No abstract

No abstract

In Crime and the American Dream, Messner and Rosenfeld contend that culturally and structurally produced pressures to secure monetary rewards, coupled with weak controls from noneconomic social institutions, promote high levels of instrumental crime. Empirically, they suggest that the effects of economic conditions on profit‐related crime depend on the strength of noneconomic institutions. This investigation evaluates this proposition with cross‐sectional data for U.S. states. In brief; the nonlinear models show considerable, indirect support for Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory, revealing that the effects of poverty on property crime depend on levels of structural indicators of the capacity of noneconomic institutions to ameliorate the criminogenic impact of economic deprivation. The implications of these findings are discussed.

In Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that public opinion, including the public's presumed desire for retribution, can be a legitimate basis for penal policy. Subsequently, the retributive doctrine has guided sentencing reform across the nation. But variation among the public in support for retribution as the goal of punishment and the effects of religion in shaping public sentiments about punishment have received little attention from researchers. Drawing from recent work on attribution theory and religion, this paper proposes and reports evidence that public support for the retributive doctrine is closely linked to affiliation with fundamentalist Protestant denominations and fundamentalist religious beliefs. The normative implications of such a connection are addressed.

Drawing on the theoretical statements of Braithwaite (1989), Cullen (1994), Messner and Rosenfeld (1994), this research examines the influence of social altruism on the level of crime for a sample of U.S. cities. The multivariate analyses clearly indicate that the ratio of contributions to the United Way to aggregate city income, a behavioral approximation of the cultural value of altruism, is inversely related to property and violent crime rates. The implications of these findings for the reduction of crime are discussed.

This research is concerned with explicating and modeling the causal linkages from economic inequality to homicide among nation-states. Specifically, the authors posit that the effect of economic inequality on cross-national homicide rates is mediated by the perceived legitimacy of the system of stratification; that is, the effect of economic inequality on cross-national homicide rates should be substantially attenuated once perceived legitimacy is controlled. The authors test this hypothesis with data from 33 of the 44 nation-states that participated in the third wave of the World Values Survey. Negative binomial regression analyses reveal that perceptions of legitimacy do not mediate the effects of economic inequality on homicide. However, they do indicate that the impact of economic, and political, illegitimacy on homicide depends on the level of modernity. The implications of these findings for the economic inequality-homicide relationship are explored.

No abstract

The near hegemony of conservative crime control policies is reinforced by a public idea or narrative about crime that citizens find persuasive: “Getting tough” with predatory offenders reduces lawlessness. Progressives have long criticized such ideology, but they have been less successful in advancing ideas capable of directing an alternative policy agenda. For three reasons, we suggest that social support may serve as a public idea that can help organize a progressive approach to crime control. First, the idea that we should increase social support to at-risk youths, families, and communities is good criminology because empirical evidence shows that social support is inversely related to individual offending and to macrolevel crime rates. Second, the claim that social support is beneficial makes sense because it resonates with Americans' personal and imagined experiences. Third, social support leads to specific policies that are humane and efficacious—that is, that will improve the lives of those at risk for crime and that will increase the safety of the public.