been found to be similar across gender, but research has consistently shown that the consequences are generally more serious for female victims. Our review draws on findings from analyses of large-scale survey data as well as qualitative approaches that explore meanings and motivations. The results point to significant areas of overlap, as well as some distinctive patterns in gender, support learning, and intersectionality theories, and identify potentially fruitful areas for additional research.

Online crime has increased in severity and frequency over the past two decades. However, although several scientific disciplines have commonly employed criminological theories to explain this phenomenon, mainstream criminology has devoted relatively scant attention to the investigation of cyber-criminals and their victims. Drawing on this assumption that more criminological attention should be given to this important type of crime, this article presents an interdisciplinary review of the current state of research on cyber-dependent crimes (i.e., crimes that require the use of computer technology to exist, such as hacking). We begin with a brief discussion of the ecosystem of cyber-dependent crimes and the key actors who operate within it, including the online offenders and enablers, targets and victims, and guardians. Next, we review empirical scholarship that pertains to each actor while distinguishing between nontheoretical research and theoretically driven studies. We then detail methodological and theoretical avenues that should be pursued by future research and discuss why criminological research should lead policy initiatives and guide the design of technical tools that improve the scientific community's ability to generate a safer and more secure cyber-environment. We conclude by discussing potential ways in which cyber-dependent crime research could pave the way for the advancement of mainstream criminological theory and research.

Over the past 50 years, researchers in the United States and abroad have debated the inherent inequities within justice systems that contribute to the underreporting of crime to the police. Our review summarizes existing knowledge about victim reporting and outlines new directions in theory and empirical research that situate this work within a broader perspective on victim help-seeking. We begin with a short review of the historical development of research on victim reporting and its implications for research and social policy. We then review and critique major explanations of victims’ reporting behavior and outline a new integrated multilevel framework. This model draws on the broader help-seeking literature to study police notification and other forms of victim help-seeking as interrelated systems that respond to social-contextual factors and feedback effects. We conclude by outlining the core empirical implications of this multilevel theoretical framework and illuminating the most significant data and research needs.

Peer influence occupies an intriguing place in criminology. On the one hand, there is a long line of theorizing and empirical work highlighting it as a key causal process for delinquency. On the other, there is a group of theoretical skeptics who view it as one of the most notorious examples of a spurious link. After discussing these perspectives, this review takes stock of our intellectual advancements in understanding peer influence over decades' worth of research toward this endeavor. We conclude that although there have been important gains, essential questions and gaps remain. Toward this aim, we offer some lines of future work that we believe offer pathways to yielding the greatest added value to the discipline.

Although jails are both common and consequential, affecting millions of individuals annually, they are a relatively understudied aspect of the criminal justice system. In this review, we first document the prevalence of jail incarceration, highlighting how jail incarceration has risen in tandem with the more commonly examined prison incarceration. Next, we describe the population of individuals in jail, paying particular attention to the heterogeneous and disadvantaged nature of this population. We document how jail incarceration is measured, demographically and in household surveys, and argue that jail incarceration has lasting and profound consequences for individuals, families, and communities. We conclude the review by suggesting directions for future research. Given the common nature of jail incarceration—in conjunction with the fact that jail incarceration creates, sustains, and perpetuates inequality—a better understanding of the prevalence, correlates, and consequences of jail incarceration is critical for fully understanding the link between the criminal justice system and inequality.

Research on inequality in punishment has a long and storied history, yet the overwhelming focus has been on episodic disparity in isolated stages of criminal case processing (e.g., arrest, prosecution, or sentencing). Although theories of cumulative disadvantage exist in criminology, they are seldom adapted to account for treatment in the criminal justice system. We provide an overview of the concept of cumulative disadvantage in the life course and review evidence on the development of cumulative disadvantages across stages of the criminal justice system. In doing so, we appraise the empirical research on policing, prosecution, and the courts and consider how these largely separate bodies of scholarship are inherently connected. We conclude with a call for future research that focuses more explicitly on the ways that life-course disadvantages shape contact with the criminal justice system and how these processes work to perpetuate patterns of disadvantage within the system and in subsequent life outcomes.

Since the early 2000s, state and local policy makers, practitioners, and advocates accelerated existing federal efforts to reform the youth justice system and dramatically reduce the number of youth detained in the juvenile justice system. States across the country achieved these drops through policy changes that created fiscal disincentives and legal roadblocks to state custody. Yet recent research shows that youth of color and LGBQ-GNCT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning, gender-nonconforming, and transgender) youth continue to be overrepresented in many juvenile justice systems throughout the country. In this review, we interrogate these disparities more deeply in an effort to (a) advocate for continued and increased efforts to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system; (b) break the silence around the experiences of LGBQ-GNCT youth in the system, which are overwhelmingly youth of color; and (c) encourage a deeper appreciation of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression and how they intersect with race when it comes to serving youth in the justice system.

Examinations of the Native American experience in the US criminal justice system are still relatively sparse, despite earlier calls for increased attention to Native American crime and justice issues. This is unfortunate, as Native Americans are unique among all groups in US society and face distinctive criminal justice jurisdictional complexities. We argue that this uniqueness renders extant racial/ethnic theoretical framings incomplete for understanding the Native American experience with criminal justice in the United States. First, we describe the complexities of criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country, discuss how internal colonialism shapes the Native American experience, and outline a set of directions for research to illuminate such jurisdictional complexities. Second, we discuss general theoretical frameworks and their strengths and limitations in explaining the Native American experience. We argue for a focus on the interlocking institutional power that shapes tribal, state, and federal justice coupling. We present an agenda for research on the consequences of contemporary criminal justice arrangements for individual Native Americans and for Native American communities collectively.

This review provides a critical overview of Indigenous peoples’ interactions with criminal justice systems. It focuses on the experiences of Indigenous peoples residing in the four major Anglo-settler-colonial jurisdictions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. The review is built around a number of key arguments, including that centuries of colonization have left Indigenous peoples across all four jurisdictions in a position of profound social, economic, and political marginalization; that the colonial project, especially the socioeconomic marginalization resulting from it, plays a significant role in the contemporary over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial criminal justice systems; and that a key failure of both governments and the academy has been to disregard Indigenous peoples responses to social harm and to rely too heavily on Western theorizing, policy, and practice to solve the problem of Indigenous over-representation. Finally, we argue that little will change to reduce the negative nature of Indigenous–criminal justice interactions until the settler-colonial state and the discipline of criminology show a willingness to support Indigenous peoples’ desire for self-determination and for leadership in the response to the social harms that impact their communities.

It took the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and, more importantly, the four coordinated attacks of September 11, 2001, to produce substantial interest among criminologists in the empirical study of violent political extremism. In the past two decades, this situation has changed dramatically with research on political extremism now routinely appearing in major criminology outlets, theses and dissertations, and meetings of professional associations. In this review, we track these changes specifically as they relate to government policies on countering violent extremism. What we find is a burgeoning literature. In the past twenty years, we have moved rapidly toward developing a criminology of political extremism. But not surprisingly, given how recent the sustained interest in this area has been, we find research areas where data are weak or nonexistent, rigorous methods are lacking, and results are disconnected from theoretical frameworks. We have divided our review of government responses to violent political extremism along a continuum ranging from the most repressive to the most conciliatory. In general, the trajectory of research on governmental policies to counteract terrorism resembles the early years of criminology itself, characterized by an incredible amount of energy and imagination but at the same time struggling to produce strong empirical data, cutting-edge methods, and sophisticated theoretical explanations.

This article reviews evidence for the effects of public opinion on court decision-making, capital punishment policy and use, correctional expenditures, and incarceration rates. It also assesses evidence about the factors explaining changes over time in public support for punitive crime policies. Most of this evidence originates from outside of our discipline. I identify two reasons that criminologists have not made more progress toward understanding the opinion-policy relationship. One is an unfamiliarity with important theoretical and empirical developments in political science pertaining to public policy mood, parallel opinion change, majoritarian congruence, and dynamic representation. Another is our overreliance on cross-sectional studies and preoccupation with comparing support levels elicited with different questions (global versus specific) and under different conditions (uninformed versus informed). I show how the resultant findings have contributed to misunderstandings about the nature of public opinion and created a false summit in our analysis of the opinion-policy relationship.

Security has always been a core function of the modern state. Yet the rise of the Preventive State captures an intensification of that role as threats to security and demands for public protection increase, prompting states to prioritize new practices of preventive criminalization, policing, and punishment. The rise of the Preventive State may promise greater security, but the costs of ever more coercive preventive laws and measures are burdensome and pose a threat to civil liberties. This review considers the drivers, multiple manifestations, and direct and collateral consequences of preventive endeavors that assess and manage risk, target hazards, and restrain or detain those deemed dangerous. It also explores their ramifications for criminology and criminal justice. It concludes by considering the potential of criminology to join cross-disciplinary efforts to articulate a new jurisprudence of security and to elaborate principles of preventive justice with which to restrain the excesses of the Preventive State.

The criminal justice system acts directly on bodies, but fundamentally it cares about minds. As neuroscience progresses, it will increasingly be able to probe the objective, physical organ of the brain and reveal secrets from the subjective mind. This is already beginning to affect the criminal justice system, a trend that will only increase. This review article cannot begin even to sketch the full scope of the new field of law and neuroscience. The first workshop on the subject was held in 2003 (Garland 2004), but the field already has its own casebook (Jones et al. 2014) and the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience (2018) shows more than 1,700 publications in the area between 1984 and 2017. Greely (2009) divided the implications of law into five different categories: prediction, mind-reading, responsibility, treatment, and enhancement. This article examines only three points: the current use of neuroscience to understand and explain criminal behavior, the possibilities of relevant neuroscience-based prediction, and plausible future applications of neuroscience to the treatment of criminals. But first, we discuss the human brain and how it works.

Predictive analytics in policing is a data-driven approach to (a) characterizing crime patterns across time and space and (b) leveraging this knowledge for the prevention of crime and disorder. This article outlines the current state of the field, providing a review of forecasting tools that have been successfully applied by police to the task of crime prediction. We then discuss options for structured design and evaluation of a predictive policing program so that the benefits of proactive intervention efforts are maximized given fixed resource constraints. We highlight examples of predictive policing programs that have been implemented and evaluated by police agencies in the field. Finally, we discuss ethical issues related to predictive analytics in policing and suggest approaches for minimizing potential harm to vulnerable communities while providing an equitable distribution of the benefits of crime prevention across populations within police jurisdiction.

Since the late 1990s, many countries have been debating what prostitution policies to apply, and, particularly in Europe, several have changed the overall approach to the phenomenon and the people involved. Prostitution is more than ever before firmly placed on policy agendas as a topic related to gender equality and globalization. Furthermore, it is seen in context with issues relating to organized crime, health, and gentrification. In both policy debates and the academic discourse, particular ways of regulating prostitution are treated as models and a central discussion is which model among these works best. In this article, I argue that this search for a best practice of prostitution policy that can be transferred to and work similarly in a new jurisdiction builds on a lack of understanding of the importance of context and implementation. How policies work depends on, among other factors, aims, implementation structures, and characteristics of local prostitution markets. But I present a broad spectrum of research to clarify what should be taken into consideration when assessing policies’ abilities to achieve diverse goals. I argue that a fundamental problem in both prostitution policy debates and scholarship is that the arguments over prostitution policies have become too detached from the many and differing contexts in which these policies operate and I propose a way forward for research.