The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Social-emotional origins of violence: A theory of multiple killing
Thomas Scheff
Aggression and Violent Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This essay outlines a cybernetic theory of violence, supporting and extending earlier studies, particularly Gilligan and Websdale. It spells out recursive, interactive processes of alienation and emotion. The theory proposes that most violence is caused by the interaction between alienation and what Gilligan called secret shame, shame about shame. Recursion need not stop in one round: there may be no natural limit for the resultant spirals. A chain reaction of vengefulness, a shame/anger derivative, can be produced in this way. Two spirals are described: shame/rage and shame/shame. Studies and accounts of multiple killings offer preliminary support. The idea may be applicable to collective behavior also, such as gratuitous wars. Websdale's cases of calmly planned familicide seem particularly relevant to the origins of wars, such as WWI, in which vengeance seems to have played a major part. It would appear that the humiliation-revenge cycle is the most dangerous element in human existence. The last section offers some tentative first steps toward decreasing violence. To the extent that the theory proposed here is true, we face the dilemma of how to present it to a civilization in which the social-emotional world is virtually invisible.
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A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing
Alberto Alesina & Eliana La Ferrara
NBER Working Paper, April 2011
Abstract:
This paper proposes a test of racial bias in capital sentencing based upon patterns of judicial errors in lower courts. We model the behavior of the trial court as minimizing a weighted sum of the probability of sentencing an innocent and that of letting a guilty defendant free. We define racial bias as a situation where the relative weight on the two types of errors is a function of defendant and/or victim race. The key prediction of the model is that if the court is unbiased, ex post the error rate should be independent of the combination of defendant and victim race. We test this prediction using an original dataset that contains the race of the defendant and of the victim(s) for all capital appeals that became final between 1973 and 1995. We find robust evidence of bias against minority defendants who killed white victims: In Direct Appeal and Habeas Corpus the probability of error in these cases is 3 and 9 percentage points higher, respectively, than for minority defendants who killed minority victims.
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Kevin Beaver & Nicholas Chaviano
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, February 2011, Pages 81-94
Abstract:
A considerable amount of research has examined the genetic correlates to a wide array of antisocial behaviors. The results culled from this line of research have revealed that genes of the dopaminergic system are associated with criminal and delinquent involvement. Whether these associations would be detected with samples of various racial/ethnic origins remains to be determined. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by examining the association between genetic risk (as measured by dopaminergic genes) and contact with the criminal justice system in a sample of Hispanics. Analyses of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health revealed that genetic risk was related to the odds of being arrested, being sentenced to probation, being incarcerated, and being arrested multiple times. Limitations of the study are discussed and avenues for future research are explored.
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Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600-1800
Manuel Eisner
British Journal of Criminology, May 2011, Pages 556-577
Abstract:
This paper examines the frequency of violent death and regicide amongst 1,513 monarchs in 45 monarchies across Europe between AD 600 and 1800. The analyses reveal that all types of violence combined account for about 22 per cent of all deaths. Murder is by far the most important violent cause of death, accounting for about 15 per cent of all deaths and corresponding to a homicide rate of about 1,000 per 100,000 ruler-years. Analyses of trends over time reveal a significant decline in the frequency of both battle deaths and homicide between the Early Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century. A significant part of the drop occurred during the first half of the period, suggesting that the civilizing processes assumed by Norbert Elias started between the seventh and the twelfth centuries. Finally, preliminary analyses suggest that regicide has a significant ‘autoregressive' component in that the murder of the predecessor and the pre-predecessor increases the risk of homicide for the current monarch. It is suggested that such bundles of regicide may be interpreted as part of extended periods of civil wars and feuding that accompanied the state-building process. The paper concludes by suggesting several individual and contextual risk factors that may be involved in the risk of regicide.
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Internalized Racism's Association With African American Male Youth's Propensity for Violence
Wesley Bryant
Journal of Black Studies, May 2011, Pages 690-707
Abstract:
Youth Violence in African American communities is still considered to be at epidemic proportions. The traditional risk factors for youth violence (i.e. delinquent friends, poverty, drug use, carrying a weapon etc.) do not account for the disproportionate overrepresentation of African American males. This study sought to better understand the propensity for violence among African American males ages 14-19 years (N=224) from four different programmatic sites: A Philadelphia high school, an African-centered charter high school, a youth detention facility, and a program that serves youth who are on probation or parole. The findings indicate that internalized racism enhances the variance explained above the variables typically explored in the delinquency and criminology literature. If further research can replicate these findings, this has implications for the content and direction of prevention approaches with African American male youth.
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Video Games and Adolescent Fighting
Michael Ward
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2010, Pages 611-628
Abstract:
Psychologists have found positive correlations between playing violent video games and violent and antisocial attitudes. However, these studies typically do not control for other covariates, particularly sex, that are known to be associated with both video game play and aggression. This study exploits the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which includes questions on video game play and fighting as well as basic demographic information. With both parametric and nonparametric estimators, as there is accounting for more demographic covariates, the video game effects become progressively weaker. The overall link between video games and fighting is modest and not statistically significant. The remaining positive association appears only for individuals who play 4 or more hours per day.
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Income inequality, trust and homicide in 33 countries
Frank Elgar & Nicole Aitken
European Journal of Public Health, April 2011, Pages 241-246
Background: Theories of why income inequality correlates with violence suggest that inequality erodes social capital and trust, or inhibits investment into public services and infrastructure. Past research sensed the importance of these causal paths but few have examined them using tests of statistical mediation.
Methods: We explored links between income inequality and rates of homicide in 33 countries and then tested whether this association is mediated by an indicator of social capital (interpersonal trust) or by public spending on health and education. Survey data on trust were collected from 48 641 adults and matched to country data on per capita income, income inequality, public expenditures on health and education and rate of homicides.
Results: Between countries, income inequality correlated with trust (r = -0.64) and homicide (r = 0.80) but not with public expenditures. Trust also correlated with homicides (r = -0.58) and partly mediated the association between income inequality and homicide, whilst public expenditures did not. Multilevel analysis showed that income inequality related to less trust after differences in per capita income and sample characteristics were taken into account.
Conclusion: Results were consistent with psychosocial explanations of links between income inequality and homicide; however, the causal relationship between inequality, trust and homicide remains unclear given the cross-sectional design of this study. Societies with large income differences and low levels of trust may lack the social capacity to create safe communities.
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Evolutionary Theory and Psychopathy
Andrea Glenn, Robert Kurzban & Adrian Raine
Aggression and Violent Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychopathy represents a unique set of personality traits including deceitfulness, lack of empathy and guilt, impulsiveness, and antisocial behavior. Most often in the literature, psychopathy is described as pathology - a disorder that has been linked to a variety of biological deficits and environmental risk factors. However, from an evolutionary perspective, psychopathy, while it could be a disorder, has been construed in the context of an adaptive strategy. In this article we will examine the strengths and weaknesses of two models suggesting that psychopathy is an adaptive strategy, and one model suggesting that it is a form of pathology resulting from accumulated mutations. Overall, we do not find that there is strong enough evidence to draw firm conclusions about one theory over another, but we highlight some areas where future research may be able to shed light on the issue.
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An inter-hemispheric imbalance in the psychopath's brain
David Hecht
Personality and Individual Differences, July 2011, Pages 3-10
Abstract:
Psychopathy is associated with two extremities. On the one hand, psychopathic individuals lack any concern for social norms and they are severely poor in maintaining healthy social relationships. In addition, the ability of individuals with psychopathy to feel certain emotions such as empathy, guilt or fear is seriously compromised. In contrast to these deficits, some behaviors and tendencies are exaggerated in psychopathy. For instance, psychopathic individuals display higher than normal impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, aggression and risk-taking. There are indications in the literature that pro-social behavior, as well as the feelings of empathy, guilt and fear are mediated predominantly by regions within the right hemisphere (RH), whereas impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, aggression and risk-taking are linked primarily with left hemisphere (LH) activity. From a neurobiological perspective, it seems that psychopathy may be associated with an altered and imbalanced inter-hemispheric dynamics; a relatively hyperfunctioning LH and/or a hypofunctioning RH. Furthermore, within the psychopathic population, the RH hypofunctioning is more characteristic of primary psychopathy with its affective and interpersonal deficits, while the LH hyperfunctioning is most typical of the secondary psychopathy which is marked by impulsivity and antisocial style.
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How Much is the Public Willing to Pay to be Protected from Identity Theft?
Nicole Leeper Piquero, Mark Cohen & Alex Piquero
Justice Quarterly, May/June 2011, Pages 437-459
Abstract:
Identity theft has become one of the most ubiquitous crimes in the USA with estimates of the number of households being victimized annually ranging between 5% and 25%, resulting in direct losses totaling hundreds of billions of dollars over the past few years. Government efforts to combat identity theft have included legislation criminalizing and increasing penalties as well as regulatory efforts designed to protect individual identifying information held by financial and other business organizations. At the same time, individuals are taking their own preventive actions and purchasing private protection such as credit monitoring and identity theft insurance services. We use data from a large sample of residents from four states (Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington) in order to assess the public's willingness to pay (WTP) for a government program designed to reduce identify theft under two separate conditions, one promising a 25% reduction in identity theft and the other promising a 75% reduction in identity theft. Results indicate that: (1) between 40% and 66% of the public is willing to pay an additional tax for identity theft prevention, more so when the promise of a reduction is highest (75% compared to 25%) with an average WTP of $87, and (2) WTP is highest among individuals who carry many credit cards, who subscribe to an identity theft protection service, and who take active steps in preventing fraud by shredding bills and paying with cash, but is lowest among individuals who believe that taxes are too high. Converted into a "per crime" cost and combined with the portion of identity theft costs that are borne directly by business, we estimate the average cost per identity theft to range from approximately $2,800 to $5,100.
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Shawn Bushway, Emily Owens & Anne Morrison Piehl
NBER Working Paper, April 2011
Abstract:
There is a debate about whether advisory non-binding sentencing guidelines affect the sentences outcomes of individuals convicted in jurisdictions with this sentencing framework. Identifying the impact of sentencing guidelines is a difficult empirical problem because court actors may have preferences for sentencing severity that are correlated with the preferences that are outlined in the guidelines. But, in Maryland, ten percent of the recommended sentences computed in the guideline worksheets contain calculation errors. We use this unique source of quasi-experimental variation to quantify the extent to which sentencing guidelines influence policy outcomes. Among drug offenses, we find that the direct impact of the guidelines is roughly ½ the size of the overall correlation between recommendations and outcomes. For violent offenses, we find the same ½ discount for sentence recommendations that are higher than they should have been, but more responsiveness to recommendations that are too low. We find no evidence that the guidelines themselves directly affect discretion for property offenders, perhaps because judges generally have substantial experience with property cases and therefore do not rely on the errant information. Sentences are more sensitive to both accurate and inaccurate recommendations for crimes that occur less frequently and have more complicated sentencing. This suggests that when the court has more experience, the recommendations have less influence. More tentative findings suggest that, further down the decision chain, parole boards counteract the remaining influence of the guidelines.
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Falling Rape Conviction Rates: (Some) Feminist Aims and Measures for Rape Law
Wendy Larcombe
Feminist Legal Studies, April 2011, Pages 27-45
Abstract:
Rape conviction rates have fallen to all-time lows in recent years, prompting governments to explore a range of strategies to improve them. This paper argues that, while the current legal impunity for rape cannot be condoned, increasing conviction rates is not in itself a valid objective of law reform. The paper problematises the measure of rape law that conviction rates provide by developing an account of (some) feminist aims for rape law reform. Three feminist aims and associated measures are explained-all of which look beyond conviction rates to qualitative and victim-centred outcomes of criminal justice processes. Applying these measures, I argue that strategies designed solely to increase conviction rates are more likely to work against, rather than in support of, feminist aims. The paper thus underscores the need for continued feminist engagement with rape law reform, broadly conceived, notwithstanding its acute limitations for feminist anti-violence politics.
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Preventing sexual violence: Can examination of offense location inform sex crime policy?
Nicole Colombino et al.
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recently, legislative initiatives to prevent sex crime recidivism include the passage of child safety zones (also called loitering zones) that prohibit sex offenders from lingering near places where children congregate. The ability of policies such as these or residence restrictions to curb sexual recidivism depends on the empirical reality of sex offender perpetration patterns. As such, the current study sought to examine locations where sex offenders first come into contact with their victims and whether sex crime locations differ among those who perpetrate offenses against children as compared to those who perpetrate offenses against adults. Further, this study examined actuarial risk scores and recidivism rates among offenders who met victims in child-dense public locations to determine if these offenders are more at risk of re-offense. Descriptive analyses, based on archival sex offender file review (N = 1557), revealed that offenders primarily cultivated their offenses in private residential locations (67.0%); relatively few offenders (4.4%) met their victims in child-dense public locations. Further, offenders who perpetrated crimes against children were more likely to meet victims within a residence, while those who perpetrate crimes against adults were more likely to encounter victims in a more public type of location (e.g., bar, workplace). Though only 3.7% of all offenders in this sample sexually recidivated, those who recidivated were more likely to have met their victim in a child-dense public location than those who did not recidivate. Current sex crime policies that focus only on where offenders live may fail to focus on where offenders go and, further, may misdirect efforts away from the place where sex crimes most often occur, namely, in the home.
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Delinquency and the Black Middle Class: An Exploratory Study
Connie Hassett-Walker
Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, October 2010, Pages 266-289
Abstract:
This study addresses the lack of criminal justice research on non-poor African Americans. The author empirically tested ideas from Pattillo-McCoy (1998, 1999) using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The main research question was what causal factors predict delinquency among middle class Blacks. Having delinquent friends predicted a greater likelihood of future arrest among middle class Blacks but a lesser likelihood among poorer African Americans, suggesting different processes at work. Indicators of parental relationship problems had more of an impact on poor Black and White youth than on middle class youth of either race.
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Prevalences of intimate partner violence in a representative U.S. Air Force sample
Heather Foran, Amy Slep & Richard Heyman
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, forthcoming
Objective: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious health concern, but little is known about prevalence of IPV in the armed forces, as military members cope with the pressures of long-standing operations. Furthermore, previous prevalence studies have been plagued by definitional issues; most studies have focused on acts of aggression without consideration of impact (clinically significant [CS] IPV). This is the first large-scale study to examine prevalences of IPV, CS-IPV, and clinically significant emotional abuse (CS-EA) for men and women.
Method: A United States Air Force-wide anonymous survey was administered across 82 bases in 2006 (N = 42,744) to assess IPV, CS-IPV, and CS-EA.
Results: The adjusted prevalence of CS-IPV perpetration was 4.66% for men and 3.54% for women. Prevalences of IPV perpetration were 12.90% for men and 15.14% for women. CS-EA victimization was 6.00% for men and 8.50% for women. Sociodemographic differences in risk for violence were found for gender, race/ethnicity, pay grade, religious faith, marital status, and career type even after controlling for other demographic variables.
Conclusions: Partner maltreatment is widespread in military (and civilian) samples. Men were more likely to perpetrate CS-IPV, whereas women were more likely to perpetrate IPV. Specific demographic risk factors were identified for different types of partner maltreatment (e.g., lower rank predicted higher risk for both perpetration and victimization across men and women). Other sociodemographic differences varied across severity (IPV vs. CS-IPV) and across gender.
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Christopher Ferguson et al.
Computers in Human Behavior, May 2011, Pages 1195-1200
Abstract:
The issue of potential media effects on psychological health of youth and young adults has been debated for decades. Research on media effects has not always been consistent. One issue that has been raised regards whether the relatively modest media effects found in some research might be explained through mediating personality variables. This hypothesis was examined in three samples of young adults: Mexican-Americans (n = 232), Croatians (n = 455) and English (n = 150). Results indicated that trait aggression was a consistent predictor of both violent crimes and depression across samples. General personality variables were less consistent predictors of violence, although neuroticism consistently predicted depression across samples. Media violence exposure did not predict negative outcomes except among Croatians for whom exposure to violent video games predicted fewer violent crimes, and exposure to television violence predicted increased violent crimes.
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Neighborhood Variation in Gang Member Concentrations
Charles Katz & Stephen Schnebly
Crime & Delinquency, May 2011, Pages 377-407
Abstract:
This study examines the relationship between neighborhood structure, violent crime, and concentrations of gang members at the neighborhood level. We rely on official police gang list data, police crime data, and two waves of decennial census data characterizing the socioeconomic and demographic conditions of 93 neighborhoods in Mesa, Arizona. Although we find positive linear associations between gang member concentrations and indicators of economic deprivation and social and familial disadvantage, the results of nonlinear models reveal that at extreme levels of disadvantage, the magnitudes of these positive associations are substantially reduced. In addition, although we find that neighborhood crime has no influence on concentrations of gang members net of other neighborhood characteristics, our results reveal that neighborhood instability is a key component for understanding variability in the gang phenomenon. More specifically, our results suggest that gang membership is less likely in social contexts characterized by either a residentially unstable population or rapidly changing structural conditions.
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Racialized Policing: Officers' Voices on Policing Latino and African American Neighborhoods
Claudio Vera Sanchez & Dennis Rosenbaum
Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, Spring 2011, Pages 152-178
Abstract:
Conflict between the police and minorities is a consistent theme in inner city neighborhoods. Most studies focus on minorities' attitudes toward the police and overlook police experiences and perceptions, thus neglecting a vital element in understanding this relationship. The objective of this study was to understand how police officers socially construct race within Latino or African American neighborhoods. A total of N = 40 police officers were interviewed. Through qualitative analysis, police officers' comments reveal that they may not racialize but instead moralize African American neighborhoods; alternatively, police officers voiced positive racializations for the Mexican neighborhood. The implications of these findings for future research and police-minority relations are further discussed.
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Model-based prediction of human hair color using DNA variants
Wojciech Branicki et al.
Human Genetics, April 2011, Pages 443-454
Abstract:
Predicting complex human phenotypes from genotypes is the central concept of widely advocated personalized medicine, but so far has rarely led to high accuracies limiting practical applications. One notable exception, although less relevant for medical but important for forensic purposes, is human eye color, for which it has been recently demonstrated that highly accurate prediction is feasible from a small number of DNA variants. Here, we demonstrate that human hair color is predictable from DNA variants with similarly high accuracies. We analyzed in Polish Europeans with single-observer hair color grading 45 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 12 genes previously associated with human hair color variation. We found that a model based on a subset of 13 single or compound genetic markers from 11 genes predicted red hair color with over 0.9, black hair color with almost 0.9, as well as blond, and brown hair color with over 0.8 prevalence-adjusted accuracy expressed by the area under the receiver characteristic operating curves (AUC). The identified genetic predictors also differentiate reasonably well between similar hair colors, such as between red and blond-red, as well as between blond and dark-blond, highlighting the value of the identified DNA variants for accurate hair color prediction.