Most prior research testing the hypothesis of the social disorganization theory that residential instability increases crime has used cross-sectional data. Using a unique dataset linking home sales address matched to census tracts with crime data in Los Angeles, we test the direction of this relationship using a six-year panel data design. We also…

This research compares representations of rap music with the self-reported criminal behavior and resistant attitudes of the music's core audience. Our database is a large sample of Toronto high school students (n = 3,393) from which we identify a group of listeners, whose combination of musical likes and dislikes distinguish them as rap univores.…

For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to…

Ecological theories linking community characteristics to the level of crime have rarely been tested outside the context of the United States and Western Europe. In this study we examine the effects of social cohesion and neighborhood disorder on crime using data from a survey of neighborhoods in Brazil. We find that lower-income neighborhoods,…

Capital punishment is the most severe criminal penalty, yet we know little about the factors that produce jurisdictional differences in the use of the death sentence. Political explanations emphasize conservative values and the strength of more conservative political parties. Threat accounts suggest that this sentence will be more likely in…

Humiliation; incarceration; stigma; loss of income, freedom, and respect: most research on offending emphasizes these sanctions. Yet classical theorists recognized other costs including physical harm. We revive this abandoned insight, arguing that danger--the possibility of pain--figures largely in people's decisions to offend. Although modern…

Analysis of 1990 data on 151 U.S. cities indicates that the spatial isolation of blacks from whites strongly predicts rates of urban black violence (homicide and robbery). Suggests that underlying the relationship between segregation and crime is the geographic concentration of poverty, joblessness, low job skills, low education, welfare, teen…