Matt Vogel

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCIES AND THE EVOLVING IMPORTANCE OF RACE, VIOLENT CRIME, AND REGION IN EXPLAINING MASS INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES†

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state-level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nations South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarcerations rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.

Vicarious Peer Victimization and Adolescent Violence: Unpacking the Effects of Social Learning, General Strain, and Peer Group Selection

This study examines how the victimization of a close friend, or vicarious peer victimization, affects adolescent violence. Competing processes linking vicarious peer victimization and violence are empirically evaluated including social learning theory, general stain theory, and peer group selection models. The analyses use peer-network data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Regression models demonstrate that the association between vicarious peer victimization and violence is attributed primarily to peer-group selection and social learning mechanisms. These findings indicate that victimization affects not only the immediate victims of violence, but permeates throughout adolescent social networks.

SPATIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE EFFECT OF NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE ON DELINQUENCY

esearch examining the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent offending typically examines only the influence of residential neighborhoods. This strategy may be problematic as 1) neighborhoods are rarely spatially independent of each other and 2) adolescents spend an appreciable portion of their time engaged in activities outside of their immediate neighborhood. Therefore, characteristics of neighborhoods outside of, but geographically proximate to, residential neighborhoods may affect adolescents’ propensity to engage in delinquent behavior. We append a spatially lagged, distance-weighted measure of socioeconomic disadvantage in “extralocal” neighborhoods to the individual records of respondents participating in the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (N = 6,491). Results from negative binomial regression analyses indicate that the level of socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods is inversely associated with youth offending, as theories of relative deprivation, structured opportunity, and routine activities would predict, and that the magnitude of this effect rivals that of the level of disadvantage in youths’ own residential neighborhoods. Moreover, socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods suppresses the criminogenic influence of socioeconomic disadvantage in youths’ own neighborhoods, revealing stronger effects of local neighborhood disadvantage than would otherwise be observed.

More Than Just Friends Online Social Networks and Offending

The study of peer-group processes has a rich history in criminology. The dramatic growth in online social network websites has fundamentally changed peer-group interaction; however, relatively little research has considered how socialization processes observed in traditional interaction translate to online interaction. Using a sample of 583 undergraduate students from a mid-southern university, this study explores the concurrency between self-reported offending and exposure to criminal behavior in social network websites. Results demonstrate a strong, positive association between individual behavior and exposure to criminal behavior in online networks, suggesting that the processes underlying traditional social interaction also characterize online interaction. These results underscore the importance of online networks for understanding the etiology of criminal behavior.