Ben Feldmeyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3797884 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Feldmeyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Feldmeyer |
| SIGNATURE | BEN FELDMEYER |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cincinnati |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6703-1045 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 281 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Collective Efficacy and Crime: Time-Variant Analyses of Los Angeles Neighborhoods, 2000 to 2008
Collective efficacy is a prominent theoretical framework guiding community and crime research. Cross-sectional analyses provide consistent support. However, collective efficacy is a theory of dynamic processes that warrants longitudinal assessment. The current study addresses this research gap by assessing the impact of collective efficacy on community rates of household robbery, child victimization, and delinquency over time (2000 to 2008), usin…
Immigration and serious gang violence: Assessing the immigrant revitalization thesis on urban gang shootings
Over the past few decades, extensive empirical evidence has supported the immigrant revitalization thesis, demonstrating that immigration is often associated with reductions in community crime. However, debate over the relationship between immigration and crime has increasingly grown in public and political discourse with many politicians claiming immigration fuels gang violence. Yet remarkably little research has examined immigration effects on …
Four Pillars of the Immigration-Crime Myth: A Summary of U.S. Public Opinion and Research on Immigration-Crime Rhetoric
Political rhetoric on immigration has increasingly framed it as a threat to public safety—fueling aggressive immigration enforcement strategies, including the expanded use of federal agents, mass deportations, and strict border controls. In particular, the immigration-crime narrative has been built on four key themes or “pillars,” which suggest that immigration (1) increases crime, (2) fuels gang violence, (3) is responsible for drug problems, an…
The New Dawn of NIBRS: Race/Ethnicity and Crime Patterns and the NIBRS Transition
In 2021, the FBI sought to retire the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Summary Reporting System (SRS) and fully transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). However, it is unclear how this transition to a “NIBRS-only” system might impact statistics on race/ethnicity and crime in the United States. To date, research offers few comparisons of race/ethnicity and crime patterns in NIBRS versus traditional UCR reporting systems. In ad…
Modeling Matters: Comparing the Presumptive Sentence Versus Base Offense Level Approaches for Estimating Racial/Ethnic Effects on Federal Sentencing
Covid-19, Race, and Crime: An Early Look at Racial Disparities in U.S. Arrest Data throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic
Background: This study explores how arrests changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic across race. Daily life changed for everyone across the country with the onset of the pandemic, and early works have shown that crime changed in this period. Method: Official arrest data were pulled from the Indiana State Police database for several violent and property crimes covering 26 counties. Data were gathered from 2017 to 2021 for a comparison of pre-…
Criminal court responses to the modern opioid and methamphetamine twindemic
Taking the long view: A temporal assessment of minority threat theory in 21st century sentencing
Staying under the Radar? Immigration Effects on Overdose Deaths and the Impact of Sanctuary Jurisdictions
Growing political and public rhetoric claim that immigration has contributed to drug crime and the overdose crisis of the 21st century. However, research to date has given little attention to immigration–overdose relationships, and almost no work has examined the ways that the sanctuary status of locales influences these connections. The current study draws on the immigrant revitalization perspective and Brayne’s (2014) systems avoidance theory t…
Public Opinion about America's Opioid Crisis: Severity, Sources, and Solutions in Context
The opioid crisis has claimed more than a half-million deaths over the past two decades and is one of the leading causes of injury deaths in the United States. The current study examines: 1) public opinion on the severity of the opioid crisis in terms of lives lost compared to other fatal social events, 2) opinions on who has been most affected by the opioid crisis, and the accuracy of these perceptions, 3) opinions on who is responsible or "to b…
Sentencing Add-Ons and Implications for Disparities in a Guidelines State
This study examined whether and how discretionary sentencing add-ons (i.e., secondary charges, victim injury points, firearms/weapons points, drug trafficking enhancements) contribute to disparities. We examined add-ons that increase sentencing points and so contribute to a defendant “scoring to prison.” We analyzed: (1) the degree to which add-ons explain racial and ethnic disparities in imprisonment (mediation); and (2) whether add-ons are more…
Unpacking the Theory of African American Offending: A Qualitative Exploration of Racial Socialization Processes and Their Effects on African American Male College Students
In 2011, Dr. James Unnever and Dr. Shaun Gabbidon introduced a Theory of African American Offending, which posits that African American offending is motivated in part by common experiences of racism. They argue that these experiences contribute to a shared worldview that includes both an accumulation of bad feelings toward pro-social institutions and legal cynicism toward the justice system, leading to decreased social bonds and a greater predile…
More immigrants, less death: An analysis of immigration effects on county‐level drug overdose deaths, 2000–2015
Public and political discourse has routinely suggested that immigration is linked to higher community levels of violence and drug problems. In contrast to these claims, research has consistently shown that immigration is not associated with greater violence at the macro level. However, few studies have examined the links between immigration flows and community drug problems. The current study seeks to address this gap in research by providing a c…
Racial Invariance or Asian Advantage: Comparing the Macro-Level Predictors of Violence Across Asian, White, and Black Populations
Racial invariance in rural and urban contexts: Comparing the structural sources of Black, White, and Latinx homicide in rural and urban counties, 2000 and 2010
Structural disadvantage has long been empirically linked to violent crime across different race/ethnic groups. More recently conceptualized as “racial invariance,” observed racial differences in crime rates are hypothesized to be the result of disparities in community-level structural conditions. However, most investigations into this hypothesis have focused on urban settings, with limited attention to rural contexts. The current study seeks to f…
The Community Determinants of Death: Comparing the Macro-Level Predictors of Overdose, Homicide, and Suicide Deaths, 2000 to 2015
A growing body of research has begun to identify the social and ecological predictors of community overdose rates. However, questions remain about these relationships, and it is unclear whether the predictors of community overdose concentrations mirror those of other fatal social problems, such as homicide and suicide. Drawing on three leading ecological theories of overdose concentrations, the present study provides a longitudinal macro-level an…
Race, ethnicity, and social change: The democratization of middle‐class crime
Since the mid‐1970s, the percentage of non‐White people convicted of white‐collar type crimes in the federal judicial system has been growing steadily. In 2015, non‐Whites accounted for more than half of all convictions for certain white‐collar type crimes, but the increase in non‐White participation has not occurred evenly across all race and ethnic groups. Asians and Latinos have increased their participation in white‐collar crime more so than …
Economic Competition and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing: A Test of Economic Threat Perspective
Economic threat arguments within the broader racial/ethnic threat theory suggest that economic competition between minorities and Whites encourages the majority group to apply formal social controls on minorities to maintain their advantaged positions. Prior sentencing research has given limited attention to economic threat and has only done so using cross-sectional measures, which does not capture changing economic circumstances (a key element o…
Immigration effects on crime in a midwestern, nontraditional destination: A neighborhood-level analysis of Cincinnati, Ohio
A wide-ranging body of research on the immigration-crime relationship has shown that immigration does not increase community crime levels. However, most prior studies have focused on traditional immigrant destinations or border cities. This study addresses several gaps in this line of research by exploring immigration effects on neighborhood levels of Violent and Property Index crimes for the 2008 to 2014 period in Cincinnati, Ohio – a Midwestern…
Immigration, Collective Efficacy, Social Ties, and Violence: Unpacking the Mediating Mechanisms in Immigration Effects on Neighborhood-Level Violence
An extensive body of research indicates that community levels of crime are either unaffected by levels of immigration or that immigration is associated with lower, not higher, rates of crime. According to the "immigrant revitalization" perspective, the protective effects of immigration are largely indirect, working through neighborhood-level processes, such as social networks, social capital, and collective efficacy. However, these mediating effe…
Immigration and Violent Crime in California, 1980-2012: Contextualization by Temporal Period and Race/Ethnicity
In light of concerns surrounding the alleged link between immigration and crime, our goal is to investigate trends in violent crime rates by race/ethnicity within and between counties with differing degrees of immigration. Using unique data from California for the 1980 to 2012 period, we find (1) that after an initial decade of stability, violence rates fell beginning in the 1990s during a period of rapid immigration growth. Additionally, (2) thi…
Narrating Mother Identities From Prison
Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied …
Religious Contexts and Violence in Emerging and Traditional Immigrant Destinations
Amidst both a resurgent interest in the impact of religion on social problems like crime, including its contextual effects, as well as scholarship directed toward the immigration-crime intersection, the current study examines how different religious traditions impact known violent offending uniquely in traditional versus emerging immigrant destinations. To do so, we employ negative binomial models regressing homicides, robberies, and aggravated a…
Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge
Revisiting Violence in New Destinations: Exploring the Drop in Latino Homicide Victimization in Emerging Immigrant Communities, 2000 to 2010
The turn of the twentieth century brought important demographic shifts among Latinos, including increasing settlement of both foreign-born and domestic Latinos into “new destination” regions and communities with little previous exposure to such populations. In turn, some scholars find higher rates of Latino victimization in these new destination communities, but there is little empirical research exploring whether and how these same locales fare …
Scope and Conceptual Issues in Testing the Race–crime Invariance Thesis: Black, White, and Hispanic Comparisons
Our goal in this article is to contribute conceptually and empirically to assessments of the racial invariance hypothesis, which posits that structural disadvantage predicts violent crime in the same way for all racial and ethnic groups. Conceptually, we elucidate the scope of the racial invariance hypothesis and clarify the criteria used for evaluating it. Empirically, we use 1999–2001 averaged arrest data from California and New York to extend …
Immigration and violence: The offsetting effects of immigrant concentration on Latino violence
The Effects of Racial/Ethnic Segregation on Latino and Black Homicide
Racial/ethnic residential segregation has been shown to contribute to violence and have harmful consequences for minority groups. However, research examining the segregation–crime relationship has focused almost exclusively on blacks and whites while largely ignoring Latinos and other race/ethnic groups and has rarely considered potential mediators (e.g., concentrated disadvantage) in segregation–violence relationships. This study uses year 2000 …
Latino immigration and White, Black, and Latino violent crime: A comparison of traditional and non-traditional immigrant destinations
Assessing Trends in Women's Violence via Data Triangulation: Arrests, Convictions, Incarcerations, and Victim Reports
Constructionist theories suggest the national rise in female violence arrests may be policy-generated because arrest statistics are produced by violent behavior and changing official responses (e.g., net-widening enforcement policies). Normative theories attribute the rise to female behavior changes (e.g., in response to increased freedoms or hardships). We examine whether any narrowing of the arrest gender gap is borne out across offense types o…
Enclaves of opportunity or 'ghettos of last resort?' Assessing the effects of immigrant segregation on violent crime rates
Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge
Racial/Ethnic Composition and Violence: Size‐of‐Place Variations in Percent Black and Percent Latino Effects on Violence Rates
According to racial invariance positions and mainstream sociological perspectives on race and crime, race differences in structural conditions should account for most if not all of the racial composition (or percent black) effect on aggregate-level violence rates. However, prior research (mostly conducted prior to 1990) generally provides mixed or contrary evidence for this position, showing instead that greater concentrations of blacks are linke…
More immigrants, less death: An analysis of immigration effects on county‐level drug overdose deaths, 2000–2015
Public and political discourse has routinely suggested that immigration is linked to higher community levels of violence and drug problems. In contrast to these claims, research has consistently shown that immigration is not associated with greater violence at the macro level. However, few studies have examined the links between immigration flows and community drug problems. The current study seeks to address this gap in research by providing a c…
Immigration, Collective Efficacy, Social Ties, and Violence: Unpacking the Mediating Mechanisms in Immigration Effects on Neighborhood-Level Violence
An extensive body of research indicates that community levels of crime are either unaffected by levels of immigration or that immigration is associated with lower, not higher, rates of crime. According to the "immigrant revitalization" perspective, the protective effects of immigration are largely indirect, working through neighborhood-level processes, such as social networks, social capital, and collective efficacy. However, these mediating effe…
Narrating Mother Identities From Prison
Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied …
A Shot of Morality? Hispanic Immigration, Religious Contextual Characteristics, and Violence
Extant research often finds that the relative size of the Hispanic immigrant population is inversely associated with rates of crime at the macro level. Yet, few studies have empirically examined the indirect pathways through which Hispanic immigration might impact crime, especially sociocultural characteristics such as religious context. Utilizing data on known violent crimes from over 600 U.S. counties in 2010 paired with religious contextual da…
Language Use and Violence: Assessing the Relationship Between Linguistic Context and Macrolevel Violence
Scholars have produced a sizable body of research assessing the macrolevel links between immigration and crime. However, researchers have given far less attention to related questions about the effects of language use on aggregate levels of violence. The current study addresses this gap in research by exploring the ways that patterns of language use—specifically, language heterogeneity and Spanish‐language concentration—are related to year 2010 s…
Public Opinion about America's Opioid Crisis: Severity, Sources, and Solutions in Context
The opioid crisis has claimed more than a half-million deaths over the past two decades and is one of the leading causes of injury deaths in the United States. The current study examines: 1) public opinion on the severity of the opioid crisis in terms of lives lost compared to other fatal social events, 2) opinions on who has been most affected by the opioid crisis, and the accuracy of these perceptions, 3) opinions on who is responsible or "to b…
The Community Determinants of Death: Comparing the Macro-Level Predictors of Overdose, Homicide, and Suicide Deaths, 2000 to 2015
A growing body of research has begun to identify the social and ecological predictors of community overdose rates. However, questions remain about these relationships, and it is unclear whether the predictors of community overdose concentrations mirror those of other fatal social problems, such as homicide and suicide. Drawing on three leading ecological theories of overdose concentrations, the present study provides a longitudinal macro-level an…
Economic Competition and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing: A Test of Economic Threat Perspective
Economic threat arguments within the broader racial/ethnic threat theory suggest that economic competition between minorities and Whites encourages the majority group to apply formal social controls on minorities to maintain their advantaged positions. Prior sentencing research has given limited attention to economic threat and has only done so using cross-sectional measures, which does not capture changing economic circumstances (a key element o…
Revisiting Violence in New Destinations: Exploring the Drop in Latino Homicide Victimization in Emerging Immigrant Communities, 2000 to 2010
The turn of the twentieth century brought important demographic shifts among Latinos, including increasing settlement of both foreign-born and domestic Latinos into “new destination” regions and communities with little previous exposure to such populations. In turn, some scholars find higher rates of Latino victimization in these new destination communities, but there is little empirical research exploring whether and how these same locales fare …
Race, ethnicity, and social change: The democratization of middle‐class crime
Since the mid‐1970s, the percentage of non‐White people convicted of white‐collar type crimes in the federal judicial system has been growing steadily. In 2015, non‐Whites accounted for more than half of all convictions for certain white‐collar type crimes, but the increase in non‐White participation has not occurred evenly across all race and ethnic groups. Asians and Latinos have increased their participation in white‐collar crime more so than …
Religious Contexts and Violence in Emerging and Traditional Immigrant Destinations
Amidst both a resurgent interest in the impact of religion on social problems like crime, including its contextual effects, as well as scholarship directed toward the immigration-crime intersection, the current study examines how different religious traditions impact known violent offending uniquely in traditional versus emerging immigrant destinations. To do so, we employ negative binomial models regressing homicides, robberies, and aggravated a…
The Environmental Impact of Immigration: An Analysis of the Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Air Pollution Levels
Staying under the Radar? Immigration Effects on Overdose Deaths and the Impact of Sanctuary Jurisdictions
Growing political and public rhetoric claim that immigration has contributed to drug crime and the overdose crisis of the 21st century. However, research to date has given little attention to immigration–overdose relationships, and almost no work has examined the ways that the sanctuary status of locales influences these connections. The current study draws on the immigrant revitalization perspective and Brayne’s (2014) systems avoidance theory t…
Racial Invariance or Asian Advantage: Comparing the Macro-Level Predictors of Violence Across Asian, White, and Black Populations
Covid-19, Race, and Crime: An Early Look at Racial Disparities in U.S. Arrest Data throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic
Background: This study explores how arrests changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic across race. Daily life changed for everyone across the country with the onset of the pandemic, and early works have shown that crime changed in this period. Method: Official arrest data were pulled from the Indiana State Police database for several violent and property crimes covering 26 counties. Data were gathered from 2017 to 2021 for a comparison of pre-…
Assessing Trends in Women's Violence via Data Triangulation: Arrests, Convictions, Incarcerations, and Victim Reports
Constructionist theories suggest the national rise in female violence arrests may be policy-generated because arrest statistics are produced by violent behavior and changing official responses (e.g., net-widening enforcement policies). Normative theories attribute the rise to female behavior changes (e.g., in response to increased freedoms or hardships). We examine whether any narrowing of the arrest gender gap is borne out across offense types o…
Immigration and violence: The offsetting effects of immigrant concentration on Latino violence
Scope and Conceptual Issues in Testing the Race–crime Invariance Thesis: Black, White, and Hispanic Comparisons
Our goal in this article is to contribute conceptually and empirically to assessments of the racial invariance hypothesis, which posits that structural disadvantage predicts violent crime in the same way for all racial and ethnic groups. Conceptually, we elucidate the scope of the racial invariance hypothesis and clarify the criteria used for evaluating it. Empirically, we use 1999–2001 averaged arrest data from California and New York to extend …
The Effects of Racial/Ethnic Segregation on Latino and Black Homicide
Racial/ethnic residential segregation has been shown to contribute to violence and have harmful consequences for minority groups. However, research examining the segregation–crime relationship has focused almost exclusively on blacks and whites while largely ignoring Latinos and other race/ethnic groups and has rarely considered potential mediators (e.g., concentrated disadvantage) in segregation–violence relationships. This study uses year 2000 …
Racial/Ethnic Threat and Federal Sentencing
This study examines whether federal sentencing decisions are influenced by the racial/ethnic composition of federal court districts. Multilevel models of individual cases within federal judicial districts show that Black defendants receive moderately longer sentences than Whites, and that Hispanics and Whites receive similar sentences. These race/ethnicity effects on sentence length are found to vary across federal districts but not as predicted …
Reassessing Trends in Black Violent Crime, 1980-2008: Sorting Out the “Hispanic Effect” in Uniform Crime Reports Arrests, National Crime Victimization Survey Offender Estimates, and U.S. Prisoner Coun…
Recent studies suggest a decline in the relative Black effect on violent crime in recent decades and interpret this decline as resulting from greater upward mobility among African Americans during the past several decades. However, other assessments of racial stratification in American society suggest at least as much durability as change in Black social mobility since the 1980s. Our goal is to assess how patterns of racial disparity in violent c…
The Environmental Impact of Immigration: An Analysis of the Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Air Pollution Levels
Racial/Ethnic Composition and Violence: Size‐of‐Place Variations in Percent Black and Percent Latino Effects on Violence Rates
According to racial invariance positions and mainstream sociological perspectives on race and crime, race differences in structural conditions should account for most if not all of the racial composition (or percent black) effect on aggregate-level violence rates. However, prior research (mostly conducted prior to 1990) generally provides mixed or contrary evidence for this position, showing instead that greater concentrations of blacks are linke…
Latino immigration and White, Black, and Latino violent crime: A comparison of traditional and non-traditional immigrant destinations
Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Threat: Is There a New Criminal Threat on State Sentencing?
Objectives: The racial threat perspective argues that racial minorities are subjected to greater punishment in places with large or growing minority populations. However, prior research has focused largely on Black populations while devoting limited attention to potential “Latino threat” or “immigrant threat” effects. To address these gaps, this study explores the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on sentence disposition (jail, pris…
Assessing the Sources of Asian Versus Non-Asian Disparities in Delinquency
Research on race/ethnicity and crime has often overlooked the patterns and predictors of Asian American offending, particularly compared to those of other racial/ethnic groups. The current study addresses this gap in the research using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to assess the degree to which social factors drawn from criminological theories are able to account for Asian versus non-Asian (White, Black, Latino, a…
A Shot of Morality? Hispanic Immigration, Religious Contextual Characteristics, and Violence
Extant research often finds that the relative size of the Hispanic immigrant population is inversely associated with rates of crime at the macro level. Yet, few studies have empirically examined the indirect pathways through which Hispanic immigration might impact crime, especially sociocultural characteristics such as religious context. Utilizing data on known violent crimes from over 600 U.S. counties in 2010 paired with religious contextual da…
Enclaves of opportunity or 'ghettos of last resort?' Assessing the effects of immigrant segregation on violent crime rates
Language Use and Violence: Assessing the Relationship Between Linguistic Context and Macrolevel Violence
Scholars have produced a sizable body of research assessing the macrolevel links between immigration and crime. However, researchers have given far less attention to related questions about the effects of language use on aggregate levels of violence. The current study addresses this gap in research by exploring the ways that patterns of language use—specifically, language heterogeneity and Spanish‐language concentration—are related to year 2010 s…
Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge
Revisiting Violence in New Destinations: Exploring the Drop in Latino Homicide Victimization in Emerging Immigrant Communities, 2000 to 2010
The turn of the twentieth century brought important demographic shifts among Latinos, including increasing settlement of both foreign-born and domestic Latinos into “new destination” regions and communities with little previous exposure to such populations. In turn, some scholars find higher rates of Latino victimization in these new destination communities, but there is little empirical research exploring whether and how these same locales fare …
Immigration and Violent Crime in California, 1980-2012: Contextualization by Temporal Period and Race/Ethnicity
In light of concerns surrounding the alleged link between immigration and crime, our goal is to investigate trends in violent crime rates by race/ethnicity within and between counties with differing degrees of immigration. Using unique data from California for the 1980 to 2012 period, we find (1) that after an initial decade of stability, violence rates fell beginning in the 1990s during a period of rapid immigration growth. Additionally, (2) thi…
Narrating Mother Identities From Prison
Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied …
Religious Contexts and Violence in Emerging and Traditional Immigrant Destinations
Amidst both a resurgent interest in the impact of religion on social problems like crime, including its contextual effects, as well as scholarship directed toward the immigration-crime intersection, the current study examines how different religious traditions impact known violent offending uniquely in traditional versus emerging immigrant destinations. To do so, we employ negative binomial models regressing homicides, robberies, and aggravated a…
Immigration, Collective Efficacy, Social Ties, and Violence: Unpacking the Mediating Mechanisms in Immigration Effects on Neighborhood-Level Violence
An extensive body of research indicates that community levels of crime are either unaffected by levels of immigration or that immigration is associated with lower, not higher, rates of crime. According to the "immigrant revitalization" perspective, the protective effects of immigration are largely indirect, working through neighborhood-level processes, such as social networks, social capital, and collective efficacy. However, these mediating effe…
Immigration effects on crime in a midwestern, nontraditional destination: A neighborhood-level analysis of Cincinnati, Ohio
A wide-ranging body of research on the immigration-crime relationship has shown that immigration does not increase community crime levels. However, most prior studies have focused on traditional immigrant destinations or border cities. This study addresses several gaps in this line of research by exploring immigration effects on neighborhood levels of Violent and Property Index crimes for the 2008 to 2014 period in Cincinnati, Ohio – a Midwestern…
Race, ethnicity, and social change: The democratization of middle‐class crime
Since the mid‐1970s, the percentage of non‐White people convicted of white‐collar type crimes in the federal judicial system has been growing steadily. In 2015, non‐Whites accounted for more than half of all convictions for certain white‐collar type crimes, but the increase in non‐White participation has not occurred evenly across all race and ethnic groups. Asians and Latinos have increased their participation in white‐collar crime more so than …
Economic Competition and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Sentencing: A Test of Economic Threat Perspective
Economic threat arguments within the broader racial/ethnic threat theory suggest that economic competition between minorities and Whites encourages the majority group to apply formal social controls on minorities to maintain their advantaged positions. Prior sentencing research has given limited attention to economic threat and has only done so using cross-sectional measures, which does not capture changing economic circumstances (a key element o…
Sentencing Add-Ons and Implications for Disparities in a Guidelines State
This study examined whether and how discretionary sentencing add-ons (i.e., secondary charges, victim injury points, firearms/weapons points, drug trafficking enhancements) contribute to disparities. We examined add-ons that increase sentencing points and so contribute to a defendant “scoring to prison.” We analyzed: (1) the degree to which add-ons explain racial and ethnic disparities in imprisonment (mediation); and (2) whether add-ons are more…
Unpacking the Theory of African American Offending: A Qualitative Exploration of Racial Socialization Processes and Their Effects on African American Male College Students
In 2011, Dr. James Unnever and Dr. Shaun Gabbidon introduced a Theory of African American Offending, which posits that African American offending is motivated in part by common experiences of racism. They argue that these experiences contribute to a shared worldview that includes both an accumulation of bad feelings toward pro-social institutions and legal cynicism toward the justice system, leading to decreased social bonds and a greater predile…
Criminology (35 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (28 works) · Political science (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Demography (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Geography (17 works) · Ethnic group (16 works) · Immigration (16 works)