One of Sampson and Laub's central findings from their analysis of the Gluecks' data was that reductions in adult criminal behavior were associated with stable employment. In support of their theory of informal social control, they maintained that employment builds social capital that, in turn, bonds young adults to social institutions. Using data from the National Youth Survey we examine the effects of associating with prosocial coworkers on changing delinquent peer networks and on criminal behavior and drug use. The results demonstrate that prosocial coworkers disrupt previously established delinquent peer networks and are associated with reductions in adult criminal behavior.

Prior research demonstrates that military service disconnects men from past social and personal disadvantages and thus potentially alters normal life-course patterns of development. Much of this research, however, has been conducted only with World War II veterans. Relatively fewstudies have examined the influence of military service in Vietnam and its impact on altering individual trajectories of development. Through latent growth curve models, the authors examine the impact of military service in Vietnam on drug use and arrests across the life-course. Longitudinal data collected by the Marion County Youth study (1964-1979) were used to track a sample of men over a 15-year period. Analyses of these data revealed substantial nonrandom selection effects associated with service in Vietnam. Lower-class youths with already established delinquent patterns were significantly more likely to have served in Vietnam. It also appears, however, that service in Vietnam significantly increased individual drug use and, hence, offending rates.

Cracked is a personal account written by someone who had a traumatic brain injury aged 14 years, in 1992. She was left with no physical scars, but with a complete loss of memory. What Lynsey well describes is the feeling of loss of identity, the feeling that she is trapped in someone else’s body, and that her family is not her own; this is particularly well accentuated by the use of the definite article, as in the mother, the father, the sister, etc. However, it is her relationship with health professionals, education, and most particularly her peers which are the most frightening and insightful aspects of this book. Initially the book’s emphasis is on the author’s loss of her own identity. She says that she feels that her own date of birth is the date of her accident, …

Although Agnew's (1992) general strain theory (GST) has secured a fair degree of support since its introduction, researchers have had trouble explaining why some individuals are more likely than others to react to strain with delinquency. This study uses data from the National Survey of Children to address this issue. Drawing on Agnew (1997) and the psychological research on personality traits, it is predicted that juveniles high in negative emotionality and low in constraint will be more likely to react to strain with delinquency. Data support this prediction.

Much research implicates parenting in the etiology of delinquency. We draw on Coleman's [Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] social capital perspective to test hypotheses that relate family "investment" in youth to the production of personal and social capital that, in turn, inhibits misbehavior. Using the well-known National Youth Survey (NYS), we find that family social capital produces the types of social and personal capital envisioned by Coleman, reduces delinquency across time, moderates the effects of misbehavior, and is associated with general positive effects across the life course. The implications associated with the social capital perspective are discussed.

Modern criminological theory makes contradictory predictions about the possible effects of money on misbehavior. Strain theory suggests that the possession of monetary resources facilitates goal achievement and therefore reduces the likelihood of offending. In contrast, an anomie perspective would view possession of money as a prelude to greater drug use and delinquency. In this study we examine the effect of adolescents' resources-namely, money earned from work and received from parental allowance-on delinquent involvement and drug use. The results tend to be consistent with anomie theory, showing that money and its pursuit are associated positively with misbehavior. The implications for criminological theory are discussed.

Recently, conservative commentators and parenting experts have been outspoken about the potential negative effects of maternal employment. Specifically, there appears to be a pervasive belief that delinquency is one unfortunate consequence of maternal work. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we examine whether the occupational status of mothers has criminogenic effects on their children. After tracing the effects of work hours and occupational conditions through risk factors to delinquency, we find that the characteristics of maternal work have relatively little or no influence on delinquency, but do have a slight (and complex) indirect effect through the delinquency pathway “supervision.” This general pattern holds regardless of whether early maternal employment (i.e., work occurring when children were in the pre-school years) or current maternal employment is considered. Our findings contradict the view that maternal employment causes child behavioral problems.

In recent years, the sustained criticism leveled at juvenile rehabilitation has raised the question of whether the public continues to endorse the correctional policy of saving youthful offenders. However, in a 1998 statewide survey of Tennessee residents, the respondents indicated that rehabilitation should be an integral goal of the juvenile correctional system. They also endorsed a range of community-based treatment interventions and favored early intervention programs over imprisonment as a response to crime. Taken together, these findings revealed that the public's belief in “child saving” remains firm, and that citizens do not support an exclusively punitive response to juvenile offenders.

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.

Since the early 1970s, criminologists have embraced the view that only broader social justice will reduce crime-a stance that has largely surrendered criminal justice policy to conservatives. Emerging research shows, however, that early intervention programs prevent crime and are cost effective. Based on a 1997 survey of Tennessee respondents, the article reports further that the public supports early intervention strongly and prefers it to incarceration as a strategy to reduce offending. Thus, the article contends that early intervention programs which extend services to at-risk children and families, comprise an important progressive policy initiative that criminologists and policy makers should support.

Based on a national sample of 1,775 youths, the authors explored the relationship of labor market participation on delinquency. Consistent with the limited existing research, the results revealed that working while in school as measured by hours employed each week, increased delinquent involvement among high-risk males. These findings caution that unless carried out carefully and in conjunction with other treatment modalities, delinquency prevention programs based on employment are likely to be ineffective if not criminogenic.

In their best-selling book, The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray argue that IQ is a powerful predictor of a range of social ills including crime. They use this “scientific reality” to oppose social welfare policies and, in particular, to justify the punishment of offenders. By reanalyzing the data used in The Bell Curve and by reviewing existing meta-analyses assessing the relative importance of criminogenic risk factors, the present authors show empirically that Herrnstein and Murray's claims regarding IQ and crime are misleading. The authors conclude that Herrnstein and Murray's crime control agenda is based on ideology, not on intelligent criminology.

Although investigative reports have contributed to the social movement against white-collar crime, few studies assess the extent to which the media socially construct corporate violence as a ''crime.'' We examine this issue through a content analysis of newspaper coverage of the fire-related deaths of 25 workers at the Imperial Food Products chicken-processing plant, which resulted in the company's owner pleading guilty to manslaughter. The analysis revealed that newspaper reports largely attributed the deaths to the lax enforcement of safety regulations but did not initially construct the deaths as a crime or subsequently publicize the criminal convictions.

Procedures are described for doing: (a) transient three dimensional structural acoustics computations, using a combination of modal and finite element techniques in space and explicit integration in time; (b) far field scattering computations, using orthogonal function expansions and the method of characteristics. These methods are discussed and preliminary validation of the approach is accomplished by comparing numerical solutions with available analytic results for some problems in spherical geometry.

A method is described for calculating the far field, transient, three-dimensional pressure field generated by acoustic waves emanating from a prolate spheroidal surface. The pressure field is expanded in a series of spherical harmonics, which leads to a system of linear, tridiagonal, one dimensional wave equations that can be integrated efficiently by numerical techniques based on the method of characteristics. Integrals involving orthogonal functions are approximated by a numerically robust scheme where exact orthogonality is obtained (in the absence of round-off errors) in terms of weighted sums over a discrete variable.

SummaryThe growing season in the semi-arid region of West Africa is drought prone and of irregular duration. Two experiments were conducted in 1986 and 1987 to test the effects of flat cultivation and tied ridge cultivation (TRC) on the yields of maize and the component crops of a maize and cowpea relay cropping system. The two research sites, with slopes of 0.05% and 3%, were near Sapu, The Gambia, on an Aridic Kandiustalf in the 700 mm rainfall zone.Both growing seasons had above average rainfall. In both years, maize on level sites showed no response to tillage practices. On the sloped site in 1987, soil moisture 10 and 15 days after the last rain was greater with TRC than with flat cultivation and yields of sole cowpea and maize were 25% and 18% greater, respectively. On the level site, TRC had no effect on residual soil moisture or grain yield. When rainfall was well distributed, tied ridging did not appear to be a viable tillage alternative for maize-based systems on flat land in central Gambia but with modest slopes, tied ridges markedly increased soil water reserves in the 0.15 to 0.60 m depth after maize harvest.

This study examined the Mikulecky Behavioral Reading Attitude Measure (MBRAM) to ascertain whether or not the scale measures Krathwohl's five stages of attitude internalization and is a Guttman type (true hierarchical) scale in addition to being unidimensional. The results of the analysis showed that the instrument has Guttman scale properties exceeding recommended indexes. Coefficients of reproducibility, scalability, internal reliability coefficients and classical factor analyses were used to explain internal properties and subscale deviations. Although internal analysis indicated that caution should be exercised in interpreting the lowest level subscale (Attending), the MBRAM was found to measure reading attitude in true hierarchical developmental stages. Thus the MBRAM was deemed to be a valuable instrument for assessing reading attitudes of secondary and post-secondary students.

To estimate how two reading attitude scales are related, 198 prospective teachers were administered the Mikulecky Behavioral Reading Attitude Measure and the Teale-Lewis Reading Attitude Scales. The former allowed classification of subjects according to Krathwohl's five stages of internalization of attitudes, while the Teale-Lewis scale measured the value subjects placed upon individual development, utilitarian and enjoyment dimensions of reading. Canonical analysis showed that the two instruments are related, with one significant function accounting for 64% of the variance. All subscales contributed significantly. The two-way multivariate analysis of variance with three dependent measures (Teale-Lewis dimensions) and two independent measures (sex and the five Mikulecky stages) gave one significant main effect—the five Mikulecky stages Readers classified at higher stages of internalization of attitudes tended 10 place greater value on all three Teale-Lewis dimensions than did readers at lower stages. Although 22% of the subjects were classified at one of the two highest stages (organization and characterization), 69% were classified at one of the two lowest stages (attending and responding).

Electrophysiological measurements were made on the mesophyll cells of wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv Waldron) and oat (Avena sativa L. cv Garry) coleoptiles treated either with the herbicide diclofop-methyl (methyl 2-(4-(2',4'-dichlorophenoxy)phenoxy)propanoate), or it's primary metabolite diclofop, (2-(4-(2',4'-dichlorophenoxy)phenoxy)-propanoic acid). Application of a 100 micromolar solution of diclofop-methyl to wheat coleoptiles had little or no effect on the membrane potential (E(M)), however in oat, E(M) slowly depolarized to the diffusion potential (E(D)). At pH 5.7, 100 micromolar diclofop rapidly abolished the electrogenic component of the membrane potential in both oat and wheat coleoptiles with half-times of 5 to 10 minutes and 15 to 20 minutes, respectively. The concentrations giving half-maximal depolarizations in wheat were 20 to 30 micromolar compared to 10 to 20 micromolar in oat. The depolarizing response was not due to a general increase in membrane permeability as judged from the E(M)'s response to changes in K(+), Na(+), Cl(-), and SO(4) (2-), before and after treatment with diclofop and from its response to KCN treatment. In both plants, diclofop increased the membrane permeability to protons, making the E(M) strongly dependent upon the external pH in the range of pH 5.5 to pH 8.5. The effects of diclofop can best be explained by its action as a specific proton ionophore that shuttles protons across the plasmalemma. The rapidity of the cell's response to both diclofop-methyl (15-20 minutes) and diclofop (2-5 minutes) makes the ionophoric activity a likely candidate for the earliest herbicidal event exhibited by these compounds.