Franklin E. Zimring

Kids, Groups and Crime: Some Implications of a Well-Known Secret

Social and policy sciences, reflecting human nature, are rich in contradiction and are occasionally perverse. It is sometimes possible both to know something important and to ignore that knowledge. To do this is to generate the phenomenon of the well-known secret, an obvious fact we ignore. When Edgar Allen Poe suggested that the best location to hide something is the most obvious place, he was teaching applied law and social science.

Firearms and Federal Law: The Gun Control Act of 1968

First, it is an attempt to increase our rather modest knowledge of the effects of governmental efforts to control firearms violence. In recent years the rate of gun violence in the United States has managed to grow to alarming proportions without the benefit of sustained academic attention.2 The 1968 Act-the only major change in federal policy since 1938-seems a natural place to look for clues about the effects of gun controls. And the need for knowledge in this area seems obvious, inasmuch as controversy is rampant and new federal legislative proposals are almost a weekly Washington event. Second, the study is an effort to gain some perspective on the difficulties

Public Opinion and the Governance of Punishment in Democratic Political Systems

It is unlikely that hostile attitudes about criminals or beliefs that punishments for crime were too lenient were the major causes of the explosive increase in punishments in the United States after 1970. Public hostility toward criminals has been a consistent theme in this country for a long time, but it did not cause big increases in imprisonment before 1970 in the United States or large expansions of incarceration elsewhere. In this article, the authors argue that growth in the salience of crime as a citizen concern and increasing public distrust of government competence and legitimacy were two of a number of changes that transformed ever-present hostile attitudes into a dynamic force in American politics. Negative attitudes toward offenders are a necessary condition for anticrime crusades, but they are always present. It was the addition of fear and distrust into the law and politics of punishment setting that produced the perfect storm of punitive expansion.

Declining Homicide in New York City: A Tale of Two Trends

The mass media pay plenty of attention to crime and violence in the United States, but very few of the big stories on the American crime beat can be classified as good news. The driveby shootings and carjackings that illuminate nightly news broadcasts are the opposite of good tidings. Most efforts at prevention and law enforcement seem more like reactive attempts to contain ever expanding problems rather than discernable public triumphs. In recent American history, crime rates seem to increase on the front page and moderate in obscurity. The recent decline in homicides in New York City is an exception to the usual pattern, the most celebrated example of crime-news-as-good-news in decades. No doubt part of the public attention can be explained because the story took place in the media capital of the United States. But more than location made the New York story newsworthy. The drop in homicides was both large and abrupt-the homicide rate in the nations largest city fell 52% in five years. Further, changes in police manpower and strategy are widely believed to have contributed to the decline. If this drop can be plausibly tied to enforcement

Imprisonment Rates and the New Politics of Criminal Punishment

While the rate of imprisonment in the United States has been increasing sharply for more than a quarter of a century, the seven years after 1993 present a special set of conditions because crime rates were decreasing while imprisonment rates continued to soar. The increase in imprisonment rate after 1991 is equal to the total imprisonment rate in the United States in 1981. This article links the recent increase in rate to a new politics of penal severity that assumes any increase in pain for criminal offenders produces a corresponding benefit to crime victims. Much of the mandatory punishment legislation of the period is a product of distrust of government that increases the level of government intervention. This new political landscape will be a very important restraint on the capacity to lower rates of incarceration in the foreseeable American future.

Homicide in Chicago, 1965-1970

Rates of criminal homicide have been increasing in many ma jor metropolitan areas. In Chicago from 1965 to 1970; the rate of homicides noted by the police more than doubled. A study of Patterns of homicide during that period reveals that robbey -killings, killings involving younger victims and offenders, group- related killings, and gun killings all increased far more substan tially than aggregate homicide rates. Homicide offense rates for black males aged 15-24 almost tripled during the six years, while victimization among the same group more than tripled. The dramatic increase in robbery killings appeared to be but one manifestation of a broader increase in young, group-related, gun homicides.

Capital Punishment and the American Agenda

Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Part I. The Road to 1987: 1. The rest of the Western world 2. The long-term trend that failed 3. The death penalty and the Eighth Amendment 4. A punishment in search of a crime Part II. Futures and Consequences: 5. A game of chicken 6. Only in America: some notes on lethal injection 7. Life in a country that kills 8. The path to abolition Appendix: deterrence and the death penalty Index.

On the Comparative Study of Corruption

This essay has two ambitions. The first is to show that a transnational comparative perspective can be of value in identifying topics worth studying in criminology and criminal law, as well as an important method of conducting such studies. The second aim is to use the comparative perspective and method to explore the topic of corruption a pervasively important and distinctive behavioural phenomenon that is of critical importance in both developing and developed nations. A comparative perspective on corruption provides insight about the role of this peculiar form of crime in various cultures and stages of development. Moreover, we also believe that a focus on corruption as a special category of crime helps to explain the passions and politics that have been involved in discourse on white-collar crime. We begin our tour with a plea for the increasing value of comparative study as a tool for criminological agenda setting and research. A brief second section defines corruption as a special subcategory of criminal behaviour defined as the unlawful use of power. A third section then speculates on the relationship between corruption and features of social and governmental organization. A final section applies this comparative perspective to some longstanding issues in criminological discourse. We show that the same mix of condemnation and imprecision that has frustrated efforts to define white-collar crime produces ambiguity in the definition of corruption. We also suggest that the core focus of our criminology of corruption-the use of power as an instrument of crime also helps to explain why white-collar crime has evoked concern, particularly among criminologists on the left. The unifying substantive theme in this analysis is the view of corruption as the criminal misuse of power. Language: en

The New Mathematics of Imprisonment

This article examines recently published claims that increased use of imprisonment will produce dramatic economic savings. Part I shows that applying the estimates generated in “Making Confinement Decisions” to trends in the United States produces anomalous results. If the study estimates were correct, criminal justice expenditures would have decreased recently and crime rates would have dropped toward zero as the U.S. prison population has doubled. Part II of the article discusses some of the factors that produced wild overestimates of the incapacitative potential of expanding imprisonment.

Punishing Homicide in Philadelphia: Perspectives on the Death Penalty

This article reports some preliminary data from a study of the legal consequences of the first 204 homicides reported to the Philadelphia police in 1970. At first glance the data may seem of marginal relevance to capital punishment as a constitutional issue-only three of the 171 adults convicted of homicide charges were sentenced to death and none will be executed. In our view, however, a study of how the legal system determines punishment in a representative sample of killings provides a valuable perspective on many of the legal and policy issues involved in the post-Furman death penalty