Bruce A. Jacobs

A Typology of Street Criminal Retaliation

Criminologists have long recognized that retaliatory violence diffuses outward from discrete conflicts, often in contagion-like fashion. No understanding of the source of this spread is possible without first documenting the modalities that fuel it. Retaliation has variation, and it is important to catalog that variation if the concept of crime as social control is to be more effectively understood. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 33 street offenders, and using qualitative techniques of analytic induction, constant comparison, and domain analysis, this article offers a typology of retaliation to refine understanding of a process that at present, remains only loosely developed.

Crack dealing, gender, and arrest avoidance

Drawing from interviews with female crack dealers, this paper explores the techniques they use to avoid arrest. We present these techniques through a four-part typology of contextual assimilation consisting of projected self-image, stashing, selling hours, and routine activities/staged performances. In addition to confronting many of the same risks and challenges as their male counterparts, women dealers face unique circumstances that are indisputably gendered. Our goal is to explore how gender shapes and mediates their dealing experience, paying specific attention to arrest-risk management. The datas larger conceptual implications are addressed, particularly as they relate to dynamic interchanges between gender and emergent street crack market conditions.

Crack dealers' apprehension avoidance techniques: A case of restrictive deterrence

The present paper explores the techniques used by dealers while engaging in street sales of crack to defy detection, obfuscate illicit activity, and avoid apprehension. These techniques are presented through a three-part typology consisting of environmental positioning, stashing, and transactional mediation. Discussion focuses on restrictive deterrence, a subfield in neoclassical theory to which the present paper gives both theoretical and practical attention. Data are drawn from semistructured interviews with 40 active street-level crack dealers operating in a medium-sized midwestern metropolitan area.

Genetic Risk for Violent Behavior and Environmental Exposure to Disadvantage and Violent Crime The Case for Gene–Environment Interaction

Despite mounds of evidence to suggest that neighborhood structural factors predict violent behavior, almost no attention has been given to how these influences work synergistically (i.e., interact) with an individual’s genetic propensity toward violent behavior. Indeed, two streams of research have, heretofore, flowed independently of one another. On one hand, criminologists have underscored the importance of neighborhood context in the etiology of violence. On the other hand, behavioral geneticists have argued that individual-level genetic propensities are important for understanding violence. The current study seeks to integrate these two compatible frameworks by exploring gene–environment interactions (GxE). Two GxEs were examined and supported by the data (i.e., the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health). Using a scale of genetic risk based on three dopamine genes, the analysis revealed that genetic risk had a greater influence on violent behavior when the individual was also exposed to neighborhood disadvantage or when the individual was exposed to higher violent crime rates. The relevance of these findings for criminological theorizing was considered.

Researching Drug Robbery

Street robbery is widely seen as the epitome of acquisitive instrumentality, yet recent research suggests that the crime may be designed more to send a message than to generate capital. Drawing from in-depth, semistructured interviews with active offenders, we find that moralistic street robbery is a response to one of three types of violations. Market-related violations emerge from disputes involving partners in trade, rivals, or generalized predators. Status-based violations involve encounters in which the grievants essential character or normative sensibilities have been challenged. Personalistic violations flow from incidents in which the grievants autonomy or belief in a just world have been jeopardized. Discussion focuses on the datas implications for deterrence and the spread of urban violence.Street robbery is widely seen as the epitome of acquisitive instrumentality, yet recent research suggests that the crime may be designed more to send a message than to generate capital. Drawing from in-depth, semistructured interviews with active offenders, we find that moralistic street robbery is a response to one of three types of violations. Market-related violations emerge from disputes involving partners in trade, rivals, or generalized predators. Status-based violations involve encounters in which the grievants essential character or normative sensibilities have been challenged. Personalistic violations flow from incidents in which the grievants autonomy or belief in a just world have been jeopardized. Discussion focuses on the datas implications for deterrence and the spread of urban violence.

Bounded Rationality, Retaliation, and the Spread of Urban Violence

Drawing from in-depth interviews with 52 active street criminals, this article examines the grounded theoretic implications of bounded rationality for retaliatory street violence. The bounds on rationality that this article explores are anger, uncertainty, and time pressure. These bounds create imperfections in the retaliatory decision-making process that, in turn, cause asymmetries in the way that reprisal is enacted. Two asymmetries are operative in this regard: strike intensity and target choice. Anger produces asymmetries of both types. Uncertainty and time pressure produce only target-choice asymmetry. All three modalities cause retaliation to be redirected. Redirection promotes the spread of urban violence through conflict spirals.

The Manipulation of Fear in Carjacking

Although prior studies on robbery decision making have explored how offenders manipulate fear in the coercive process, research has paid little attention to the issue as it relates to carjacking. The gap is significant given that carjacking requires offenders to neutralize victims who are inherently mobile and who can use their vehicles as both weapons and shields. Based on qualitative interviews with 24 active carjackers, the present paper explores this issue and the data’s grounded-theoretic significance for coercive decision making in predatory social exchange. In particular, the article examines fear as an essential intervening variable that links threat to compliance. It also explores how offenders manipulate the “severity” dimension of threat to influence the certainty and celerity of compliance. The approach taken here offers an advancement in the study of coercion and a refinement of the compliance generation process itself.

Managing Victim Confrontation: Auto Theft and Informal Sanction Threats

Objectives. This paper explores how offenders manage the prospect of victim confrontation during auto theft. Methods. Data were drawn from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 active offenders recruited from the streets of a large Midwestern US city using snowball sampling methods. Results. Two contextual domains figured prominently in the offenders’ decision-making calculus: The area around the target and the target itself. The first galvanized the offenders’ attention to, and management of, informal social control. The second enjoined offenders to balance speed and stealth in breaching the target. Conclusions. Victim confrontation is an informal sanction that is distinct from both retaliation and traditional extralegal sanctions. The rarity with which it occurs in auto theft is likely due to confrontation avoidance measures offenders adopt at the front end of the offense and during the enactment process itself. The conceptual implications of victim confrontation in crime are explored in relation to the following five areas: (1) sanction celerity and present orientation; (2) sanction certainty and ambiguity aversion; (3) sanction interdependence; (4) violence avoidance; and (5) directions for future research.

Boundary-Crossing in Perceptual Deterrence: Investigating the Linkages Between Sanction Severity, Sanction Certainty, and Offending

Severe punishments have historically been the bedrock of criminal deterrence, but criminologists have long documented that such threats are often ineffective. Instead, it has been the certainty of sanctions that has been most emphasized and that has garnered empirical support. In a departure from prior research, the question motivating this study is whether increases in the threatened severity of sanction threats alter the perceived certainty of detection irrespective of any objective changes in detection certainty, and then how such perceptions relate to offending. To the authors’ knowledge, scant attention has been paid to examining the possibility of this “boundary-crossing,” or the extent to which two core dimensions of deterrence, objective and perceptual certainty, cross, intersect, or interact with one another. Using data from a sample of young adults, the authors find mixed support for “boundary-crossing”: Although combinations of objective certainty and severity did not necessarily result in substantive differences in perceptions of certainty and severity, an individual’s own perceived certainty and severity related to offending differently depending on the information provided to them about the objective certainty and severity of punishment.

Drug dealing and negative reciprocity

This article explores the notion of negative reciprocity. It uses the experience of drug dealers who sell poor quality heroin to consider the problem conceptually. The article examines the disclaimers and accounts dealers make while attempting to balance negative reciprocity. Disclaimers warn customers before the sale that product quality may be sub‐par and that they may wish to pass. Accounts neutralize customer complaints after purchase and consumption and centrally involve two types: appeals to defeasibility and counter denunciations. Conditions under which dealers use either disclaimers or accounts—and sub‐types within these axial categories—are specified. The discussion uses dealers’ experience to expand and modify existing conceptualization on the norm of reciprocity. Data were drawn from interviews with 32 semi‐institutionalized heroin user‐dealers located in a large western city.