Neal Shover

The Later Stages of Ordinary Property Offender Careers

Few sociologists have studied the later stages of careers in deviance and criminality. This paper describes how 36 ordinary property offenders, released from confinement from four months to 28 years earlier, changed their perspectives toward life and criminal behavior as they got older. Changes in criminal behavior resulted from two types of occurrences in the mens lives: temporal and interpersonal. Some of the age-related changes differ little from those experienced by non-offenders. Consequently, the findings challenge critical assumptions about offenders employed by proponents of the death penalty and other repressive crime control measures.

Cultural explanation and organizational crime

Both the number and influence of organizations increased dramatically during the 20th century, which helps explain why the problem of organizational crime has received attention from investigators. Growing interest in organizational and corporate crime has been matched by interest in organizational culture. Variation in organizational culture is employed to explain many aspects of organizational performance, from effectivenessin goal attainment to criminal conduct. There are reasons, however, to be critical of theoretical constructions and empirical investigations of organizational culture. There is both considerable ambiguity about its meaning and an implicit assumption of intra-organizational cultural uniformity. Cultural explanations were developed principally in case studies, empirical analyses are flawed, and supportive post hoc interpretations ofinteresting or enigmatic findings are commonplace. The influence of hierarchy and agency as constraints on organizational culture has received insufficient attention. We interpret the appeal of organizational culture despite the absence of demonstrated predictive value, and we call for additional research on sources of variation in organizational crime.

The Social Organization of Burglary

The social organization of systematic burglary is discussed and briefly compared to earlier work on systematic offenders. Salient aspects of both the internal and external social organization of burglary are presented, especially as these are related to the problems of burglary. It is suggested that burglary continues to be more like the social organization of professional theft, as this was presented by Sutherland, than check forgery and armed robbery, as these have been depicted in recent literature. Some possible reasons for this are presented. Finally, it is suggested that the social organization of burglary can be expected to continue to change as a result of macrolevel changes in the economy and in the nature of security forces.

The Organization and Impact of Inspector Discretion in a Regulatory Bureaucracy

Recent trends in regulatory bureaucracies in the United States indicate a shift toward detailed, rigid mandates. In part, this movement represents an attempt to weave an increasingly seamless web of non-discretionary policies for field-level inspectorates. This paper examines the organization of inspection and enforcement practices in such an agency—the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. The creators of the enabling legislation and the agency top executives went to great lengths to circumvent inspector discretion. Questionnaire and interview data on the agencys inspector corps suggest that such efforts were only partially successful. Not only do field-level personnel employ discretionary practices, but the nature of the regulated industry structures the context of inspector discretion. We show a relationship between corporate size and the exercise of inspector discretion. We also show that patterns of inspector discretion affect the size of civil fines imposed for regulatory violations.

Intrafamily Conflict and Delinquency

Using self-report data on delinquency, this article examines two questions. First, is the relationship between family conflict and delinquency stronger for girls than for boys? Second, is conflict in the home directly related to delinquency or is the relationship mediated by one or more of the following variables: (1) parental supervision; (2) identification with parents; (3) beliefs about the law; and (4) social support for delinquency? The effects of family conflict on status, property, and aggressive delinquency are analyzed with path analytic techniques. Total effects of family conflict for all offense categories are greater for females than for males. However, direct effects of family conflict on property and aggressive offenses are greater for males than for females. When all variables are ranked by explanatory power, similar patterns for females and males emerge. The implications of these results for delinquency theory and research are discussed.

Street Crime, Labor Surplus, and Criminal Punishment, 1980-1990

Conventional wisdom holds that variation in state use of criminal punishment is produced principally by variation in the rate of street crime. Neo-Marxist variants of conflict theory predict that use of punishment by capitalist states also varies with economic conditions generally and with the size of the labor surplus in particular. Many investigators have found support for this relationship, but recurring design and analytic shortcomings of their studies limit confidence in it. We test for the labor surplus/punishment relationship using a theoretically more appropriate sample and methodology. Residual-change regression analysis is applied to crime, demographic, economic, and prison-commitment data for a sample of 269 United States urban counties for the period 1980 to 1990. It identifies independent contributions to change in state use of imprisonment by change in violent street crime and in the proportionate size of both the young male population and the labor surplus. The findings, therefore, lend further support to and strengthen confidence in neo-Marxist theories of official punishment.

Sex Roles and Criminality: Science or Conventional Wisdom?

It is argued that past theoretical work on female crime and delinquency has employed and built upon a set of nonrational sexist assumptions which have rarely been explicitly articulated in the work itself. And yet the theory on female misconduct cannot be adequately comprehended without an awareness of this accompanying set of assumptions. Until these ideas are critically examined and subjected to empirical scrutiny, progress will not be made in understanding female criminality and the allegation that it is on the increase.

The origins of criminal sentencing reforms

This paper explores the explanatory utility of two broad perspectives on correctional reform, one informed by materialism and the other by a functionalist interpretation of state policy. Using state-level demographic, economic and political data, we examine some structural antecedents of criminal sentecing reform in the United States during the period 1971–1982. Using stepwise regression procedures, variables derived from the materialist perspective prove superior to variables derived from the functionalist perspective as predictors of the extensiveness of changes in criminal sentencing codes. While the findings are encouraging, they reinforce the need for a more complex model of change in law.

Generative Worlds of White-Collar Crime

A complex of issues surrounding white-collar crime has flummoxed investigators for nearly seven decades. They originate in disagreement over how to distinguish and define the concept and whether there is significant analytic payoff from doing so. This paper begins by briefly noting this definitional controversy and lays out an approach that is employed in the remainder of the paper. Next the paper notes that regardless of how white-collar crime is defined research shows striking differences between white-collar and common offenders. The focus then shifts to class-based differences in lives and child-rearing that provide working-class citizens and citizens of privilege with significantly different cultural capital. A major focus is constructions of white-collar crime by the latter that distinguish them from what is characteristic of street offenders. The paper concludes with an interpretation of white-collar-crime that is committed by privileged citizens that situates it in context of social class and cultural capital.

Tarnished Goods and Services in the Marketplace

ONE OF THE CONTINUALLY RECURRING interactional processes in social life is exchange of tarnished goods between two or more freely consenting parties. By tarnished goods, I mean those commodities and services, the exchange of which makes at least one of the parties discreditable (Goffman, 1963: 3-4). Most such exchanges, while ubiquitous, are extremely transitory in nature, even though some kinds of tarnished goods and services (and transactions therein) do tend to develop into an almost institutionalized set of market arrangements. This paper focuses on interaction between buyers and sellers-between service personnel and their clients-in the marketplace of tarnished goods. While taking an interactional approach to the market, I recognize, of course, that there are other viable approaches which others have, indeed, already used (e.g., Schelling, 1967; Schur, 1965).