J Hagan
Biographic Data
| ID | 2630 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Hagan |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Hagan |
| SIGNATURE | HAGAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4262-9822 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 234 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3826 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 234 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1955 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 33 |
My Unexpected Adventure Pursuing a Career in Motion
My interest in criminology grew as the Vietnam War escalated. I applied to two Canadian graduate schools and flipped a coin. The coin recommended the University of Toronto, but I chose the University of Alberta, which had a stronger criminology program. I wrote a dissertation about criminal sentencing, which led to an Assistant Professorship at the University of Toronto. Dean Robert Pritchard of Toronto's Law School encouraged my work and later s…
Crime, Policing, and Voter Turnout in Chicago's 2023 and 2019 Mayoral Elections
Politicians and pundits commonly tout campaigning on crime and policing as an effective strategy for winning elections. Yet, scholars have only recently started examining the contributions of both variables to voting. The available research shows that scholars disagree, however, about whether crime and policing, independently or jointly, increase or decrease voter turnout and whether race or ethnicity condition these relationships. We examine the…
Homelessness, Offending, Victimization, and Criminal Legal System Contact
There is now a sizable literature on connections between homelessness, crime, and criminal legal system contact. We review studies on these relationships, focusing mostly on links between the adversity that often characterizes homelessness—the need for shelter, food, and income—and offending, victimization, and involvement with the criminal legal system. We concentrate on multivariate studies from the United States and Canada and consider researc…
Chicago's Reckoning
Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wilson’s tortured confession to two police killings. This case coincided with RM Daley’s pursuit of Whi…
Racist Torture and the Code of Silence
We join Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of the racialized U.S. social system with a situational methodology developed by Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Irving Goffman to analyze how law works as a mechanism that connects formal legal equality with legal cynicism. The data for this analysis come from the trial of a Chicago police detective, Jon Burge, who as leader of an infamous torture squad escaped criminal charges for more than thirty yea…
The President and the Boss's son
Relatively few theoretical criminologists are recognized for their lasting impact on public policy, and it is therefore instructive to reconsider a scholar whose influence endures. Donald Cressey wrote a theoretically driven Presidential Commission essay that inspired the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). He also advanced a theory of “respectable crime” that explains why this act has more extensively been directed downwar…
Beliefs about Legality and Benefits for Mental Health
Research on mental health pays increasing attention to the influence of social institutions on subjective well-being over the life course. Yet little research has considered how belief in the promise of legal institutions may have beneficial effects for well-being. Through structural equation models of longitudinal data, our findings suggest that belief in the neutrality and fairness of legal institutions has salutary effects for mental health ne…
Legal Cynicism and System Avoidance
The Roma are Europe’s largest minority group and face extensive discrimination across the continent. Drawing on a survey of Roma and non-Roma households in twelve Central and Eastern European countries, we analyze the extent to which legal cynicism, as a cognitive frame, is connected to the avoidance of helpful social institutions. We thus expand existing research on legal cynicism to focus on individuals’ contacts with potentially helpful instit…
Whose lives mattered? How White and Black Americans felt about Black Lives Matter in 2016
White Americans, on average, do not support Black Lives Matter, while Black Americans generally express strong support. The lack of support among white Americans is striking, and we argue that it matterswhythis racial gap exists. Using a nationally representative survey collected during the crest of the first wave of widespread attention to the movement, we explore four potential explanations for interracial differences in feelings toward Black L…
What the Study of Legal Cynicism and Crime Can Tell Us About Reliability, Validity, and Versatility in Law and Social Science Research
We call for a further appreciation of the versatility of concepts and methods that increase the breadth and diversity of work on law and social science. We make our point with a review of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism's value, like other important concepts, lies in its versatility as well as its capacity for replication. Several classic works introduced legal cynicism, but Sampson & Bartusch named it. Kirk & Papachristos used a cultural framewor…
Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and complaints about abuse of police power
Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighborhood variation in complaints about police misconduct. Using data on complaints filed in Chicago be…
Race and policing in the 2016 presidential election
A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police sparked mass protests, received extensive media coverage, and fueled a new civil rights movement in the years leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Both major party nominees campaigned on issues of race and policing in different ways. Drawing on colorblind racism theories and the history of law‐and‐order politics, we explore how views of race relations and the police were as…
A tale half told
Dual-process theory of racial isolation, legal cynicism, and reported crime
Significance Cynicism about lawlessness and police crime prevention and protection efforts is often high in predominately African-American neighborhoods, but residents persist in calling 911 and requesting police assistance. These calls continue to rise in neighborhoods that have recently experienced further increases in racial isolation, incarceration, and home foreclosures. These patterns are independent of statistical controls for an array of …
Crimes of Terror, Counterterrorism, and the Unanticipated Consequences of a Militarized Incapacitation Strategy in Iraq
OIN," the counter-terrorism doctrine the United States used during the Iraq War, was in criminological terms overly reliant on militarized "incapacitationist" strategies. Based a on competing "societal reactions" or community-level labeling theory, we argue that COIN failed to anticipate but predictably produced state-based "legal cynicism" in Arab Sunni communities-increasing rather than decreasing politically defiant terrorist crimes. We test o…
Race, Legal Cynicism, and the Machine Politics of Drug Law Enforcement in Chicago
Using a wide array of official and unofficial data spanning two decades in the neighborhoods of Chicago, we explore connections between legal cynicism, the electoral regime of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and citizen calls for police assistance and police reports of drug crime. We find that the disproportionate concentration of legal cynicism about law enforcement in African American neighborhoods played a prominent and insufficiently understood role …
Procedural Justice Theory and Public Policy
This article introduces a scientific exchange over the status of procedural justice theory and its applicability to policing reform. The introduction notes the long history of sociolegal research on procedural justice and its emergence as a source of ideas for criminal justice reforms and police training programs. The article contrasts the positions taken by Nagin & Telep (2017) and Tyler (2017) . Nagin & Telep assert that it is premature to appl…
Economic insecurity and the rise in gun violence at US schools
Race, Justice, Policing, and the 2016 American Presidential Election
Scholars have long been interested in the intersection of race, crime, justice, and presidential politics, focusing particularly on the "southern strategy" and the "war on crime." A recent string of highly-publicized citizen deaths at the hands of police and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement have brought renewed visibility to this racially-driven intersection, and in particular to issues involving contact with and attitudes toward …
White-Collar Crimes of the Financial Crisis
The Militarization of Mass Incapacitation and Torture during the Sunni Insurgency and American Occupation of Iraq
While scholars and journalists have focused important attention on the recent militarization of intensive policing and imprisonment policies in the United States, there is little reciprocal recognition of how militarized versions of these policies were also exported for use in the occupation of Iraq. Intensive policing and imprisonment enabled the American-led and Shia-dominated Iraq Ministries of Defense and Interior along with U.S. forces to pl…
The Theory of Legal Cynicism and Sunni Insurgent Violence in Post-Invasion Iraq
We elaborate a cultural framing theory of legal cynicism-previously used to account for neighborhood variation in Chicago homicides-to explain Arab Sunni victimization and insurgent attacks during the U.S. post-invasion occupation of Iraq. Legal cynicism theory has an unrecognized power to explain collective and interpersonal violence in international as well as U.S. settings. We expand on how "double and linked" roles of state and non-state acto…
Mass Imprisonment and Its Consequences
Iraq and the Crimes of Aggressive War
From the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib to unnecessary military attacks on civilians, this book is an account of the violations of international criminal law committed during the United States invasion of Iraq. Taking stock of the entire war, it uniquely documents the overestimation of the successes and underestimation of the failings of the Surge and Awakening policies. The authors show how an initial cynical framing of the American war led …
Latvijas emigrantu kopienas
Monogrāfija izstrādāta un izdota ar Eiropas Sociālā fonda finansiālu atbalstu projekta «Latvijas emigrantu kopienas: nacionālā identitāte, transnacionālās attiecības un diasporas politika» (vienošanās Nr. 2013/0055/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/13/APIA/VIAA/040) ietvaros
Race, Ethnicity, and Youth Perceptions of Criminal Injustice
This paper advances a comparative conflict theory of racial and ethnic similarities and differences in youth perceptions of criminal injustice. We use HLM models to test six conflict hypotheses with data from more than 18,000 Chicago public school students. At the micro-level African American youth are more vulnerable to police contacts than are Latinos, who are more at risk than whites, and there is a corresponding gradient in minority group per…
Extra-Legal Attributes and Criminal Sentencing
Nearly half a century after Thorsten Sellin (1928) first introduced the topic for research, the issue of discrimination in judicial sentencing is still very much with us. Thus, Richard Quinney (1970: 142), among the more provocative critics of our system of criminal justice, observes that Obviously judicial decisions are not made uniformly. Decisions are made according to a host of extra-legal factors, including the age of the offender, his race,…
New Kid in Town
Les AA. etudient l'impact des demenagements sur la vie des familles et plus particulierement sur la reussite scolaire des enfants. Ils presentent un certain nombre de donnees collectees a Toronto, au Canada, entre 1976 et 1989. Ils s'efforcent de dresser une typologie des demenagements effectues par les familles et leur frequence. Ils examinent l'influence en ce domaine d'un certain nombre de facteurs comme la structure familiale, le statut socio…
Changing Conceptions of Race
Theories based on static and simplistic conceptions of the social significance of race fail to account for anomalous research findings and confuse our understanding of race-related outcomes. To substantiate this argument, an analysis is presented of the effects of changing conceptions of race and drugs on sentencing outcomes during a modern anti-drug crusade. This crusade involved a compromise between conservative and liberal impulses in which we…
Destiny and Drift
I combine the concept of drift, drawn from social control theory, and a life course conceptualization to elaborate a paradigmatic model to study cultural stratification. I apply this model in a thirteen-year panel study to examine the effects of adolescent subcultural preferences on later adult status attainments. Adolescents adrift from parental and educational control are more likely than those with more controls to develop mild or more serious…
Race, Class, and the Perception of Criminal Injustice in America
The results of two research literatures, one dealing with criminal sentencing and the other with public ranking of crime seriousness, have raised doubts that conflict exists in American society about issues of criminal justice. This paper offers a different and more direct approach to this issue by analyzing public perceptions of criminal injustice and by assessing the capacity of conflict theory to explain them. Our analysis is based on a nation…
Sociological Criminology and the Mythology of Hispanic Immigration and Crime
Our sociological knowledge of crime is fragmented and ineffective in challenging and correcting mistaken public perceptions, for example, linking immigration and crime. These misperceptions are perpetuated by government reports of growing numbers of Hispanic immigrants in U.S. prisons. However, Hispanic immigrants are disproportionately young males who regardless of citizenship are at greater risk of criminal involvement. They are also more vulne…
Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment for Children, Communities, and Prisoners
Analyses of the effects of America's experiment with vastly increased use of imprisonment as a penal sanction typically focus on crime reduction and public spending. Little attention has been paid to collateral effects. Imprisonment significantly reduces later employment rates and incomes of exprisoners. In many urban communities, large fractions of young men attain prison records and are thus made less able to contribute to their communities and…
The Class Structure of Gender and Delinquency
Though seldom considered together, class and gender are among the most frequently analyzed correlates of delinquency today. This paper formulates and test a neo-Marxian, class-based, power control theory of gender and delinquency. Using this theory and a prediction made by Bonger more than a half-century ago, the article demonstrates that the relationship between gender and common forms of delinquency declines with each step down the class struct…
Ceremonial Justice
Journal Article Ceremonial Justice: Crime and Punishment in a Loosely Coupled System Get access John Hagan, John Hagan University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar John D. Hewitt, John D. Hewitt Ball State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Duane F. Alwin Duane F. Alwin Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Goo…
Incarceration and Intergenerational Social Exclusion
This article explores intergenerational implications, specifically the troubled transitions of the children of incarcerated fathers from adolescence to adulthood. Although crime rates have decreased annually since the early 1990s, the social exclusion of fathers through imprisonment has increased, as has the further exclusion of young adults through homelessness, health-care uninsuredness, and political nonparticipation. Our latent class analysis…
Class in the Household
This paper extends a power-control theory of common delinquent behavior developed by Hagan, Gillis, and Simpson in 1985. It does so by bringing the class analysis of delinquency into the household, using a new model of class relations based on the relative positions of husbands and wives in the workplace. In patriarchal families, wives have little power relative to husbands, daughters have little freedom relative to sons, and daughters are less d…
The Mass Incarceration of Parents in America
The authors discuss social selection, stigmatization, and socialization/strain theoretical explanations for the intergenerational influences of parental incarceration on their children. Results with national survey data reveal that net of selection factors, paternal imprisonment decreases the educational attainment of children in emerging adulthood. While this pattern is found across race/ethnicity, the results in combination with disproportionat…
The Social Embeddedness of Crime and Unemployment
A missing piece in the literature that links crime and unemployment is an understanding of the proximate causes of joblessness in the lives of individuals. Granovetter has demonstrated with his concept of social embeddedness that early employment contacts can enhance the prospects of getting a job and subsequent occupational mobility. The alternative implication is that youths who are embedded in criminal contexts can become isolated from the lik…
The Sexual Stratification of Social Control
This paper outlines an historically situated, gender-based perspective on crime and delinquency. The perspective is stated in prc)positional form and tested with data on juvenile delinquency. The fundamental propositions assert that there is a sexually stratified inverse relationship between structurally differentiated processes of social control, such that women are more frequently the instruments and objects of informal social controls, while m…
Raising the Bar
Controversy surrounds the selection of women and men for partnerships in law firms. Two structural theories explain the greater success of men in achieving partnership. Human capital theory emphasizes investment choices and productivity; gender stratification theory highlights institutional constraints and bias. The authors incorporate Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital perspective, which emphasizes both tangible structural sources of social capi…
Punishment Regimes and the Multilevel Effects of Parental Incarceration
The US prison boom has resulted in the mass incarceration of parents in the United States. We review recent scholarship on the relationship between parental incarceration and child inequality and social exclusion over the life course. We develop a multilevel social exclusion framework to stimulate future research on the effects of paternal and maternal incarceration. This framework is intergenerational in its focus on incarcerated parents and the…
Just Des(s)erts? The Racial Polarization of Perceptions of Criminal Injustice
Sociologists have long been interested in how reactions to deviance influence social order and consensus. However, classic statements on this subject present contrasting hypotheses. This article extends previous work by examining how the extensive media coverage of an interracial homicide influences public attitudes toward the criminal justice system. Initial results indicate that race, education, and police contact directly effect perceptions of…
Race and policing in the 2016 presidential election
A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police sparked mass protests, received extensive media coverage, and fueled a new civil rights movement in the years leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Both major party nominees campaigned on issues of race and policing in different ways. Drawing on colorblind racism theories and the history of law‐and‐order politics, we explore how views of race relations and the police were as…
The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur
Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes …
The Differential Sentencing of White-Collar Offenders in Ten Federal District Courts
While sociologist have long debated the relationship between the status characteristics of criminal offenders and the sentences they receive, they have done so with data sets drawn from state courts whose prosecutorial resources are focused almost entirely on low status defendants. Qualitative and quantitative data analyzed in this paper are drawn from ten federal district courts whose statutes and resources provide greater potential for the pros…
In and Out of Harm's Way
Homeless youth establish a variety of relationships with people they meet on the street. These associations generate different levels of the intangible resources of trust, commitment, and reciprocity that contribute to a person's social capital. We argue that the relationships homeless youth describe as “street families” resemble the fictive kin common among people who have limited resources, and that these relationships are a greater source of s…
Youth Violence and the End of Adolescence
American youth experience high levels of violence, and increasingly the U.S. public policy response is to punish young perpetrators of violence through waivers and transfers from juvenile to adult courts. Adolescence is a time of expanding vulnerabilities and exposures to violence that can be self-destructive as well as destructive of others. Such violence can involve intimate relationships or strangers, and in addition to being perpetrators or v…
When Crime Pays
Several theoretical traditions offer insights into individual success in conventional activities. We extend this work, suggesting that explanations of success also apply to crime: although prosperity in licit or illicit activities has several unique antecedents, success in either endeavor is influenced by common faactors. Most research on conventional success focuses on the effects of human and social capital, and criminal forms of these are impo…
Intergenerational Educational Effects of Mass Imprisonment in America
In some American schools, about a fifth of the fathers have spent time in prison during their child's primary education. We examine how variation across schools in the aggregation and concentration of the mass imprisonment of fathers is associated with their own children's intergenerational educational outcomes and 'spills over' into the attainments of other students. We assess the association of this interinstitutional and intergenerational 'pri…
The Design of Conrad's The Secret Agent
One of the problems of The Secret Agent, as of Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, is the extent to which Conrad succeeds in fusing into an organic whole a great number of apparently detached scenes and characters. Obviously the domestic tragedy of the Verlocs is the core of the plot, in terms of which many of the other characters can be accounted for: Mr. Vladimir precipitates the bombing, Karl Yundt's ravings excite Stevie's heated imagination, th…
Employers, Trade Unions and the First Victorian Factory Acts
worked. Many of these girls were juveniles; in the ill-ventilated workrooms of Bailarais clothing industry,1 they worked up to eighteen hours a day for miserly wages.2 As the Ballarat Courier published letter after letter of sympathy, the local Early Closing Association reversed an earlier decision,8 and requested Major Smith to meet a deputation 'on the subject of intro ducing a Bill in the next session to limit the hours of labour of all sewing…
The D.A.V., 'Trades' and 'Labour' in the Seventies
The Shooting Party, Čexov's Early Novel
An Incident at the Dawn
Writing Australian Trade Union History
Some trade unions have been conspicuous for inspiring intense loyal ties, and exciting men to extraordinary personal sacrifice. Coal-miners, seamen and watersiders have been involved in dramatic public action, and their histories lend themselves to epic treatment. Other unions have fought their fight in less conspicuous ways, and the sacrifices of their members have taken a less obviously dramatic form. The very absence of public record has been …
A Pattern of Character Development in War and Peace
It is, or ought be, one of the scandals of modern criticism in Englishspeaking countries that exist so few attempts analyze in detail the structure and artistry of Tolstoj's War and Peace. From at least the time of Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Percy Lubbock, and E. M. Forster the myth has persisted in many quarters that Tolstoj simply does not require such analysis. Because the great length of War and Peace and its multitude of characters and inc…
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume Three, 1851-1890, A-C
Labour and Industry in Australia, Vols. I-IV
Conceptual Deficiencies of an Interactionist Perspectlve in “Deviance”
Land Labour and Gold
Piece Work and Some of Its Consequences in the Printing and Coal Mining Industries in Australia, 1850-1930
Protestantism and Social Reform in New South Wales 1890-1910
Labelling and Deviance
Discussion begins with a review of three major concerns of the labelling perspective in deviance: (1) locating the social origins of stigmatic labels; (2) documenting the application of these labels to selected populations; and (3) assessing the consequences of the labelling process for the recipients' future conduct. It is suggested that the latter concern is the most dramatic aspect of the labelling perspective. Two assumptions accompanying thi…
Extra-Legal Attributes and Criminal Sentencing
Nearly half a century after Thorsten Sellin (1928) first introduced the topic for research, the issue of discrimination in judicial sentencing is still very much with us. Thus, Richard Quinney (1970: 142), among the more provocative critics of our system of criminal justice, observes that Obviously judicial decisions are not made uniformly. Decisions are made according to a host of extra-legal factors, including the age of the offender, his race,…
Crime and Criminalization
Law, Order and Sentencing
Sentencing data are analyzed in a test of the hypothesis that judicial attitudes toward and interact with offender attributes to produce disparities in disposition. Although an interaction effect is observed, its form varies from common conception. Judges strongly favoring and sentence primarily on the basis of legal definitions of offense seriousness. Judges less concerned about the maintenance of law and order similarly emphasize offense seriou…
Work and Teaching Machines as Delinquency Prevention Tools
Carefully evaluated delinquency prevention programs have had little impact on their subjects, at least in terms of deterring official delinquency. Few projects meet the requirements of a controlled experiment, and fewer still have a follow-up to assess the long-term impact. This paper presents an analysis of the long-term impact of the Opportunities for Youth Project, which utilized two experimental variables: (1) a supervised work program and (2…
Setting the Record Straight Toward the Reformulation of an Interactionist Perspective in Deviance
The Social and Legal Construction of Criminal Justice
Issues associated with conflict, interactionist, and organizational perspectives on criminal justice are examined. These perspectives are then applied in a study of the pre-sentencing process. Data collected in a western Canadian province indicate a division in the judicial wisdom regarding the use of probation officers, as advisors, in the pre-sentencing process. An analysis of cases in which pre-sentence recommendations are requested reveals an…
Law, Order and Sentencing
Authors' Reply
The Sociology of Law and Order
J. H. Scullin
The Labelling of Deviance
Sociology (173 works) · Political science (159 works) · Criminology (140 works) · Law (115 works) · Psychology (96 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (84 works) · Law (75 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (58 works) · Social Psychology (43 works) · Economics (41 works)