Racial profiling has generated a significant amount of social concern in American society. Yet little is known about the etiology of this phenomenon, in part because its defining characteristics have yet to be identified and conceptualized. In this article, the authors summarize and organize the existing racial profiling literature and establish a strong conceptual foundation for future racial profiling research. Four issues that must be explicitly addressed in the conceptualization process of research on racial profiling are identified and described: realm of activity, level of aggregation and unit of analysis, population of interest, and characteristics of the incident. These factors have methodological implications in terms of data collection, control variables, and methods of analysis.

In recent decades, patriarchy has increasingly been posited as an explanation for gender differences in crime and victimization. While researchers frequently allude to the ''patriarchal structure of society'' or to ''male domination'' when discussing their theoretical perspective or findings, rarely do they articulate their conceptualization of the term. As a result, patriarchy has been used as an explanatory wild card that lacks specificity and is purported to both increase and decrease female crime and delinquency. In this paper we examine the conceptualization of patriarchy in criminological theory and research, discuss why the failure to clearly conceptualize this construct is problematic, and offer potential avenues for operationalizing patriarchy with the goal of facilitating future research on gender differences in crime.

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Feminist scholars have long argued that patriarchy affects the structure and organization of society as well as the lived experiences of men and women. Although often referenced in discussions of gender differences in crime and justice, few have articulated more specifically the link between patriarchy and gender differences in the experiences of men and women as victims, offenders, or workers. We take up the challenge to theorize patriarchy and examine the extent to which it operates as an organizing principle with regard to employment in the criminal justice system. We consider differences in the representation of men and women working in the legal profession, corrections, and law enforcement, as well as the culture and structure of these workplace environments in the United States. We argue that patriarchy is a useful midlevel theoretical concept that helps explain both quantitative and qualitative gender differences in criminal justice work. This study complements the "doing gender" approach by focusing on gender at the institutional level, and describing how the culture and structure of the criminal justice system shape and constrain the experiences of individuals occupying social roles within it.

This study uses time-series regression techniques to examine the impact of decommodification on homicide rates in the United States from the institutional anomie perspective. Although recent studies have examined the impact of decommodification on cross-national variations in homicide rates, little attention has been paid to historical trends in this relationship. Our findings support institutional anomie theory when decommodification is conceptualized as a historically variant and contextual variable. No support was found for more intricate specifications measuring annual variation in the level of decommodification, and no support was found for alternative modes of periodization. Finally, the results also point to a temporal shift in the correlates of homicide rates between the two distinct historical periods, and the results have methodological implications for conducting time-series analyses.