Alexis R Piquero

Organizational Justice and Police Misconduct

Although police misconduct has interested policing scholars for many years, extant research has been largely atheoretical and has ignored the role of organizational justice in understanding the behavior. This study uses survey data from a random sample of 483 police officers employed in the Philadelphia Police Department to explore the role of organizational justice in police misconduct. Results indicate that officers who view their agency as fair and just in managerial practices are less likely to adhere to the code of silence or believe that police corruption in pursuit of a noble cause is justified. Furthermore, perceptions of organizational justice are associated with lower levels of engagement in several forms of police misconduct. The results suggest that organizational justice is a promising framework to understand police misconduct and may help guide police administrators in the implementation of effective management strategies to reduce the incidence of the behavior.

Disengaging From Gangs and Desistance From Crime

We study the relationship between disengagement from gangs and desistance from crime within a life-course criminological framework. Gang disengagement is conceptualized as the event of gang membership de-identification and the process of declining gang embeddedness. We examine the effects of both the event and the process of disengaging from gangs on (1) criminal desistance mechanisms and (2) criminal offending using longitudinal data and multilevel modeling. We find that disengaging from gangs is indirectly related to offending through less exposure to antisocial peers, less unstructured routine activities, less victimization, and more temperance. Gang disengagement is associated with decreased contemporaneous offending but does not predict future offending after controlling for desistance mechanisms. Evidence also suggests that those who leave gangs more quickly are less exposed to antisocial peers, and possess better work histories and psychosocial characteristics even while in the gang. We discuss implications for research on gangs and criminal desistance.

The Unpredictability of Murder: Juvenile Homicide in the Pathways to Desistance Study

There is minimal research that has investigated the characteristics distinguishing youth who commit murder to other juvenile offenders. Of the research that has been done, scholars have identified a wide variety of factors that distinguish these offenders, including poor family environments, emotional and social problems, poor mental health, and behavioral disorders. Using data from Pathways to Desistance, a study of 1,354 serious youthful offenders, we examined how 8 demographic characteristics and 35 risk factors distinguish between those youth who were charged with some type of homicide and those youth who were not charged with any type of homicide. We find that only 18 (1.33%) youth were charged with a homicide offense. Among the predictors, age, intelligence quotient (IQ), exposure to violence, perceptions of community disorder, and prevalence of gun carrying are significantly different across the two groups. Results from a rare-events logistic regression that simultaneously examined the relationship between these five risk factors and their ability to distinguish between the two groups indicate that only lower IQ and a greater exposure to violence were significant. Finally, a higher number of risk factors were associated with a higher likelihood that youth would be charged with homicide.

Does Adolescent Bullying Distinguish Between Male Offending Trajectories in Late Middle Age

The perpetration of bullying is a significant issue among researchers, policymakers, and the general public. Although researchers have examined the link between bullying and subsequent antisocial behavior, data and methodological limitations have hampered firm conclusions. This study uses longitudinal data from 411 males in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development from ages 8 to 56 in order to examine the relationship between adolescent bullying and distinct late middle adulthood trajectories of offending, in which different groups of males follow different offending pathways. Results show that self-reported bullying predicts only certain adult offending trajectories but that the effect becomes insignificant once controls are introduced for childhood risk factors, although this may be due to the small number of the most chronic offenders. Study implications and directions for future research are noted.

Developmental trajectories and antisocial behavior over the life-course

Marc Le Blanc consistently reiterated the importance of longitudinal research on crime and delinquency. His work has arguably transformed the field of criminology by driving theoretical perspectives from general to dynamic in nature, incorporating both static and dynamic factors as particularly relevant in understanding the breadth and scope of criminal behavior. This chapter reviews the vast contribution Marc Le Blanc had on the field of criminology, and the ripple effect that his research has had in terms of innovative analytical methods, an emphasis on longitudinal data collection, diversity in samples used, and the influx of trans-disciplinary collaboration.

Assessing the Mental Health/Offending Relationship Across Race/Ethnicity in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Offenders

We examine the extent to which the relationship between mental health and substance use problems and the risk of rearrest varies across race/ethnicity. Data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders, are used to estimate the risk of rearrest over time. Results show that mental health (except for substance use) does little, above and beyond traditional criminogenic risk markers and control variables, to significantly increase or decrease the risk of rearrest, a finding that was largely replicated across race/ethnicity. Some evidence emerged that the mechanisms by which mental health/substance use disorders and criminogenic risk interact to affect risk of rearrest operated differently across race/ethnic groups. Mental health conditions may have some small relationship to rearrest, but this effect is dwarfed by other more powerful risk factors such as antisocial history. Research is needed assessing the conditions under which mental health is implicated in offending.

A comparative, cross-cultural criminal career analysis

For over 30 years, the criminal career paradigm in criminology has raised important theoretical and policy questions as well as research on the ‘dimensions’ of the criminal career (for example, onset, duration, lambda, persistence, chronicity, desistance). Yet few studies have examined criminal career dimensions using a cross-national comparative approach. In this paper, we use an international sample of students (aged 12–15 years) from 30 countries (International Self-Report Delinquency Study-2): (1) to determine the extent of cross-national variation in the prevalence and correlates of high-frequency, serious offenders; and (2) to explore cross-national variation in offending patterns and selected correlates of offense specialization (for example, gender, self-control, delinquent peer association). Although we find several factors are correlated with criminal career dimensions across context, important differences emerged as well that have implications for developing context-specific theories of crime and effective offender programming.

Gender Differences in Criminal Intent: Examining the Mediating Influence of Anticipated Shaming

Research finds males to have a higher likelihood of offending than females. Dominant explanations of the gender/crime relationship tend to invoke strain, learning, and control theories, but we propose that part of the relationship is attributable to differences in anticipated shaming. We test this argument using data collected from a sample of 439 young adults. Results of both Tobit regressions and path analyses support our hypothesis, suggesting that anticipated shaming may actually mediate more of the gender/crime relationship than do variables derived from alternative perspectives. Implications for understanding and controlling crime are discussed.

Variability in Moral Disengagement and Its Relation to Offending in a Sample of Serious Youthful Offenders

Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement (MD) refers to the freeing of oneself from moral or ethical standards to engage in wrongdoing. Little is known about heterogeneity in MD among serious adolescent offenders, how MD changes over time in the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, and how such heterogeneity corresponds to offending. We used data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a longitudinal study of a sample of serious youthful offenders followed for 7 years, to examine trajectories of MD as well as the relationship of these trajectories to offending. Furthermore, we assessed whether MD varied by demographic and individual characteristics. Results indicated the presence of three trajectories: low, moderate, and high patterns. Females and Whites were more likely to be in the low-MD trajectory, whereas Hispanics were more likely to be in the high-MD trajectory. Respondents in the moderate or high-MD trajectories had more re-arrests at the 7-year follow-up relative to those in the low-MD trajectory, net of controls.

Exploring the Link between Being Bullied and Adolescent Substance Use

Abstract Although research suggests that bullied adolescents may respond to victimization with substance use, much of this prior work has been cross-sectional. Using longitudinal data from a community-based sample, we examine the impact of early bullying victimization on the initiation of substance use in adolescence after considering the potential influence of selection effects using propensity score matching. After matching, there were moderate differences between victims of bullying and control students for cigarette smoking and alcohol use, which was limited to those exposed to higher levels of bullying. Being bullied in childhood appears to have only minor effects on the onset of adolescent substance use in this sample.