- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Annual Review of Criminology
- Previous Issues
- Volume 8, 2025
Annual Review of Criminology - Volume 8, 2025
Volume 8, 2025
- Autobiographical Essay
-
-
-
My Unexpected Adventure Pursuing a Career in Motion
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 1–23More LessMy interest in criminology grew as the Vietnam War escalated. I applied to two Canadian graduate schools and flipped a coin. The coin recommended the University of Toronto, but I chose the University of Alberta, which had a stronger criminology program. I wrote a dissertation about criminal sentencing, which led to an Assistant Professorship at the University of Toronto. Dean Robert Pritchard of Toronto's Law School encouraged my work and later successfully nominated me for a Distinguished University Professorship. My interests continued to grow in international criminal law. A MacArthur Distinguished Professorship at Chicago's Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation facilitated my research at the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I followed this by studying the crime of genocide in Sudan and later the trial of Chicago's Detective Jon Burge. Burge oversaw the torture of more than 100 Black men on Chicago's South Side. US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuted Burge when Illinois prosecutors would not. Despite many good things about Chicago, the periodic corruption of the government and police was not among them.
-
-
- Perspectives
-
-
-
Black Political Mobilization and the US Carceral State: How Tracing Community Struggles for Safety Changes the Policing Narrative
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 25–52More LessThis review integrates recent scholarship outside of criminology with primary source material from a broadened source base to trace underappreciated histories of political struggle to secure safety and address harm in Black communities. Much of the existing literature in criminology and related social science fields tends to overlook bottom-up sources and the creative safety practices and sites of safety provision that exist and, in so doing, contributes to a lopsided empirical narrative of policing in the United States. This review, however, highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives. Unearthing these often marginalized and misrecognized histories and sources of Black-led struggle for community safety enables an analysis of not only the forms that community-led practices and interventions can take but also the ongoing state-produced conditions—referred to in this review as safety deprivation—that give rise to them. More broadly, this review uses these histories as a lens through which to consider how empirical narratives of policing and safety are transformed when community-derived, bottom-up knowledge sources are accounted for both substantively and methodologically and offers the field a guide of available databases.
-
-
-
-
Beyond the Seductions of the State: Toward Freeing Criminology from Governments’ Blinders
Jack Katz, and Nahuel RoldánVol. 8 (2025), pp. 53–73More LessCriminology is haunted by state-structured biases. We discuss five. (a) With the spatial boundaries and the binary deontology they use to count crime, governments draw researchers into ecological fog and sometimes fallacy. (b) All legal systems encourage criminologists to promote untenable implications of socially stratified criminality. (c) To degrees that vary by time and place, the scope of criminological research is compromised by methodological nationalism. (d) State agencies use chronologies that repeatedly draw researchers away from examining the nonlinear temporalities that shape variations in criminal behavior. (e) State agencies produce data that facilitate explaining the why of crime, but scientific naturalism would first work out what is to be explained. We recommend a criminology that begins by describing causal contingencies in social life independent of governments’ labeling of crime.
-
- Measurement and Methods
-
-
-
Agent-Based Modeling in Criminology
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 75–95More LessAn agent-based model is a form of complex systems model that is capable of simulating how the micro-level behavior of individual system entities contributes to macro-level system outcomes. Researchers draw on theory and evidence to identify the key elements of a given system and specify behaviors of agents that simulate the individual entities of that system—be they cells, animals, or people. The model is then used to run simulations in which agents interact with one another and the resulting outcomes are observed. These models enable researchers to explore proposed causal explanations of real-world outcomes, experiment with the impacts that potential interventions might have on system behavior, or generate counterfactual scenarios against which real-world events can be compared. In this review, we discuss the application of agent-based modeling within the field of criminology as well as key challenges and future directions for research.
-
-
-
-
Algorithmic Bias in Criminal Risk Assessment: The Consequences of Racial Differences in Arrest as a Measure of Crime
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 97–119More LessThere is great concern about algorithmic racial bias in the risk assessment instruments (RAIs) used in the criminal legal system. When testing for algorithmic bias, most research effectively uses arrest data as an unbiased measure of criminal offending, which collides with longstanding concerns that arrest is a biased proxy of offending. Given the centrality of arrest data in RAIs, racial differences in how arrest proxies offending may be a key pathway through which RAIs become biased. In this review, we evaluate the extensive body of research on racial differences in arrest as a measure of crime. Furthermore, we detail several ways that racial bias in arrest records could create algorithmic bias, although little research has attempted to measure the degree of algorithmic bias generated by using racially biased arrest records. We provide a roadmap to assist future research in understanding the impact of biased arrest records on RAIs.
-
-
-
Studying Repeat Victimization: A Consideration of Measurement Issues
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 121–140More LessDecades of research have recognized the phenomenon of repeat victimization and its policy relevance. Although there are continuing efforts to explain the theoretical underpinnings of repeat victimization, there are still measurement-related issues that limit our understanding of the topic and ability to inform interventions, including varying operational definitions, data constraints, and sampling and nonsampling error. In this article, we review theoretical advances in the literature over the past decade, propose operationalizations that can foster greater consistency across studies, comprehensively assess the data constraints around commonly used public data sources to study repeat victimization, and empirically demonstrate how one of these constraints—missing data—can be considered. Recommendations for future research in the area of repeat victimization are provided.
-
-
-
Open-Source Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 141–170More LessThis review focuses on the use of open-source data in criminology and criminal justice research, highlighting the field's advancements through these data, optimal practices for constructing open-source databases, and key methodological hurdles to confront. As the amount and types of available public information have grown, scholars have capitalized on this access by constructing open-source databases. Our review found extraordinary growth in this research area and that these flexible methods have been used to study a range of important topics, including issues that have been historically challenging to research. These methods have been most impactful in the study of rare events, such as school shootings, terrorism, and mass shootings. Some studies have become core works that significantly impacted criminology and other scientific disciplines, and the limits of the use of sources have yet to be determined. Our review of this literature found variations in the methodological approach to constructing such databases. Many studies did not evaluate the credibility of the open-source information they relied upon and often were not transparent in describing their research process. We identify the different processual elements of systematically developing and using such data. We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, set forth best practices, and discuss how to improve methodological rigor and oversight in future research.
-
- Conceptual Frameworks and Foundational Issues in Criminology
-
-
-
New Worlds Arise: Online Trust and Safety
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 171–192More LessOver the past two decades around the world, people's social lives are increasingly occurring within online digital spaces. Throughout this transition, social media platforms have been struggling to govern an increasing number of complex social phenomena that have carried over from our offline world to these new social platforms, ranging from bullying and harassment to the sale of illicit goods. In their attempts to build out systems to govern these issues, many platforms have drawn inspiration from models borrowed from the offline world familiar to criminologists. In this review, we draw attention to the field of online trust and safety. We provide an overview of the ways platforms have developed tools and systems to govern the people, content, and interactions that take place on their platforms while also looking at the way the field itself has developed rapidly over the past few years. Lastly, we look at research that exposes opportunities for promising paths forward to govern these digital social spaces, highlighting the ways that criminology research can positively contribute toward building vital online communities.
-
-
-
-
Birds of a Feather Born Together? On Siblings, Crime, and Criminal Legal System Contact
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 193–214More LessClassic criminological scholarship emphasizes sibling correlations in delinquency, criminal offending, and system contact. This foundational work, however, has mostly not translated to a rich contemporary research agenda on whether and how siblings influence one another—an unfortunate omission given that siblings spend significant time together throughout the life course. Our review, therefore, has one overarching goal: to invigorate the criminological study of siblings in an era of increasingly complex and varied family systems. We trace the sporadic criminological literature on siblings over the past half-century and document the relative absence of research on siblings in core criminology journals. In so doing, we lean on interdisciplinary scholarship to argue that siblings have been both undertheorized and underanalyzed in criminology, highlight the practical barriers and causal identification challenges to isolating so-called sibling spillovers, and rummage the limited landscape of recent empirical research for insights to push the field forward.
-
-
-
Concerning Cars: Automobility and the Contours of Control, Order, and Harm
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 215–237More LessCriminology has been coincident with the motor age, at least in the Global North. The history of automobility is bound up—in mutually conditioning ways—with changing patterns of crime and social control. Yet the car has remained in relative obscurity as a focus of criminological attention—often present, sometimes investigated as a niche topic but at the same time somehow absent. Against this backdrop, this review describes some key elements of the close relation between automobility and the changing contours of control, order, and harm and offers some preliminary conceptual resources for identifying and investigating the criminological resonances of that most pervasive and mundane of modern objects: the automobile. By treating auto-dominance as a form of slow violence, we can, I argue, make the car into a vehicle for rethinking how to practice criminology in a time of climate breakdown.
-
-
-
International and Historical Variation in the Age–Crime Curve
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 239–268More LessOur goals were to assess competing narratives within criminology about contextual variation in the age–crime curve (ACC)—most prominently, whether the ACC shows constancy or difference across societies and historically and whether the prevalence of adolescent lawbreaking is high, with a majority of teens committing crime, contributing to a steep peak followed by rapid, continuous descent among adjacent adult age groups. We analyzed historical and cross-national evidence from numerous sources that revealed significant variance in ACCs. Strongly at odds with invariance projections of an adolescent peak and rapid descent, the predominant age–crime patterns outside the United States were postadolescent peaks and spread-out age distributions. Teen prevalence was typically much lower than the projection that a majority of teens commit crime, whereas the prevalence of adult crime was often sizable and serious. We illustrate using understudied societies how a socio-cultural framework that draws on age-graded expectations, social control practices, age-structured crime opportunities and stressors, and resultant lifestyle differences across significant life stages (adolescence, young adulthood, midlife) can apply to understanding cross-national differences in the age–crime relationship. Methodological challenges and future areas of research are discussed.
-
-
-
Does Nothing Stop a Bullet Like a Job? The Effects of Income on Crime
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 269–289More LessDo jobs and income-transfer programs affect crime? The answer depends on why one is asking the question, which shapes what one means by “crime.” Many studies focus on understanding why overall crime rates vary across people, places, and time; because 80% of all crimes are property offenses, that is what this type of research typically explains. But if the goal is to understand what to do about the crime problem, the focus should instead be on serious violent crimes, which the best available estimates suggest seem to account for the majority of the social costs of crime. The best available evidence suggests that policies that reduce economic desperation reduce property crime (and, hence, overall crime rates) but have little systematic relationship to violent crime. The difference in impacts arguably stems in large part from the fact that most violent crimes, including murder, are not crimes of profit but rather crimes of passion, including rage. Policies to alleviate material hardship, as important and useful as those are for improving people's lives and well-being, are not by themselves sufficient to also substantially alleviate the burden of violent crime on society.
-
-
-
Crime and Governance in the Global South
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 291–310More LessThis article considers the relationship between crime and governance on the peripheries of the Global North. It draws on examples from across the Global South to show how conceptualizations of crimes are impacted by history, politics, and socio-economic contexts and how crime is influenced by, and in turn influences, governance practices. The review centers on four arguments: Western ideologies and epistemologies are inadequate for conceptualizing the nexus between crime and governance in the Global South; understandings of crime must be informed by knowledge of contextual harmscapes; models of crime control and policing do not always capture the hybridity and plurality of everyday governing practices in the Global South; and crime dynamics intersect with governance structures to create complex challenges for state control. The review highlights the need for scholars and practitioners to adopt historically and contextually informed approaches to theorizing the governance of criminalized harms in the Global South.
-
-
-
Criminology and Corporate Crime: The Art of Scientific Cross-Pollination
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 311–331More LessBorn of sociology while absorbing ideas and scholarship from other specialties, criminology can legitimately tout its interdisciplinary bona fides. Yet within the field, integration and cross-pollination across subject areas is, far too often, absent. Concentrating on corporate crime and summarizing the literature across a variety of different domains, I demonstrate that criminology, as a discipline, benefits from knowledge generated by corporate crime scholarship and vice versa. I discuss why it is essential to build a multidisciplinary knowledge base that informs and draws from corporate crime scholarship while also addressing critical epistemological challenges and knowledge gaps that confound integrative efforts. I conclude with potential areas of synergy ranging from the theoretical (organizational life cycle/life course and decision-making in different contexts) to new/old forms of crime and crime control associated with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
-
-
-
Short-Term Mindsets and Crime
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 333–358More LessWe propose the concept of short-term mindsets as an alternative to self-control as envisioned in Gottfredson & Hirschi's self-control theory (SCT). We lay out a competing perspective, short-term mindsets theory (STMT), based on this novel concept. STMT assumes that short-term mindsets are partly rooted in enduring individual differences and in part develop in response to criminogenic environments, events, and experiences. STMT connects individual-level perspectives to sociogenic views by explaining how several risk factors of crime (e.g., negative parenting, delinquent peers, substance use) all impact on short-term mindsets. Exposure to one risk factor encourages short-term mindsets that, in turn, make exposure to other risk factors more likely, thereby increasing the likelihood of crime. We show that STMT enjoys stronger empirical support than SCT, better aligns with other theory, and can account for phenomena typically considered at odds with, or outside the purview of, SCT.
-
- Bringing the Rural Back in
-
-
-
Crime, Violence, and Criminal Justice in Rural America: Toward a Rural Neighborhood Effect
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 359–376More LessWe review the current scholarship on rural policing, punishment, crime, and reentry. We shift the focus from the “square of crime” to an expansive understanding of crime and punishment in rural communities that uses neighborhood effects to study inequality across places. A central focus of the article is an investigation of the prison boom or the tripling of prison facilities in the United States. Ultimately, the prison boom is largely a rural phenomenon. As such, we examine how prison building is a product of carceral capacity tied to rurality and race. By focusing on the neighborhood effect, we can theorize what contributes to, and mitigates, crime and punishment across rural communities. In building toward a theory of a rural neighborhood effect, we investigate context through understanding the role of spatial and racial stratification in shaping inequality across rural places.
-
-
-
-
Rural Criminology: Unveiling Its Importance and the Path Forward
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 377–401More LessThe article conducts a comprehensive analysis of literature spanning four decades (1980–2023) sourced from databases such as Scopus, JSTOR, and ScienceDirect. It critically examines the evolution and theoretical underpinnings of rural criminology, emphasizing its significance and illustrating key research themes within the field. Despite the domination of North American, Australian, and British scholarship, rural criminology has seen considerable growth and emerged as a dynamic and extensive field of study, engaging scholars from many countries worldwide from various disciplines. Studies show that although areas across the rural–urban continuum often exhibit lower crime rates in contrast to cities, they encounter distinctive safety challenges shaped by their inherited characteristics and the uneven impact of globalization. Misconceptions regarding rural life can conceal the actual occurrence of crime and violence, including acts against marginalized groups, the environment, and wildlife, making crime prevention initiatives a challenge.
-
- Safety, Crime and Policy
-
-
-
Investments in Policing and Community Safety
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 403–429More LessI review the empirical literature on the effects of police staffing, police deployment, and styles of police enforcement. When cities put more police officers on the street, crime and violence have declined without a corresponding increase in arrests for the types of serious offenses that are most likely to lead to imprisonment. Investments in police therefore have the potential to generate a double dividend for society, reducing serious crime without driving up incarceration rates. At the same time, when cities have hired more police, those officers have ended up making many more quality-of-life arrests for minor crimes, thus widening the net of the justice system. The benefits of policing can be maximized and the costs can be minimized when police eschew strategies that revolve explicitly around making large numbers of stops and arrests and instead focus their efforts on more precise and problem-oriented approaches.
-
-
-
-
Re-Centering the Community in Violence Intervention: Reclaiming Legacies of Street Outreach in the Provision of Public Safety
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 431–458More LessCities across the country have increasingly turned toward community violence interventions (CVI) to address community safety without relying on criminal legal strategies. This article inspects beneath the veneer of present-day CVI approaches to examine how their work is dedicated as much to neighborhood social organization as it is to responding to gun violence. Underneath contemporary definitions of outreach workers as mediators of violence, earlier sociologists and criminologists conceived of these workers as frontline builders of community charged with mending breaks in the social fabric. Acknowledging this past is important because it re-centers criminology's contributions to the practice of street outreach and provides insights that help to comprehend the challenging present moment in American public safety. We offer directions for a reinvigorated social science of street outreach that re-centers community processes, structures, and institutions and, in so doing, might better inform contemporary practice and policy.
-
-
-
The Rise of Progressive Prosecutors in the United States: Politics, Prospects, and Perils
Vol. 8 (2025), pp. 459–484More LessThroughout much of the United States, progressive chief prosecutors (PCPs) have campaigned for office by pledging to end mass incarceration and reduce disparities therein. In this review, we summarize the progressive prosecution movement and the evidence base concerning PCPs. We attribute the rising number of PCPs to a disjuncture between the criminal justice policy preferences of state-level policymakers and voters. Although voters, especially in urban areas, prefer reforms aimed at reducing excessive punitiveness and increasing fairness, state-level policymakers have been reluctant to enact such reforms. PCPs bridge this gap by using their authority to implement local reforms without altering state laws. We detail the number of PCPs leading prosecution in urban counties, examine their characteristics, discuss the controversies surrounding PCPs, and critically review the emerging body of evidence concerning the influence of PCPs on sanctioning and public safety.
-