G Lafree
Biographic Data
| ID | 55819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Lafree |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Lafree |
| SIGNATURE | LAFREE G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8418-1440 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1026 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
The Cambridge Handbook on the Economics of Terrorism
Since the turn of the century, few issues have shaped political debate and policy-making more than terrorism. As a result, there has been a huge increase in the amount of academic research devoted to investigating the causes and consequences of terrorism. The Cambridge Handbook on the Economics of Terrorism is the first to present a state-of-the art survey of the economics of terrorism. It adopts a rational-choice perspective according to which t…
Mind the Gap: Institutional Capacity, Globalization, and the Discrepancy Between Criminal Justice and Health Homicide Data
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 governanc…
Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion. By Amy Adamczyk
Crime and Law Enforcement After Fatal Police Encounters: Differential Impacts of Freddie Gray’s Death Across Baltimore Neighborhoods
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 Ba…
Has Globalization Reduced Worldwide Terrorist Attacks
Policymakers and researchers have frequently assumed that worldwide globalization has increased terrorist attacks, especially following the 9/11 attacks. However, we argue that there are strong theoretical reasons to expect that globalization is instead associated with decreases in terrorism. There are surprisingly few direct empirical tests. Using annual data from a sample of 143 countries, from 1970 to 2018, we provide a systematic, cross-natio…
Understanding what violent street crime, globalization, and ice cream have in common
Research Summary In recent years, nutrition researchers have found that ice cream may have as many health benefits as low‐fat milk or yoghurt for those with diabetes or at risk of diabetes. Nonetheless, they have resisted reporting this finding to the media, the public, or other researchers. This observation got me thinking about how preconceived assumptions and biases affect social science in general and criminology in particular, are affected b…
The future of interpersonal violence research: Steps towards interdisciplinary integration
Interpersonal violence is a high-priority issue for the general public, policymakers, and academics. It is commonly defined as the use of physical force - threatened or actual - with the intent to cause harm or injury (Dahlberg & Krug, 2002 ), and can be contrasted with collective or political forms of violence. Its negative consequences range from immediate effects, such as personal harm and injury, to longer-term consequences for offenders, vic…
Comparing the Determinants of Worldwide Homicide and Terrorism
Over the past two decades, the study of terrorism has been increasingly integrated into mainstream criminology. Like other types of criminal behavior, terrorism can be divided into etiology (an emphasis on “breaking laws”) and criminal justice (an emphasis on “making laws” and “reacting toward the breaking of laws”). Moreover, like the study of crime, the study of terrorism is inherently multidisciplinary. Nevertheless, terrorism differs from mor…
Strengths and Weaknesses of Open Source Data for Studying Terrorism and Political Radicalization
Compared to studying other forms of illegal violence, terrorism research faces unique data challenges. Notably, consistent police data are generally lacking, victims often have no direct knowledge of attacks and are sometimes killed, and perpetrators are difficult to interview and are often unreliable sources. In the face of these data challenges, the increasing availability of open source data on terrorist attacks and perpetrators has profoundly…
Climate Change, Fish Production, and Maritime Piracy
Contemporary social science has produced little research on connections between climate change and crime. Nonetheless, much prior research suggests that economic insecurity may affect individual calculations of the cost and benefit of engaging in criminal behavior, and climate change is likely to have important economic consequences for professions like fishing that depend directly on the environment. In this paper, we test the possibility that c…
Toward a Criminology of Terrorism
The study of terrorism represents one of the major turning points in criminology of the twenty-first century. In the space of just two decades, research on terrorism and political extremism went from a relatively uncommon niche to a widely recognized criminological specialization. Terrorism research now appears in nearly all mainstream criminology journals; college courses on terrorism and political violence have been added to the curricula of mo…
Choosing Where to Fight: Do Social Networks Distinguish American Isis Foreign Fighters from Isis-Inspired Terrorists
Why did some American citizens choose to travel to fight in Syria and Iraq rather than engage in Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)-inspired terrorism in the United States? We conducted a social network analysis (SNA) on a sample ( n = 224) of extremists who either plotted ISIS-inspired attacks within the United States or attempted to travel to Syria or Iraq to join the group between 2013-2020. We test how network size, network interconnected…
Does Globalization Reduce Personal Violence? The Impact of International Trade on Cross-National Homicide Rates
While interest in globalization has continued to increase, few researchers have linked it to crime rates. However, if globalization has the characteristics suggested by either its supporters or detractors, it likely has a significant effect on cross-national violent crime rates. Supporters of the doux commerce (gentle commerce) thesis argue that increasing international trade decreases all types of violence, including homicide, by providing indiv…
In the shadow of 9/11: How the study of political extremism has reshaped criminology
White‐collar crime and illegal political extremism share several characteristics with relevance to criminology. Neither is associated with lower socioeconomic status individuals, both involve perpetrators that rarely see themselves as criminal, and both face unique data challenges. Following Edwin Sutherland's influential research, the study of white‐collar crime became a recognized specialization within criminology. Similarly, following the coor…
A Comparative Study of Initial Involvement in Gangs and Political Extremism
There is a paucity of research comparing gang members and domestic extremists and extant studies find few explicit linkages. Despite this, there remains a great deal of interest in possible similarities between these criminal groups. Driving this interest is the possibility of adapting policies and practices aimed at preventing entry into criminal groups. A critical first step to determining compatibility is to examine the circumstances of the in…
Micro and macro-level risk factors for extremism and terrorism: Toward a criminology of extremist violence
Over the past twenty years, research on political extremism and terrorism has become one of the fastest growing sub-fields within criminology. This rapid growth is reminiscent of the early years of criminology itself, characterized by energy, imagination and creativity but at the same time a specialization struggling to collect and analyze valid data, apply appropriate research methods and develop coherent theoretical frameworks. In this paper, w…
Counter‐terrorism policies in the Middle East: Why democracy has failed to reduce terrorism in the Middle East and why protecting human rights might be more successful
Most quantitative research examining predictors of country‐level terrorism have used worldwide samples which potentially obscures regional or country‐specific effects. This may be especially problematic for regions in which common predictors of political violence differ from what is expected based on worldwide patterns. In this paper we explore the possibility that this situation exists for several key predictors of terrorism in the Middle East s…
Who is more violent in extremist groups? A comparison of leaders and followers
Few prior studies have examined the extent to which the behavior and characteristics of political extremists are related to their position within radical groups. In this paper we concentrate on one of the most fundamental distinctions in groups: That between leaders and followers. Our main goal is to investigate the comparative propensity of leaders and followers to engage in political violence. In a sample of individuals who have committed ideol…
Social Learning and Social Control in the Off- and Online Pathways to Hate Crime and Terrorist Violence
Although recent years have seen a great increase in the study of hate crime and terrorism, there is limited research to date that explores connections between hate crime and terrorism. This study uses a qualitative case-study method to explore the competing criminological theories of social learning and social control to investigate their utility in explaining radicalization among hate and terrorist violent extremists. Our analysis demonstrates i…
Using Google and Twitter to Measure, Validate and Understand Views about Religion across Africa
Religion and Support for Political Violence among Christians and Muslims in Africa
Researchers have found consistently that religion reduces criminal behavior. Yet rising levels of political violence are frequently attributed to a new wave of religious terrorism. Our study seeks to reconcile this apparent discrepancy by studying the attitudes of people living in 34 African nations. Using data from the Afrobarometer survey and mixed modeling, we examine the influence of individual and collective religiosity for shaping civic eng…
Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America
In the past fifty years, street crime rates in America have increased eightfold. These increases were historically patterned, were often very rapid, and had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. Much of the crime explosion took place in a space of just ten years beginning in the early 1960s. Common explanations based on biological impulses, psychological drives, or slow-moving social indicators cannot explain the speed or timing of thes…
Government Policies for Counteracting Violent Extremism
It took the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and, more importantly, the four coordinated attacks of September 11, 2001, to produce substantial interest among criminologists in the empirical study of violent political extremism. In the past two decades, this situation has changed dramatically with research on political extremism now routinely appearing in major criminology outlets, theses and dissertations, and meetings…
Examining the utility of social control and social learning in the radicalization of violent and non-violent extremists
Research on radicalization to accept extremist ideologies has expanded dramatically over the last decade, particularly attempts to theorize pathways to violence. These models are complex, and contain aspects of key criminological frameworks including social learning and social control theories. At the same time, they do reconcile the inherent differences in these frameworks, requiring research to examine how these models could be combined and the…
Correlates of Violent Political Extremism in the United States
Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether…
Introducing the Global Terrorism Database
Compared to most types of criminal violence, terrorism poses special data collection challenges. In response, there has been growing interest in open source terrorist event data bases. One of the major problems with these data bases in the past is that they have been limited to international events—those involving a national or group of nationals from one country attacking targets physically located in another country. Past research shows that do…
The Effect of Sexual Stratification By Race on Official Reactions to Rape
Collins argues that sexual access, like other valuable commodities, is distributed according to relative power within a sexual stratification system. He predicts more serious official reactions to violations of the sexual stratification system in which men from less powerful groups sexually assault women from more powerful groups. Race continues to be an obvious correlate of stratified sexual access in America. But empirical studies have not asse…
Democracy and Crime: A Multilevel Analysis of Homicide Trends in Forty-Four Countries, 1950-2000
Despite simultaneous increases in democratization and violent crime rates in many countries during the second half of the twentieth century, the authors could find no prior studies that have directly examined possible connections between these two processes. The civilization perspective predicts that violent crime rates will decline along with the civilizing effects of democratization, the conflict perspective predicts that violent crime rates wi…
The Impact of British Counterterrorist Strategies on Political Violence in Northern Ireland: Comparing Deterrence and Backlash Models
Since philosophers Beccaria and Bentham, criminologists have been concerned with predicting how governmental attempts to maintain lawful behavior affect subsequent rates of criminal violence. In this article, we build on prior research to argue that governmental responses to a specific form of criminal violence—terrorism—may produce both a positive deterrence effect (i.e., reducing future incidence of prohibited behavior) and a negative backlash …
Declining Violent Crime Rates in the 1990s: Predicting Crime Booms and Busts
The United States in the 1990s has experienced the greatest sustained decline in violent crime rates since World War II-even though rates thus far have not fallen as rapidly as they increased during the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I review a set of exogenous and policy-related explanations for the earlier crime boom and for the crime bust of the 1990s. I argue that our understanding of crime trends is hampered by a lack of longitudin…
Quest for Significance and Violent Extremism: The Case of Domestic Radicalization
In the present study, we applied the quest for significance model of radicalization to explain the use of political violence. According to the model, when people experience loss of personal significance (e.g., due to social rejection, achievement failures, or abuse) the motivation to restore significance may push them toward the use of extreme means. We tested this prediction in a sample of individuals who have committed ideologically motivated c…
Still Separate and Unequal? A City-Level Analysis of the Black-White Gap in Homicide Arrests since 1960
More than four decades ago, the Kerner Report chronicled the violent disturbances of the 1960s and predicted that the United States was rapidly moving toward two racially separate and unequal societies. Resulting concerns about black and white inequality form a critical chapter in the history of sociological research. Few studies, however, explore trends in racial inequality in rates of violence. Has the gap between black and white violence rates…
The Effect of Changes in Intraracial Income Inequality and Educational Attainment on Changes in Arrest Rates for African Americans and Whites, 1957 to 1990
Rapid increases in crime in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s have been puzzling in that they seem to coincide with economic growth and increased educational opportunity for disadvantaged groups, especially African Americans. We argue that these increases in crime may be more understandable in their historical context: Much of the economic expansion during the postwar period and the unprecedented gains in educational attainment for A…
Correlates of Violent Political Extremism in the United States
Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether…
Testing a Rational Choice Model of Airline Hijackings
Using data that combines information from the Federal Aviation Administration, the RAND Corporation and a newly developed database on global terrorist activity, we are able to examine trends in 1,101 attempted aerial hijackings that occurred around the world from 1931 to 2003. We have especially complete information for 828 hijackings that occurred before 1986. Using a rational choice theoretical framework, we use continuous‐time survival analysi…
Race and Crime in Postwar America: Determinants of African‐american and White Rates, 1957–1988
The idea that crime and deviance are explained mostly by access to opportunities—especially those provided by employment, income, education, and family stability—is one of the most powerful assumptions about crime in postwar America. However, despite its importance, the actual relationship between opportunity measures and crime during this period remains little understood. while cross‐sectional studies of these issues have become common, few long…
Cross-National Determinants of Child Homicide
This paper uses cross-national data on child homicide to develop a societal-level model of child abuse. Analysis of hypotheses emerging from four perspectives on abuse suggests that a focus on economic stress is most useful in explaining cross-national variation in child homicide in developed countries. High levels of female labor-force participation, coupled with low levels of female status and welfare spending, result in high child-homicide rat…
Adversarial and Nonadversarial Justice: A Comparison of Guilty Pleas and Trials
Despite the frequency of guilty pleas, researchers disagree about the ability of plea bargaining to provide justice. Critics argue that plea bargaining deprives defendants of due process rights and procedural safeguards Proponents argue that guilty pleas save resources for cases that require trial and allow officials flexibility to tailor justice to individual defendants. This article explores these issues by examining the effect of defendant and…
The Empirical Study of Terrorism: Social and Legal Research
Social science research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, aided by social and legal studies. In this review, we examine research on the causes of terrorism and the effectiveness of strategies for countering it. We define terrorism as the threatened or actual use of illegal force directed against civilian targets by nonstate actors in order to attain a political goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation. Our review of causes is di…
Democracy, Crime, and Justice
By SUSANNE KARSTEDT and GARY LaFREE The connection between democracy and criminal justice is so fun a ental as to be self-evident: the rule of law guarantees due process, and the observation of human rights is an integral part of the emergence and institu tionalization of democracy. Indeed, most mea sures of the strength of democracy include an index of criminal justice and due process guar antees. By contrast, the connection between democracy an…
Expanding Criminology's Domain: The American Society of Criminology 2006 Presidential Address
Democracy is directly linked to the two main components of criminology: crime and justice. Moreover, the scientific study of crime and justice has been limited in large part to researchers working in democratic regimes. In this article, I address the question of how criminologists through research and education can better nurture democratic, nonauthoritarian societies. I argue that our field would be strengthened by expanding the domain of crimin…
Official Reactions to Social Problems: Police Decisions in Sexual Assault Cases
Responsibility for arrest and charging makes police influential agents in the offical processing of sexual-assault cases. Recent research offers three competing models of police decisions: the legal model suggests that police do not discriminate between victims on the basis of extralegal attributes; the extralegal model suggests that police do discriminate; and the change model suggests that reliance on extralegal determinants declines with growi…
County‐Level Correlates of Terrorist Attacks in the United States
Research Summary We develop a set of hypotheses informed by a social disorganization framework and test them using newly available data on nearly 600 terrorist attacks in U.S. counties from 1990 to 2011. Our results show that terrorist attacks were more common in counties characterized by greater language diversity, a larger proportion of foreign‐born residents, greater residential instability, and a higher percentage of urban residents. Contrary…
Trajectories of terrorism: Attack patterns of foreign groups that have targeted the United States, 1970–2004
Research Summary Although researchers began to assemble open‐source terrorism event databases in the late 1960s, until recently most of these databases excluded domestic attacks. This exclusion is particularly misleading for the United States because, although the United States is often perceived to be the central target of transnational terrorism, the domestic attacks of foreign groups targeting the United States are often ignored. We began this…
The Effects of Participants' Ethnicity and Gender on Monetary Outcomes in Mediated and Adjudicated Civil Cases
Researchers and policymakers have long been concerned about the extent to which such sociocultural factors as ethnicity and gender determine access to organizational rewards and constraints within legal systems. Scholars have also wondered whether less formal processes, such as those found in alternative dispute resolution, are especially susceptible to bias. To test these arguments, we studied the impact of disputants' ethnicity and gender on mo…
Culture and Extremism
Much research in the last several decades has examined the social, political, and economic factors that predict terrorism, yet to date, there has been little attention to cultural factors and their relationship to terrorism. We present findings from the Global Terrorism Database showing how numerous cultural dimensions identified in the cultural psychology literature relate to over 80,000 terrorist attacks that occurred between 1970 and 2007. Con…
Explaining Japan's Postwar Violent Crime Trends
Japan has long been recognized for its low rates of violent crime, rates that usually seem to be declining. The most common explanation for postwar rates links unique cultural characteristics to a system of exceptionally effective informal social controls that, at the macro level, suggest low levels of social disorganization. Other common explanations include low levels of economic stress, a small proportion of young males and a criminal justice …
Evidence for Elite Convergence in Cross-National Homicide Victimization Trends, 1956 to 2000
The two dominant perspectives in cross-national comparative criminology (modernization and conflict) make competing predictions about the convergence of national crime rates over time. The modernization perspective predicts convergence in crime rates for all nations of the world whereas the conflict perspective predicts growing divergence between industrializing poor nations and highly industrialized rich nations. I also explore an intermediate p…
Cross-National Patterns of Terrorism: Comparing Trajectories for Total, Attributed and Fatal Attacks, 1970-2006
Despite growing international concern about terrorism, until recently, very little was known about worldwide risk patterns for terrorist attacks. In this paper, we are especially interested in determining the extent to which terrorism is concentrated at the country level over time and whether different measures of terrorism (total, attributed and fatal attacks) yield similar results. Traditional sources of crime data — offi cial police records an…
The Impact of Terrorism on Italian Employment and Business Activity
Despite the growth in research examining direct economic impacts of terrorism, the indirect impact of terrorism on the stability of local economies has generally been overlooked. Using panel data regression models and the most comprehensive open source database on terrorism currently available to researchers, the paper examines the impact of terrorism on employment and business outcomes in Italy from 1985 to 1997. It is found that terrorist attac…
The Effect of Sexual Stratification By Race on Official Reactions to Rape
Collins argues that sexual access, like other valuable commodities, is distributed according to relative power within a sexual stratification system. He predicts more serious official reactions to violations of the sexual stratification system in which men from less powerful groups sexually assault women from more powerful groups. Race continues to be an obvious correlate of stratified sexual access in America. But empirical studies have not asse…
The Other Side of Rape
Official Reactions to Social Problems: Police Decisions in Sexual Assault Cases
Responsibility for arrest and charging makes police influential agents in the offical processing of sexual-assault cases. Recent research offers three competing models of police decisions: the legal model suggests that police do not discriminate between victims on the basis of extralegal attributes; the extralegal model suggests that police do discriminate; and the change model suggests that reliance on extralegal determinants declines with growi…
Male Power and Female Victimization: Toward a Theory of Interracial Rape
Previous research in criminology assumes that rape is primarily an intraracial phenomenon. But empirical studies since the late 1950s have shown substantially higher rates of black offender-white victim (BW) than white offender-black victim rape. The present study tested two models of BW rape on a set of 443 rape victimizations collected by the National Crime Panel from 1973 to 1977. The normative model interprets BW rape as a correlate of increa…
Research on Sentencing: The Search for Reform, Vol. 1
Jurors' Responses to Victims' Behavior and Legal Issues in Sexual Assault Trials
Feminists argue that rape laws and their application are explained by social rules requiring women to conform to conservative sex-role norms and defining them as the sexual property of men. We operationalized and tested some of these arguments with data on 360 jurors who served in rape trials. Courtroom observations led us to distinguish trials in which the major issue was whether a sexual assault occurred (consent or “no sex” cases) from trials …
Adversarial and Nonadversarial Justice: A Comparison of Guilty Pleas and Trials
Despite the frequency of guilty pleas, researchers disagree about the ability of plea bargaining to provide justice. Critics argue that plea bargaining deprives defendants of due process rights and procedural safeguards Proponents argue that guilty pleas save resources for cases that require trial and allow officials flexibility to tailor justice to individual defendants. This article explores these issues by examining the effect of defendant and…
Judging the Jury
Cross-National Determinants of Child Homicide
This paper uses cross-national data on child homicide to develop a societal-level model of child abuse. Analysis of hypotheses emerging from four perspectives on abuse suggests that a focus on economic stress is most useful in explaining cross-national variation in child homicide in developed countries. High levels of female labor-force participation, coupled with low levels of female status and welfare spending, result in high child-homicide rat…
Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault
Criminology and the study of rape. The labeling perspective and offical reactions to rape. The conflict perspective and the legal processing of rape cases. Constructing rape: the victim and the police. Constructing rape: the courts. Rape and the social control of blacks. Rape and the social control of women. Jurors' responses to victims' behavior in rape trials. Constructing rape: conclusions and implications. References. Index
Making Sense Out of Rape Research
Four Theories of Rape in American Society: A State-Level Analysis
Race and Crime in Postwar America: Determinants of African‐american and White Rates, 1957–1988
The idea that crime and deviance are explained mostly by access to opportunities—especially those provided by employment, income, education, and family stability—is one of the most powerful assumptions about crime in postwar America. However, despite its importance, the actual relationship between opportunity measures and crime during this period remains little understood. while cross‐sectional studies of these issues have become common, few long…
Defining Rape
Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault
The argument for studying race and crime
We argue that a full articulation between race and crime issues is important for research and education in criminology and criminal justice. We examine the relationship between race and criminology research in four periods of U.S. history. We also outline core concepts and scholarship central to discussions of race and crime
Crime and Control in Comparative Perspectives
Just Deserts or Injustice: The Controversy over Racial Bias in Criminal Justice Processing
The Effect of Changes in Intraracial Income Inequality and Educational Attainment on Changes in Arrest Rates for African Americans and Whites, 1957 to 1990
Rapid increases in crime in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s have been puzzling in that they seem to coincide with economic growth and increased educational opportunity for disadvantaged groups, especially African Americans. We argue that these increases in crime may be more understandable in their historical context: Much of the economic expansion during the postwar period and the unprecedented gains in educational attainment for A…
The Effects of Participants' Ethnicity and Gender on Monetary Outcomes in Mediated and Adjudicated Civil Cases
Researchers and policymakers have long been concerned about the extent to which such sociocultural factors as ethnicity and gender determine access to organizational rewards and constraints within legal systems. Scholars have also wondered whether less formal processes, such as those found in alternative dispute resolution, are especially susceptible to bias. To test these arguments, we studied the impact of disputants' ethnicity and gender on mo…
African American Collective Action and Crime, 1955-91
Connections between collective action and common crime are often politically sensitive: regimes may benefit to the extent that they can dismiss collective action as the work of criminals; criminals may benefit to the extent that they can justify their actions as politically motivated. Although there is widespread disagreement about the exact relationship between collective action and crime, the dominant sociological view in recent years has been …
Declining Violent Crime Rates in the 1990s: Predicting Crime Booms and Busts
The United States in the 1990s has experienced the greatest sustained decline in violent crime rates since World War II-even though rates thus far have not fallen as rapidly as they increased during the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I review a set of exogenous and policy-related explanations for the earlier crime boom and for the crime bust of the 1990s. I argue that our understanding of crime trends is hampered by a lack of longitudin…
Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and New Victims
Random Violence is a deft and thought-provoking exploration of the ways we talk about - and why we worry about - new crimes and new forms of victimization. Focusing on so-called random crimes such as freeway shootings, gang violence, hate crimes, stalking, and wilding, Joel Best shows how new crime problems emerge and how some quickly fade from public attention while others spread and become enduring subjects of concern. Best's original and incis…
Too Much Democracy or Too Much Crime? Lessons from California's Three-Strikes Law
Explaining Japan's Postwar Violent Crime Trends
Japan has long been recognized for its low rates of violent crime, rates that usually seem to be declining. The most common explanation for postwar rates links unique cultural characteristics to a system of exceptionally effective informal social controls that, at the macro level, suggest low levels of social disorganization. Other common explanations include low levels of economic stress, a small proportion of young males and a criminal justice …
Political science (69 works) · Criminology (59 works) · Law (56 works) · Sociology (52 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (45 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (45 works) · Terrorism (40 works) · Psychology (37 works) · Law (36 works) · Politics (31 works)