Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>After decades of relative obscurity, research on desistance from offending has experienced an exponential, and much warranted, escalation in attention. This precipitous growth is motivated by the timely alignment of theory, data, and method that characterized the opening of the twenty-first century. Despite the growth of the field, fundamental questions remain. This chapter provides a focused review of key twenty-first-century theoretical and methodological developments on desistance as well as a pointed discussion of critical issues. After outlining the current definitions and longitudinal trends of desistance, we discuss contemporary theories and the studies that inform these theories. We use an organizational schema situating theories in terms of the primacy with which they place structural opportunities or subjective motivations in their explanations of the transition away from offending. We conclude by presenting avenues for advancing research in the areas of definitions, theoretical testing, and bridging the research-policy divide.</jats:p>

<jats:p> The systematic study of how available weapons influence the rates, patterns, and outcomes of criminal violence is new, but it is now a well-established and fast-growing subfield in criminology, legal studies, public health, and economics. This review focuses on the transactions that arm dangerous offenders, noting that if those transactions could be effectively curtailed it would have an immediate and profound effect on gun violence and homicide rates. Guns are legal commodities, but violent offenders typically obtain their guns by illegal means. Our knowledge of these transactions comes primarily from trace data on guns recovered by the police and from occasional surveys of gun-involved offenders. Because most guns used in crime are sourced from the stock of guns in private hands (rather than a purchase from a licensed dealer), the local prevalence of gun ownership appears to influence the transaction costs and the proportions of robberies and assaults committed with guns rather than knives or other weapons. Nonetheless, regulations that govern licensed dealers have been linked to trafficking patterns and in some cases to the use of guns in crime. </jats:p>

<jats:p>If there is agency and some decision-making process entailed in criminal behavior, then what are the incentives for crime and for conformity, and what is their role in offending decisions? Incentives have long been the province of economics, which has wide influence in criminology (e.g., Becker 1968 ). However, economics has evolved considerably since Becker's influential model. An important development has been the advent of behavioral economics, which some consider a branch of economics on par with macroeconomics or econometrics ( Dhami 2016 ). Behavioral economics integrates empirical departures from traditional microeconomic theories into a rigorous and more descriptively accurate economic model of choice. This review explains how behavioral economic applications on offender decision-making can help refine criminological theories of choice and identify innovative possibilities for improving crime-control policies.</jats:p>

<jats:p> This review assesses the current state of knowledge about monetary sanctions, e.g., fines, fees, surcharges, restitution, and any other financial liability related to contact with systems of justice, which are used more widely than prison, jail, probation, or parole in the United States. The review describes the most important consequences of the punishment of monetary sanctions in the United States, which include a significant capacity for exacerbating economic inequality by race, prolonged contact and involvement with the criminal justice system, driver's license suspension, voting restrictions, damaged credit, and incarceration. Given the lack of consistent laws and policies that govern monetary sanctions, jurisdictions vary greatly in their imposition, enforcement, and collection practices of fines, fees, court costs, and restitution. A review of federally collected data on monetary sanctions reveals that a lack of consistent and exhaustive measures of monetary sanctions presents a unique problem for tracking both the prevalence and amount of legal financial obligations (LFOs) over time. We conclude with promising directions for future research and policy on monetary sanctions. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Forensic DNA testing has rapidly become an invaluable tool for identifying suspects and proving guilt in criminal cases. But as DNA technologies evolve and databases grow, a broad range of issues concerning the science, statistics, and social policy of forensic DNA testing have surfaced. This article reviews some of the emerging challenges in the field. </jats:p>

<jats:p> A life-span developmental approach describes Joan McCord's career and highlights her pioneering contributions to criminology and, more broadly, to understanding human development. The main focus of this article is on her exceptional scientific contributions through the assessment of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study experimental preventive intervention. We highlight her efforts to understand how a delinquency prevention intervention caused iatrogenic effects and the lessons she drew for evaluation research. Important contributions to key issues in developmental criminology are summarized, such as the different roles of mothers, fathers, and neighborhoods in the development of delinquency as well as the importance of differentiating discipline from punishment. We describe how Dr. McCord relied on philosophy, how she tackled oppositions between theory-driven and data-driven research in criminology, and how she helped young investigators learn how to learn, and we end by highlighting her contributions to the organization and development of criminology in the United States and around the world. </jats:p>

<jats:p> When ethnographers study street crime, they anticipate that readers might shame them for shaming the poor. One common response is to compromise the quality of ethnographic data. Another is to pass righteous indignation away from the poor by arguing the causal significance of deindustrialization, class inequalities, racial prejudice, policing, colonialism, or hostility toward immigrants. Almost always, such arguments are gratuitous: The evidence for the structural and historical causes offered by ethnographers does not vary with the situational and biographical variations in behavior that make for high-quality ethnographic data. Nevertheless, if we read around the rhetorical practices that contemporary ethnographers of crime use to shift shame away from their subjects and themselves, we learn how street crime is produced through small criminogenic social circles. Considered as a set, recent ethnographies have significantly advanced knowledge about the social psychology of criminality, and they provide promising leads for improving the understanding of variations in crime patterns over time and across metropolitan spaces. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Broken windows theory (BWT) has heavily influenced social science and policy over the past 30 years. It posits that disorder in neighborhoods leads to elevated crime by inviting additional criminal activity and by discouraging the positive social behavior that prevents crime. Scholars have debated the veracity of BWT, and here we conduct a meta-analysis of 96 studies to examine the effects of disorder on residents’ ( a) general proclivities for aggressive behavior and ( b) perceptions of and attitudes toward their neighborhood (e.g., fear of crime), with particular attention to aspects of research design that might confound causal inference. We found no consistent evidence that disorder induces greater aggression or more negative attitudes toward the neighborhood. Studies that found such effects disproportionately utilized weaker research designs that omit key correlates or confound perceptions of disorder with other neighborhood attitudes. We explore implications for theory, research, and policy. </jats:p>

<jats:p> A large body of empirical research exists that attempts to determine whether or not police discriminate on the basis of race. We investigate whether the methods used typically produce valid inferences. We find that they often most likely do not and that results may diverge from reality in either direction, indicating discrimination when it is not present or alternatively indicating a lack of discrimination when it is in fact present. The reason for this is that tests make assumptions about police behavior that are often implausible. Because of this, the simplest forms of benchmark and outcome tests should not be used, although the problem is more general. We discuss several possible ways to improve inferences about the absence or presence of discrimination, such as employing matching or weighting techniques and using novel, computationally intensive methods. </jats:p>