Patricia L. McCall

Structural Covariates of Homicide Rates: Are There Any Invariances Across Time and Social Space?

This study demonstrate that the empirical literature on the structural convariates of homicide rates contains inconsistent findings across different time periods and different geographical units. This apparent variance of findings may be due to statistical or methodological artifacts of particular studies, such as different time periods covered, units of analysis, samples, model specification, and problems of statistical analysis and inference. A baseline regression model using 11 structural covariates is estimated for cities, metropolitan areas, and states in 1960, 1970, and 1980. The empirical estimates of this model exhibit instability because of high levels of collinearity among several regressors. Principal components analysis is applied to simplify the dimensionally of the structural covariate space. Reestimation of the regression model then indicates that the apparent inconsistencies across time and social space are greatly reduced. The theoretical significance of the findings for substantive theories of violent crime are discussed.

How Many Latent Classes of Delinquent/Criminal Careers? Results from Mixed Poisson Regression Analyses

This article reviews questions about different categories of criminal careers, summarizes Poisson latent class regression models, describes procedures for evaluating the optimal number of latent classes, and applies this methodology to data from male cohorts taken from the cities of London, Philadelphia, and Racine. Four latent classes of offending careers is an appropriate number for the London cohort, but five classes can be justified for the Philadelphia data. In the case of the Racine cohorts, five classes may be detected for the 1942 and 1955 cohorts but only four for the 1949 cohort. Despite the varying numbers of latent offending classes, there clearly is a small number of typical age patterns.

A Comparison of Poisson, Negative Binomial, and Semiparametric Mixed Poisson Regression Models With Empirical Applications to Criminal Careers Data

Specifications and moment properties of the univariate Poisson and negative binomial distributions are briefly reviewed and illustrated. Properties and limitations of the corresponding poisson and negative binomial (gamma mixtures of Poissons) regression models are described. It is shown how a misspecification of the mixing distribution of a mixed Poisson model to accommodate hidden heterogeneity ascribable to unobserved variables—although not affecting the consistency of maximum likelihood estimators of the Poisson mean rate parameter or its regression parameterization—can lead to inflated t ratios of regression coefficients and associated incorrect inferences. Then the recently developed semiparametric maximum likelihood estimator for regression models composed of arbitrary mixtures of Poisson processes is specified and further developed. It is concluded that the semiparametric mixed Poisson regression model adds considerable flexibility to Poisson-family regression models and provides opportunities for interpretation of empirical patterns not available in the conventional approaches.

Sex Differences in Age Patterns of Delinquent/Criminal Careers: Results from Poisson Latent Class Analyses of the Philadelphia Cohort Study

Applications of latent class analyses to the study of criminal careers have yielded results with implications for criminological theory. Distinct latent classes of individuals within various samples have been identified based upon the similarity of individuals with respect to their rate of offending across the teen and adult years, net of the effects of other regressors. In previous research on samples of males taken from the cities of London and Philadelphia, four and five such categories have been identified respectively, ranging from a group of nonoffenders to a group of chronic offenders. However, the question of whether similar findings hold for females has not been adequately addressed, in part due to the scarcity of longitudinal samples with sizable female populations. Data from the Second Philadelphia Cohort are used to address this and related questions. First, are there latent classes of female offenders? Second, if such categories do exist, how do they compare? Third, how do classes of male and female offenders compare on key measures of criminal careers? Analyses of the samples yield differing numbers of classes for males and females. Gender invariances as well as differences in patterns of offending are also found and are discussed.

An Empirical Assessment of What We Know About Structural Covariates of Homicide Rates: A Return to a Classic 20 Years Later

As the 20-year mark since the publication of an article by Kenneth C. Land, Patricia L. McCall, and Lawrence Cohen, “Structural Covariates of Homicide Rates: Are There Any Invariances Across Time and Social Space?” approaches, the question that these scholars originally posed is raised again: Have researchers been able to identify a set of robust structural covariates that consistently predict crime rates? Subsequent to the publication of this piece, numerous scholars have replicated and extended its conceptual, methodological, and empirical work in various ways—with more than 500 citations to date. In response to this attention, the authors first review the advances made by the Land et al. article. This is followed by a review of findings from studies published over the past 20 years to determine which structural predictors identified in the Land et al. piece continue to be prominent in the study of homicide and which structural predictors have surfaced in recent years as influential to crime rates. Using data on U.S. cities for the years 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, the authors then present a systematic empirical assessment of the explanatory power of the covariates of homicide rates identified in the Land et al. study. Twenty years later, we find support for the claims of invariance established in Land et al. and acknowledge the contributions of this piece to the macrolevel study of homicide rates.

Structure, Context, and Agency in the Reproduction of Black-on-Black Violence:

Violence has a substantial impact on morbidity and mortality within the African-American community. While certainly providing insight into macro- and micro-level forces, existing conceptualizations of the race and violence linkage are limited. We discuss these limitations and then offer a more comprehensive and integrated theoretical framework for understanding disparate patterns. Rather than reducing race-specific violence outcomes to social-psychological or deterministic structural factors, the theoretical model we construct suggests that violence among African Americans (and other subordinated racial/ethnic groups for that matter) is best conceived of as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon, patterned by the intersection of social structure, local context, and agency.

The Use of Incarceration in the United States

The past two decades have produceda profound increase in imprisonment in theUnited States, resulting in a prison populationof two million and expenditures of over

Adding another Piece to the Inequality-Homicide Puzzle: The Impact of Structural Inequality on Racially Disaggregated Homicide Rates

35billion annually on corrections, while otherimportant government services are underfunded. Imprisonment is highest for minority maleslargely because of the War on Drugs, which hasalso dramatically increased the incarcerationof women and created nearly 1.5 millionchildren having a parent incarcerated. Inresponse to this trend, the American Society ofCriminology (ASC) directed the ASC NationalPolicy Committee (NPC) to draft a policy paperon the incarceration issue. This articleexplains the main ideas, themes, andrecommendations of the full policy paper. Itanalyzes the sources and effects of theincreased use of imprisonment, drawingattention to the negative effects of excessiveincarceration. The paper and itsrecommendations reflect a concern that the ASCneeds to set a research agenda that isindependent of the federal government andconventional wisdom. The NPC hopes this paperwill stimulate a healthy and much overduedebate on the role of the ASC in public policyin general, and the merits of widespreadincarceration in particular.

Violent criminal behavior: Is there a general and continuing influence of the South?

Criminologists have produced mounting evidence that economic deprivation, social disorganization, and racial inequality are associated with homicide rates. Our research agenda incorporates both criminological and structural inequality theories into the study of the influence of structural covariates on race-specific homicide rates. We examine the effects of economic deprivation, labor market competition, racial segregation, and racial inequality on interracial and intraracial homicide rates for a sample of U.S. cities in 1980. The results of principal components and multiple regression analyses suggest that economic deprivation affects the intraracial homicide rates for Whites and Blacks, as well as the rates of White interracial homicide offending. Racial segregation and racial inequality were found to contribute significantly to the Black interracial homicide rate. In addition, we find that labor market competition affects the rates of White and Black interracial homicide. The contribution of structural theories for studies of homicide and the implications of these findings are discussed.

Something That Works in Juvenile Justice: An Evaluation of the North Carolina Court Counselors' Intensive Protective Supervision Randomized Experimental Project, 1987-1989.

Abstract Historically, the South has been characterized by high homicide rates relative to other regions in the United States. The present study attempts to make sense of the disparate findings among extant studies of the Southern culture of violence thesis by correcting for their methodological problems and by examining violent crime rates at three levels of aggregation-cities, metropolitan areas, and states—and across three decennial census periods—1960, 1970, and 1980. Whereas most studies of the Southern culture of violence thesis use homicide rates as the focal measure of violent behavior, the present study investigates the generalizability of the Southern culture of violence thesis to other violent index crimes. In addition, the models are also compared over time to determine whether the Southern regional effects persist over time and, if so, whether there is a diminishing effect of region. The results provide evidence for the existence of a Southern culture which supports situation-specific types of violence (i.e., defensive acts) rather than violence in general. Furhermore, the findings provide mixed support that cultural effects diminish over time.