Argentina's robbery rates are among the highest in the world, and for decades the nation has endured consistently high inflation and at times hyperinflation. There is little research on the association between inflation and acquisitive crime in Argentina, but given the widespread negative effects of inflation on other outcomes in Argentina, it is important to know if it is associated with crime. We examined this association. Our unit of analysis was the Argentina-year from 1973 to 2022 (N = 50). Outcome variables were total acquisitive crime (sum of official robbery and theft categories) and homicide rates. We obtained acquisitive crime data from (Sistema, ) and inflation data from the World Bank (2023). We employed dynamic time series modeling. Results indicated that inflation is associated with both outcomes across time. Drawing from rational choice and routine activity theories, inflation may be associated with both the motivation and opportunity for crime by expanding illicit markets, especially for stolen durable goods.
Following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, abortion access in the United States has become increasingly restricted. Drawing on ambivalent sexism and minority threat perspectives, this study examines support for abortion criminalization. Using data from a national survey of U.S. adults (N = 1494), this study examines whether ambivalent sexism and perceived racial and ethnic minority threat are associated with support for criminal sanctions against abortion, controlling for political, religious, and contextual factors. Respondents evaluated abortion scenarios that varied key features, including the woman's presumed race or ethnicity, the reason for the abortion, and gestational stage. Results indicate that both ambivalent sexism and minority threat are independently associated with greater support for abortion criminalization. Moreover, these beliefs interact such that support for punitive abortion laws is highest among individuals who endorse both sexist and racist ideologies. These findings situate abortion attitudes within theories of punishment and social control, suggesting that support for criminalization may function as a mechanism for maintaining existing social hierarchies.
The proliferation of big, complex, and spatial data presents opportunities to further advance criminological theories by measuring the physical environments in which crime occurs. Drawing on high-resolution Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and administrative crime, demographic, and land-use data for Chicago, this study develops micro-scale indices of physical disorder, environmental instability, and vegetation intensity. We integrate these novel environmental measures into multivariate negative binomial models of violent, property, drug, and other crime counts, including community-area fixed effects to isolate within-neighborhood variation. Satellite-derived physical disorder consistently predicts elevated crime counts across categories, even within community areas, while vegetation and environmental instability display nuanced associations that vary by offense type. These findings extend two frameworks within the environmental criminology field, routine activity, and social disorganization theories, by revealing how fine-grained physical context shapes crime opportunity and guardianship beyond traditional sociodemographic measures. This paper illustrates how novel data infrastructures can refine and expand classical criminological theories in the era of digital urban analytics.
Prior research has documented racial disparities across criminal-legal system processing. Yet, causal explanations remain limited and focus primarily on disparate decision-making by system professionals and cumulative effects of case processing. Fewer studies have examined the effects of broader social, economic, and structural conditions on system disparities. We collected Relative Disadvantage Tool (RDT) responses from 714 individuals admitted to three jails in Indiana. We linked RDT responses to administrative records to examine racial differences in pretrial outcomes and associated effects of relative disadvantage. Findings showed no direct effects of race on pretrial outcomes net of covariates, though Black individuals self-reported more disadvantage. Higher levels of disadvantage predicted a lower likelihood of financial bond payment and release from detention in 3 days, with evidence that relative disadvantage mediated the association between race and release from detention. Findings suggest relative disadvantage may influence early pretrial outcomes and particularly so for Black individuals.
Because domestic violence cases are challenging to prosecute, many prosecutors' offices have created specialized units to handle them. Their efficacy, however, remains unclear. The present study evaluates a Special Victims Unit (SVU) operating within a South Carolina judicial circuit. We assess the relationship between implementation of the SVU and three outcomes: victim cooperation, evidence amount, and non-prosecution/dismissal. Using a pre-post design centered on the SVU's implementation in late 2017, we analyze the population of domestic violence charges filed between 2017 and 2018 (N = 1,155) and employ inverse propensity score treatment weighting to estimate average treatment effects. Contrary to expectations, victim cooperation decreased and case dismissals increased following implementation. At the same time, the amount of evidence collected significantly improved. Our findings contribute new evidence to the ongoing conversation about SVUs and the implications associated with their adoption.
This cross sectional study extends General Strain Theory (GST) to examine how online harassment victimization (OHV) shapes suicidal ideation among 2067 South Korean adolescents who reported experiencing OHV. We investigate whether the intensity and type of OHV predict suicidal ideation, whether this relationship is mediated by negative emotional states, and whether protective factors moderate these effects. We find that OHV significantly predicts suicidal ideation for both boys and girls, but the strongest predictors differ by gender: exploitation and stalking for girls, and coercion and stalking for boys. Depression/anxiety more strongly mediates the OHV-suicidal ideation relationship than anger, particularly among girls. Informal help-seeking and positive peer relationships mitigate OHV's harmful effects, but only for girls, while formal help-seeking among boys is associated with higher suicidal ideation. Consistent with GST, the results situate self-directed deviance within associations linking digital strains to gender-specific patterns of suicidal ideation, highlighting criminology's role in studying technology-related harms.
Scholars have debated why crime rates are consistently higher in some ethnoracial neighborhoods than in others for nearly a century. We move beyond prior research to test the hypothesis that disparities in violent crime are a function of racialized income segregation, a central mechanism of structural racism. Drawing from the second wave of the National Neighborhood Crime Study, which documents recent sociodemographic conditions and violent crime in 8,227 neighborhoods nested within 61 cities circa 2008-2016, we estimate multilevel models with controls at the neighborhood- and city-levels. Consistent with the racial invariance thesis, the models reveal that racialized income segregation fully explains heightened violence in Black, Latinx, minority, and multi-ethnic neighborhoods relative to White. We conclude that Massey's (1996) image of an increasingly polarized world, one in which the trend is towards race and income segregation, does indeed have profound implications for explaining ethnoracial disparities in violent crime.
Many reform-oriented chief prosecutors have adopted policies categorically declining to prosecute certain offenses, but little is known about how these policies affect police behavior. This article examines how police enforcement responds to these policies. Using Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's 2022 declination policy as a case study, the analysis exploits New York City's unique institutional structure-five independently elected prosecutors served by a single police department-to implement a difference-in-differences design. Drawing on precinct-month arrest and summons data from 2016 to 2024, I find that the policy reduced arrests for covered offenses while modestly increasing the use of summonses, with no evidence of enforcement displacement to more serious offenses. These effects were concentrated in offenses subject to presumptive rather than categorical declination and varied across precincts. The findings highlight the importance of interorganizational relationships and informal signaling between prosecutors and police in shaping the practical impact of reform prosecution.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping various domains, yet their ability to align with human judgment remains a critical challenge. This study explores the extent to which LLMs can serve as judicial decision-makers by comparing their sentencing decisions to those of 123 retired judges on two fictional cases involving rape and violence. We evaluate GPT, Gemini, and Claude using zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompts. LLMs showed greater consistency, producing significantly lower sentence disparity than judges. To assess accuracy, we treated the judges' average sentence as a conservative benchmark-acknowledging that the "correct" sentence is unknown. If models outperform even this minimal standard, they are closer to any plausible ground truth. Remarkably, all LLMs deviated less from the judges' mean than the judges themselves, suggesting that when properly prompted, LLMs can deliver more accurate sentencing decisions than human judges.
Violent victimization remains a persistent problem in U.S. schools, yet existing estimates often underestimate its extent due to missing measures of repeat victimization, unspecified risk, and reliance on incident counts. Using 48 waves of nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional data from Monitoring the Future (1976-2023; pooled N = 251,055 12th graders; 46.5% male; 11.5% Black), this study employs modified Poisson mixture models to analyze four types of school violent victimization - threatened or injured, with or without a weapon - measured as grouped and right-censored (GRC) counts. The models estimate incidence and decompose it into risk and intensity. Results reveal that despite declining violent victimization since the 1990s, intensity rises, indicating increased repeat victimization among those at risk. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds - including those from non-intact families and with lower GPAs - are more likely to experience repeat victimization. The findings underscore the persistence of school violence and its role in reproducing social inequality.
More than 3 million adults are under community supervision in the US. Large probation populations and probation's net-widening effects have motivated reform mobilizing interdependent actors. In Georgia, Senate Bill (SB) 174 created early discharge pathways that involved review by the Department of Community Supervision (DCS), including officers and an automated algorithm, and circuit judges. SB105, passed in 2021, strengthened SB174's mandates. We evaluate SB105 ' s effectiveness at streamlining review using multilevel modeling, examining how loose coupling-sequentially between actors and laterally across circuits-and judicial discretion interacted to shape the policy's procedural effects. SB105 shortened cumulative review times, and DCS's algorithm effectively automated changes to screening criteria. However, judicial review times increased sporadically, reflecting circuit-specific characteristics. Processing varied by race, sex, and offense type. Findings suggest that automation can relieve administrative bottlenecks but, through loose coupling, may produce uneven outcomes unless reforms account for geographic differences and actors' paradigms for decision-making.
In this research, we treat the "homicide gap"-discrepancies in homicides recorded as deaths by public health systems and as crimes by criminal justice systems-as an outcome to be explained. Drawing on new institutionalism theory, we argue that the level of discrepancy between homicide data from the two sources reflects the capacity of domestic institutions and the extent to which countries are embedded in globalized systems of norms and governance. Based on homicide counts from the UNODC and the WHO across 99 countries from 1991 to 2020, our Bayesian quantile regression analysis shows that countries with stronger political system capacity, more robust health systems, and greater globalization exhibit significantly smaller homicide gaps. We also find that the effect of globalization is largest in countries whose strong local institutions enable them to better actualize the benefits associated with global integration. We discuss implications for theory, method and policy.
Despite the attention generated by high-profile cases of police violence against Black Americans, the impact of these events on citizen and police decision-making remains unsettled. Although existing studies document general effects of police violence on crime and policing, research has not adequately examined how these effects compound existing neighborhood inequalities. We examine the impact of Freddie Gray's death while in police custody in Baltimore in 2015 on violent crime, the decision to call the police and arrest clearance rates. Both violent crimes and citywide 911 calls for violent crimes significantly increased following Gray's death while arrest clearance rates for violent crimes significantly declined. Further, these changes were limited mostly to structurally disadvantaged neighborhoods. Our results demonstrate that the effects of high-profile police violence vary significantly by neighborhood disadvantage, with the largest increases in crime and decreases in police effectiveness concentrated in the most disadvantaged areas.
Prosecutor discretion significantly influences criminal case outcomes through charging decisions, plea bargaining, and sentencing recommendations. However, criminal case outcomes are also shaped by the interactions between judges and defense attorneys, who exercise their own discretion. Our study examines how internal prosecutorial guidelines that constrain discretion affect sentencing outcomes and case resolution types. We consider two distinct guidelines adopted in Philadelphia, which vary in terms of transparency and specificity: one offers broad guidance and the other imposes stricter targets. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that both policies resulted in reduced sentences. The more predictable plea terms encouraged the defense to opt for judge sentencing over negotiated pleas, leading to shorter sentences. These findings suggest that defense attorneys respond strategically to shifts in prosecutorial behavior, weighing sentencing expectations across legal actors. As a result, the effects of prosecutorial guidelines on outcomes are shaped by how other courtroom participants adapt and interact within the broader legal environment.
Employing a mixed-methods approach, this study explores the role of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) in enhancing domestic and family violence (DFV) policing. Data were collected from surveys administered to police officers in two Australian jurisdictions (N = 452) and a nationwide sample of DFV victims (N = 119), complemented by qualitative analysis of open-ended responses. Findings demonstrate that BWCs contribute to objective evidence collection and strengthen police accountability, thereby supporting legal processes. In contrast, victim experiences reveal challenges such as privacy concerns, potential misinterpretation of footage by justice authorities, and difficulties in capturing nonphysical violence. This indicates that while BWCs bolster investigative rigor, their optimal use depends on tailored, trauma-informed police training and robust data-handling protocols. Overall, this integrated evidence underscores the strategic value of BWCs as a tool to improve both investigative outcomes and victim safety in DFV contexts.
Most accounts expect neighborhood disadvantage to shape residents' negative experiences, including violence and victimization, in a linear fashion. Yet, the tendency to homogenize poor and (often) ethnoracially segregated communities risks oversimplifying the relationship between disadvantage and resident experiences. We suggest the immigrant revitalization thesis implies a more nuanced, curvilinear association between disadvantage and residents' perceptions of and experiences with neighborhood crime and safety in contexts with high concentrations of Latinos and immigrants. Employing data from the El Paso Neighborhood Study, we find strong associations between disadvantage and the adoption of the code of the street and legal cynicism, perceptions of disorder and crime, and victimization risk. However, this relationship wanes at higher levels of disadvantage. Furthermore, Latino immigrant concentration moderates the association between disadvantage and resident outcomes. Residents in these communities may draw on resilient forms of social capital to mitigate the toll of living in marginalized spaces.
Little is known about behavioral health outcomes of gang-involved youth outside urban areas. This study examines diverse early-adulthood outcomes among gang-involved youth from rural and small communities and whether these outcomes differ by degree of involvement. Data came from a panel of youth (n = 2,002) from the 12 rural and small-town control communities of the Community Youth Development Study, a community-randomized trial of the Communities That Care prevention system. Repeated Measures Latent Profile Analyses, conducted within gender groups, derived classes of gang involvement during adolescence (Grades 7 to 12), including gang member, gang-associated, and nonaffiliated youth. Logistic regression models then compared outcomes at Age 19 between classes. Male and female rural gang members and gang-associated adolescents had significantly greater odds of multiple outcomes, including delinquency, substance use, and well-being outcomes, compared to non-affiliated youth. Findings suggest gang-associated rural youth should be considered alongside gang members in preventive interventions.
This study examines the relationship between gender equality and female homicide victimization by evaluating how changes in globalization within nations shape this association. Prior research suggests that the relationship evolves from backlash to amelioration over time, but we argue that globalization, rather than time itself, is the structural force driving this shift. Drawing on the doux commerce thesis and the civilizing process, we theorize that rising globalization fosters societal acceptance of gender equality and strengthens institutional capacity to protect women. Using fixed-effects panel models across 84 nations from 1991 to 2021, we assess linear and curvilinear effects of domain-specific gender equality and evaluate globalization's moderating role. Results show that within nations, increases in globalization significantly reshape gender norms and reduce female homicide victimization, supporting the claim that globalization accelerates the transition from backlash to amelioration. This study advances theory by offering a falsifiable mechanism for Whaley's temporal framework and new evidence on how global integration conditions gendered patterns of lethal violence.
Most research on the impact of procedural justice on police legitimacy has relied on cross-sectional data, with limited attention to potential reverse effects. This study examines the reciprocal relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy (i.e. obligation to obey) over time using cross-lagged panel analysis of three waves of survey data (n = 617) collected largely from crime hot spots in Baltimore, Maryland. Findings showed little evidence that prior perceptions of procedural justice influenced subsequent obligation to obey. However, some evidence of the reverse effect emerged, although it was significant only from Wave 2 to Wave 3, with prior obligation to obey predicting later perceptions of procedural justice. The findings suggest that the widely reported robust effects of procedural justice on police legitimacy may stem from an overreliance on cross-sectional studies. This study highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy.
